 Good afternoon, everyone, this is and welcome, this is think outside the stacks case studies on ETD usage to promote new connections. Sharing this information with you is Josh Carmel from the University of Southern Mississippi. My name is Valerie Emerson and I'll be your moderator for the next 20 minutes. Just a quick reminder, during the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted. And please feel free to use the Q&A tab to post questions and we will address these questions during the Q&A portion at the end. You can navigate to other sessions by clicking the desired session in the hop-in schedule or click the left-hand side for links. Thank you all for joining us and I'll turn it over to Josh Carmel. Thank you so much Valerie and thanks to the conference organizers for giving me the opportunity to be here today and to share this information with everybody. So what I'm going to talk about in this session are a few case studies, a few examples of activities that we've done here on our campus at the University of Southern Mississippi to promote ETD usage, but also to showcase the way that others are using those ETDs to kind of build the case for the value that those ETDs have both for students and for researchers alike. So a quick roadmap on where we're going. First of all, can you see the slides? Yeah, yes. Great. So a quick roadmap on where we're going. I'll do a quick introduction of myself, give you a little bit of an overview of our ETD program, then talk about how we sort of make the case for using ETDs when recruiting students, and then we'll compare sort of the big picture and the small picture when looking at the metrics, the data we get from ETDs, things like download counts, those sorts of things. And how both sides of that equation can be used to sort of build the case for why ETDs matter. And then we'll conclude with maybe a look at what's next and other ideas that maybe you have for doing similar projects at your own institution. So I mentioned the introduction a little bit about me. I am a scholarly communications manager at the University of Southern Mississippi, so I wear lots of different hats here. I manage the institutional repository at Quilla. I am chair of our copyright task force. I lead our open educational resource group here, so lots of different hats I wear. And part of that process is related to ETDs, because of course the ETDs are kept in the repository. So I don't directly manage a lot of those. Most of that is done by the graduate school. And if you were here last year, you heard me talk about that process. I did a short talk on that relationship last year, so I would encourage you to go back and look at the slides for that if you were not here last year. But basically they do all the day-to-day managing, and then I just sort of manage the platform, provide tech support, that sort of thing. So a little bit about our ETD program. The IR itself launched in January 2012. The initial focus of course was on faculty publications, but we also, one of the first collections we piloted was the undergraduate honors theses. They came to us with the December 2011 graduates and said, could we include these in the repository when you get it up and running? And so we did, and that was one of the first collections we started with. In 2015, spring of 2015 is when the graduate school came on board and we started including also the master's theses and dissertations, along with a small collection of doctoral projects that a couple of colleges do, like the College of Nursing, for example, does that. It's a little distinct from the standard dissertation. The map you see there, that's the downloads of our honors theses just since December of 2014. That's the earliest this map went back, so it didn't go quite back to the beginning, but you can already see just the huge usage we've gotten even just since 2014 out of that collection. And again, that's just honors theses, and that's not even factoring in dissertations and master's theses as well. So the first case study that I wanted to mention was the idea of using theses as a recruitment tool. So again, we'll start with the honors theses. You can see an example of the readership map there that shows where some of those downloads are coming from. Each year, usually in November, so in the fall of the year, almost right around now, the honors college will host what they call an honors day, which is where prospective honors students are invited to come to campus to visit to learn about the campus, the honors college, the program, all those sorts of things. Obviously this didn't happen last year because of the pandemic, and I'm not sure if it'll happen in person this year either, but before then what would happen was that all these units across campus were invited in to come and talk a little bit about themselves, the services they offered, and so of course part of that group was the library. And so I would typically go along with some of our librarians to present on the library that day because one of the things that I could talk about was the honors theses. So part of the requirements of the honors program is that every honors college student must create complete an honors theses to graduate. And as I've already told you, those theses go into the IR, so what I tend to do is I would go to this thing, I would show them a quilla show them the collection and say, okay, I know you're hearing about the honors theses. I know that sounds a little intimidating, but so here's the collection up. You can go through, you can browse, you can see what's there. You can see what these things look like and realize, oh, okay, this isn't as scary as it sounded just in hearing it described. And you can also see the types of things that students of research, you can look at some of the different topics they've gone over, which might give you some ideas of if I go into this program, here are some ideas that I would like to pursue in my own research. Another benefit of that, it's an opportunity for them to identify faculty in the area of their interest. So if you'll notice here, this is one of the metadata pages from an honors theses in our repository. You'll notice the faculty advisor is listed right there in the metadata. So if a student finds a topic that really grabs their attention, they can look and say, okay, this is the faculty member that that person worked with. So maybe I could reach out to that faculty emergency if we could do a similar topic, a related topic that's in line with my interest. So right out of the gate is they're just getting started, really not even started yet, right, because they're just sort of visiting the campus at this point. But it's a chance for them to start forming connections to identify faculty that might be good to work with if they do decide to enroll, they do decide to continue. So that's a case that really probably wouldn't have been considered for honors theses say 20 years ago, right? I mean, you're not thinking of a bunch of theses at that point, which would have been bound somewhere in the stacks of the library as a tool to go and show students and say, hey, here's something you can use to help you make this decision. But when they're online, when they're openly available where the student can browse what's there and they can see the faculty members involved, then it's a good tool where they can come in with a little bit of a head start. They can come in kind of already knowing, having a plan of attack, I guess you could say as they get started with their program. Now the next thing I want to do, like I said, I want to, I mentioned doing sort of a big picture and a small picture view of things. So one of the things that I found is when you're sharing with folks across campus, different constituent groups are interested in different pieces of data, right? So if you're dealing with sort of top level administrators, you're dealing with deans with higher ups in university administration. One of the things that they're often interested in is that big picture view, the 10,000 foot view. So just give me the numbers and show me the raw data as it were. So for instance, if you looked at our theses and dissertations, here's the raw data, here's our total downloads to this point. Over a million on both the honors theses and on the dissertations, over a quarter of a million of master's theses and then the doctoral projects, which are our smallest collection, a little over 100,000. In terms of just a raw number, in terms of just some straightforward data to sort of make your case, that's a great tool to have, just to be able to show, look, look how much these things are being used. Look how many people are reading these things. Look how much the research being done at this university by our students is being accessed around the world. And like we've seen from the maps I showed you before, you can already see. You can tell where those downloads are coming from globally, what parts of the world are accessing those theses. So that's a good quick way to show impact for those stakeholder groups that really just want to know something quick, something they can kind of wrap their heads around easily, large numbers like that are a great way to do that. Another way to do that with numbers would be to look at a comparison of print versus electronic. So we looked at the print down print checkouts of our dissertations over the past two years. So from July 2019 to August 2021, compared that with the number of times that our electronic dissertations were downloaded over that same period. And you can see for yourself the numbers. You just over 200 checkouts are in-house uses of the print dissertations versus well over half a million downloads of the electronic versions. So it's a way to demonstrate with just two simple numbers the difference between a dissertation that's sitting on the shelf somewhere in the stacks that's getting pulled down every once in a while, but not all that often versus electronic dissertations that are getting downloaded all over the world numerous times. And just the scale alone is a huge way to show, look at the difference this makes. Look at the value this brings by having these dissertations available like this. But so that's the big picture of you. But what about other groups? For other groups, sometimes the power is in story, right? The power is in being able to give specific examples showing how these individual theses, these individual dissertations are being used. So I've shown you 600,000 downloads, right? That sounds cool. But what are some of the ways that people are using those theses, those dissertations where they're downloading them? Is there a story to be told there? And so that's what I want to do with the remaining time is just highlight a few case studies, a few examples of how our theses of dissertations have been used to show sort of the effect that they've had. So starting out with honors theses, I'll start you with a thesis that critiques political cartoons opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. So it's a rhetorical criticism of anti-ERA cartoons. One of the things in digging through the analytics of our system is that I was able to find that a political article about the North Carolina bathroom bill back in 2016 actually cites and links to this thesis. What they did in that article is they showed how some of the arguments that were used against the ERA back during that era were some of the same arguments being used in opposing the bathroom bills that were such a controversial part of the landscape at that time. And so they actually connected to this thesis to say, look, these arguments aren't really new, it's been going on for a while. But there you have an honors student, an undergraduate whose research is now showing up in a story in Politico. I mean, that's a pretty cool impact that doesn't happen in the print-only landscape. Another one, here's an honors thesis, a content analysis of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, viewed as public relations efforts using the social change model of leadership. What it's doing basically is viewing Freedom Summer through a PR lens. Well, this thesis gets linked and shows up in an Atlantic article about approaches for calling out racism and dealing with the fact that sometimes, as it says there, sometimes just trying to be civil and going along to get along. It doesn't really bring about the change that needs to happen. And so they sort of use the way that this student approached Freedom Summer to say, so maybe some of these same strategies should come into play with how we address these issues now. What about master's thesis? Anything there to be gleaned? Well, here's a master's thesis, acting black in analysis of blackness and criminality in film. What it did was the author analyzed stereotypes of blackness in films, how these portrayals affect how African Americans are viewed in society. So it's looking at how some of the, particularly some of the negative stereotypes that you'd see in popular culture would carry over into society. And this ends up showing up in a Forbes article about the Central Park Karen incident. If you remember this a few years ago, there was a lady in Central Park named Amy Cooper who ends up calling the police on this African American man who, insisting that he's threatening her and all these sorts of things, which was totally fabricated. And all that sort of went into that, that she ended up losing her job, she was charged for the false allegations, but later ends up having those charges dropped. And so what this article does is it actually links to this thesis to kind of point out that some of these stereotypes that you see in the culture end up having real world impacts, right? It has a real world impact where a white woman is able to make specious allegations toward a black man and face very few consequences. And so the problem that exists there, there's our research being done by one of our students, being able to sort of speak to that, being able to show, here's a piece of this problem that needs to be addressed and it's getting picked up by major news outlets like this. Another one looked at the experiences of Italian American servicemen during World War II, specifically those ones serving in Sicily and in Italy. Shows up in a history.com story on Italian Americans during World War II, specifically looking in this case to that thesis, because of the fact that it showcased how many Italian Americans served in the military. So here again, here's one of our master's theses being a source for an outlet to sort of tell a different story as well. So it's again, it's more usage. It's usage that's not happening in a print only world. And then lastly, let's take a quick look at a few dissertations. So the first one, transition outcomes of young adults with disabilities. This one is examining the connection between race, ethnicity, gender and disability type, and then the ability of young adults post school. So post completing high school, for example, to attain positive outcomes, whether it be in employment, education, whatever the case may be. Well, this study and the data that they found ends up showing up as part of a National Conference of State Legislatures resource where they sort of compiled several different studies. This is one of the ones listed because it outlines some of the policies that states are using to assist youth with disabilities in preparing for jobs. So they're able to, as they're giving these resources, say, here's a study that says, here are the things you should focus on. Here are the objectives that you should try to achieve that are going to help these students succeed in the workplace. So again, this is not just theoretical information. It's practical real world impact where states that are looking at policy decisions, looking at how can we help these students succeed? Well, here's data that we're using and that we're sharing with fellow organizations to promote that happening. Another one here is a dissertation that deals with a queer critique of LGBT characters and themes in primetime network television situational companies. What it was kind of looking at here are sort of the different, again, sort of stereotypes or models that sort of existed. In particular, this one kind of looks at different portrayals of lesbianism, for example, and this showed up in a BuzzFeed story about the movie Chasing Amy. Because what the story does, it links back to this dissertation talking about the role of Ellen DeGeneres and the portrayal of her character when she first came out on her sitcom and sort of how that shaped early portrayals and understandings of lesbianism on television and also in film and so on and so forth. Okay, Josh, we're coming up on five minutes. Okay, perfect, because I'm almost done, so we're in good shape. Because the last one I wanted to show you, the rebel made me do it, mascots race and the lost cause. This is by a doctoral student who looked at schools that are either using or did use rebel as their mascot and the link between those mascots and then some of the language or symbols used by either white supremacist groups or proponents of the lost cause. The thing that's cool about this one is that the author tweeted about the fact that this dissertation has been read over 3000 times. It's even been contacted by a student, a high school student that wants to use that dissertation as a basis for changing the mascot at her school. That's the kind of impact, that's the kind of difference that dissertations can make, that theses can make when they're able to get into the hands of people, when they're able to discover what's out there, they're able to read it, they're able to see it. And so that's the beauty that ETDs can bring is that we're taking all this information that used to live on shelves that used to live in the stacks somewhere and making available to people all over the world. So a final thought, what's next? This is where I would turn it over to you. How might you use ETDs at your institution? How might you use the ETDs that you have to make some of these same connections to show some of this same effect, impact? And are there other examples of using ETD data besides what I've done here? This is just a couple of quick case studies. I'm sure there's lots of other ideas too. So do you have anything to add as well? And so at this point, I'll hand over for questions. I have a question. So you're presenting this information to prospective students. Do they seem really receptive? Do you feel it's having like a positive impact on their decision to attend our institution? I do. From the times that I've done this, usually, like I said, they're kind of presented with the thesis and it's sort of just this abstract thing of, okay, we know we got to do this, but I don't have any idea of what goes on into it. And so being able to show them examples and say, here's where you can go. Here's where you can browse. It kind of makes them feel more comfortable because they know, okay, here's what the goal is. Here's what I'm trying to do. It's not just this abstract thing out there where I've got to figure this out as I go, but I can look at examples. I can see, okay, here's about how long they are. Here's what goes into them, that kind of thing. So you spoke with this in terms of doing this informational session with honor students due to it with prospective graduate students as well. I'm not at this point, which some of that is because some of the, there's not really sort of a unified graduate school recruitment day like there is with the honors students that usually more than individual programs that do that. But I have done some events with, for example, we have a graduate school appreciation week and we do have some grad school orientations that I've spoken at before and kind of shown some of these things. Okay, we have a question from Stephanie. It's how did you track citations of the various ETDs? Did you start by looking at a specific thesis title? So one of the tools we have, so our repository is, it uses the digital common system. And so one of the tools in their dashboard is you can look at referral URLs. And so that's how I was able to track down the case studies. You can go through those referral URLs and you see, oh, here's a place where Politico is linking to one of our theses. What's that about? And you sort of can follow that link and see, ah, they've linked to the thesis because they're using it as a resource in the story they're telling you. So that's kind of what I've used to go back and find these different examples. And for the tweet, for example, that's from Plubmetrics. That's one of the other tools that's built into that. As you can see where a thesis or a dissertation gets mentioned in a tweet or on Facebook or gets cited or shows up in a news story or blogs. That's another tool that I've used. Anybody else? All right. Well, thanks again for being here and thanks again for the opportunity to share this. The slides are available with the conference proceedings. So if you want to go back and check those out, you're welcome to. My contact information is up there on the screen. So feel free to reach out to me if you think of any other questions later. And again, thanks for having me here today and thanks for being here. And thank you for sharing with us. I hope you have a good rest of the conference.