 I think it's about time to get started. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and you've reached one of the project briefing sessions that is part of our spring 2020 CNI virtual member meeting, which will be running until the end of May. When we pivoted to a virtual meeting, one of the things we were able to do was to issue a call for additional sessions addressing aspects of the current emergency. And one of those sessions is today at this project briefing. It's from Clemson University and we're going to have two speakers. The Dean of Libraries, Chris Cox, and Chris Vincent, the head of library technology at Clemson, who are going to talk about their experiences with emergency planning in a time of crisis. And I have to say that we were just chatting a little before this session and I hope they will share some of their emerging thinking, not just about what they've been through, but about how they're going to address the fall term. So with that, I thank you for joining us. I express my great appreciation to the two Crises and over to you, Chris Cox. Thanks Cliff. So I'm Chris Cox, Dean of Libraries at Clemson, and we're going to talk about a lot of the planning we did prior to having to work from home and then what happened because we ended up working from home relatively quickly after we started our planning. So I'm here with Chris Vincent. He's going to talk in a few minutes. And when we go to the next slide, we'll talk about the outline. So we're going to do, we're going to talk about our overview of our planning process. We'll talk about how we worked on coming up with a plan to move services remotely, how we went through planning related to working from home and making sure that employees had the technology and they needed to be able to do their jobs, and the variety of lessons to learn that came through having to quickly pivot to offering all our services online and having everybody work from home online. Next slide. So if you're looking for a link to this presentation, the link is right here and it's also available in the chat or Q&A. So go ahead and take a look there. Next slide. So we wanted to talk about our timeline. So the university began planning for COVID-19 in mid-February and there was a large meeting of all deans, directors, chairs, leaders around the 25th of February. And what happened was they began having these meetings where a emergency operations center was developed on campus to figure out exactly what it would look like to bring students home from abroad as well as work on what it might look like if we had to go to online education. So once travel restrictions were announced and things started hopping, I put together an emergency planning group which we'll talk about in a minute within the library is to start our own planning about what it would look like to move our own services online and have our people work from home. The rest of the timeline shows that we started to work from home on the 16th of March. We're still working from home. You can see in the background I'm actually not at Clemson, but it's a clever background. And we're hoping that we'll be opening up around July 1 at this point as we start our planning to reopen. Next slide. So let me talk a little bit about the process that we went through to plan for a potential work from home or providing services online. Next slide. So one of the things that we had in our benefit which was pretty opportune is that we had just reviewed our business continuity and operations plan. This was part of a university initiative. So we knew what our critical functions were. We had our contacts in place. We had a document that was available on staff web or intranet to be able to have everybody know what everybody's phone number was. Know what their IT access was because we're going to do an evaluation of that as part of this. And we were able to look at key action items that we were following up on that we ended up having to address a lot more soon than we thought at first. We also had a communication plan because we'd had a variety of power outages and things that occurred on campus that allowed us to come up with plans about how we would communicate with others about what was going on if we had to close. Next slide. So the emergency planning group was made up of our head of information research services and head of IT library IT circulation security and facilities coordinators the faculty chair and business officer to answer some questions the library that's going to be that the university had provided to us about what would happen if they went online. As part of that we established work from home guidelines which offered expectations and were signed by all employees and supervisors regarding setting weekly goals making sure there were agreements with supervisor and employee offering really communication between them and those expectations as well as weekly reports of accomplishments. We also created a remote services delivery plan which talked about how we would offer services from a distance as well as develop the library IT emergency action plan which Chris, Chris Benson will provide to you in a minute. Next slide. So in terms of services we'll keep going here. Next slide. The first thing we did was we did a service inventory where we looked at all our services all public services anyway to determine whether we could provide them online and it turned out there were only five services physical access to collections printing access to study spaces access to public computers and our maker space technology that were not available electronically so we're in a good place when we start. Next slide. In terms of service expansion when we went online on March 16th we determined there were a variety of things we wanted to do that would help us to be more integral to the online education experience. One was one was doing more with librarians being embedded in Canvas or CMS. We saw a 28 percent increase in instruction sessions as a real result of that outreach. We updated our research guides as part of this and offered a variety of guides related to faculty teaching online, students engaging with us online using our materials and we saw a 14 percent increase in those. We also extended our chat hours to the evening and weekends which we didn't have before. We saw an 88 percent increase in those. We also increased e-reserves and faculty took advantage of those in great numbers as well as we had a scan and deliver process where we were able to provide a variety of scan chapters and book sections for people and our peak request was 35 in one day. Next slide. For collections we originally mailed items to patrons and when a lot of articles came out that they were afraid COVID might actually be on the on those books we discontinued that. We moved to scan and deliver and just offered sections of things so our print collection was pretty much under lock and key. We benefited from Honey Trust and Internet Archives emergency collections and we integrated those in our discovery platform that's Chris Spear headed Chris Vincent and he'll talk about that in a minute. We expanded the availability of stream media and ebooks by offering a purchase on demand service and we purchased 54 items in a five weeks five week time frame for faculty and students to support the research in their courses and last we digitized additional archive materials to support instruction. I'm going to turn it over to Chris Vincent now for the next part. All right, good afternoon everyone. My name is Chris Vincent. I'm head of library technology at Clemson Libraries and I'm going to walk you through the emergency planning process for addressing the technology needs of our employees and those of our students and faculty and how really even though we didn't have a lot of time for planning what we were able to do in an initial two week period before working from home and then the initial two two week period after we started working from home how we were really able to prepare our employees to successfully work from home and deliver those services online. So I'll just jump right into the plan and kind of talk about the three objectives that we had with this plan. The first one I'm going to talk about was that we really wanted to ensure that our emergency preparedness documents and contacts were updated and available to all library employees so we wanted to have that centralized place so that at least all of the employees were on the same page in terms of our response to this emergency. The first step in that process to meet that objective was to update the IT section of our business continuity and operations plan which Dean Cox has just mentioned. So that was a university plan which we had first started about three years ago and have been updating kind of gradually ever since but right before Covid there was a big push for us to really update the IT section of that business continuity plan with our current contacts information about the servers that we have both in-house and hosted externally. Information such as the functional owners and technical owners of our central and department applications and the recovery strategies for bringing those systems back up in case we weren't able to have physical access to them. The second step in that process was to centralize all of the documentation and resources that we had floating around into one central place so that if employees had questions about what they should be doing or what our plans were for work from home they could go to one place to find that information. So we created a new section in our staff internet called staff web where we centralized all of those resources and information and we put all of our emergency action plans on there including for all of our branches our business continuity and operations plan and some resources for working remotely that both we developed as a library and our central IT had developed for us. The final point and meeting that first objective was creating a contact list to define functional areas of library technology. So this was really to help people one identify a primary contact and a backup contact and the case that they couldn't reach another person. I know it seems like it was a really long time ago but early mid to early March wasn't that long ago and we weren't really sure what the contours of this work from home environment was going to look like, how accessible people would be from their homes regarding internet access. So we wanted to make sure that we had that information out there so if someone had immediate needs we'd be able to address that one way or another. Moving on to the second objective that was in our library technology plan it was to ensure that employees had the technology necessary to perform basic work functions at home and we identified these tools as having access to a computer, a network connection and a reliable access to core software and I'll walk you through each of these as well. So the first step and this was in the first couple of weeks before we started working from home was we went through and reviewed our inventory to determine which employees had laptops and would be already at least somewhat well equipped to begin working from home. Certainly we did not have enough. We've never even faced with a situation where everyone had to be working remotely all at the same time so that was definitely one of our first major challenges was figuring out how to get employees the technology they needed to do that. Clemson libraries is a fairly lean organization. We have roughly 82 employees and we had 36 laptops issued at that time to our employees mostly to our librarians. A lot of our staff were still using desktop computers. Within library technology we had some extra laptops available that we would normally check out to people who were going on a presentation but for the most part had desktop computers. So we did have some of those laptops available. Many of them were older models but beggars can't really be choosers in this situation so we really took everything we had to try to meet this demand and this deficit of 36 computers which we had to figure out how to scrounge up. So in order to figure out how to meet that number that meet that 36 number demand was to send out a survey. So I sent out a survey to all library employees to determine who had a computer secure network webcam and or headset available at home that they that could be used in the event of an emergency. So one we asked if they had it available and two we asked if they were willing to use it and in some cases some of our employees weren't willing to use their personal computer so we had to figure out something there but we were able to. The survey was also intended to measure our employees familiarity with certain core software applications which we had identified to be used during the work from home period and somehow even though it was only a day and a half turnaround time we got a 100% response rate on the survey. Primarily thanks to Dean Cox sending out some really good messaging on completing it and from that survey we were able to identify 29 additional employees with home computers who could use those instead of being issued some sort of laptop or device from the university. So we were able to meet the demand mainly through people being able to use their home computers and being willing to do so. In addition to the the laptops that we had one of the more interesting numbers were the number of employees who did not have home internet any capacity so no cell phones no Wi-Fi nothing and we had five of those within our department. In terms of familiarity with technology the survey results also showed us that most people had heard of Box and Google Drive and weren't as familiar with two other softwares that we had identified mostly Microsoft OneDrive and WebEx so we used the responses to this question with familiarity with technologies to design a tech training series that I will get into in a little bit. So our overall response to this technology gap that came out in the survey was to procure additional laptops and repurpose some of our older ones. Some of this especially in such a short period of time talking two weeks a week and a half were complicated by supply issues not only due to COVID-19 but also due to a tornado that hit Nashville, Tennessee and destroyed a distribution center for Dell computers from whom we purchased our laptops. So there was definitely a supply issue there which we were able to face by now working with our central IT department to order them in another manner and to get those to the employees who needed them. We also purchased headsets for all employees we just went ahead and purchased 82 for all of them and we also partnered with our central IT department to issue wireless hot spots to employees who did not have internet or had persistent internet issues and this is the access to internet issue is something that we found came up and continues to come up during the work from home period so we were able to catch a few of these early on but it's certainly something that has continued to come up over and over. I mentioned core software earlier the other part of meeting this objective was to identify those standard software applications that we would be using while working from home and these are all software applications in which we have enterprise licenses at Clemson so we definitely had a vested interest in using those because we knew that not only could we support them but our central IT could also support them and those core applications include Box, Google Drive, using vdpn, remote desktop and duo, Cisco Webex, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. The other part of this objective was to carry out a pilot exercise to test the ability of our employees to work from home so we identified I think roughly 10 to 12 people in our staff to work from home and before we were told to work from home so in the week before we were actually supposed to start working from home people we had employees who would perform a certain list of tasks that we had developed and put into a course in Canvas which is our CMS at Clemson so we developed that out so that we could identify any problems that came up with those pilot exercises and to see if that's something that we could, a technique that we could distribute more widely to all library employees after we began an official work from home period. The third phase of our plan was to ensure that all employees were trained to successfully work from home, easily communicate with co-workers and to share documents with each other and the first step in doing that was to offer a tech training series on those software applications that I mentioned previously. We held six so the original plan was to hold these tech trainings in person the week before spring break or I'm sorry is the week during spring break however that's the week that we all unexpectedly had to begin working from home so we had to shift those trainings online after a little short delay but we had six online sessions covering those course software applications. At that point we also required all employees to take the work from home Canvas course which we had finessed throughout the pilot exercise period and we would send out regular tech tips to people these were things such as how to measure your bandwidth so you can tell if it's you can tell if you're having internet issues or if it may be internet issues on someone else's side just little things to help people understand all the different factors that go into working from home and things that they could do to improve that experience. Overall I feel like it was a pretty successful tech training series we had really high engagement we had 133 live attendees that came and watched along with 326 recording views for a total of 459 interactions so I think it speaks to the need of our employees not just working from home but just their general desire to have more training and more and more experience with technology and they were looking for us to do that and I'm glad that we're able to meet that demand. This is the response to this initial tech training series also inspired a second round which we have just started up again and that's mainly based around the use of Adobe software so hopefully that'll be just as successful as this first round. We got good responses in terms of people saying that they felt the training was effective and that it improved their understanding and ability to use the software that was taught. We didn't get any disagrees which is good but 72 definitely agreed that it helped their understanding and working from home which is good to see just considering so many people so many of our employees were thrown into a situation they were not expecting and having to use technology in which they've never even heard of before so being able to deliver that training to them is really important. Another strategy we employed to help meet the demand for tech training was to assign and recruit tech liaisons from the different departments within the libraries. One of the reasons for doing this was because we knew that a smaller department such as ours trying to support everyone working from home was going to be a massive undertaking so we pulled people from the different departments and trained them and how they could support their colleagues in more of a peer-to-peer experience and help them navigate those work from home tools like for example instead of reaching out to us to say create a folder in box and share that with a colleague they could reach out to someone who they're used to working with and say hey how do I do this so we found that to be really successful too the tech liaisons love having that being able to support their colleagues in that way. One thing we did make very clear with the tech liaisons both for their benefit and our benefit was that they would not have any role in supporting personal or university issue hardware or having to support highly technical issues. For those types of issues we still requested that they refer them to us to handle. The tech liaisons also proved very valuable in providing input on the work from home canvas course and really pointing out how we could improve some of the modules that we had in there. In addition helping us figure out how we could broaden that work from home canvas course to really become more of a tech onboarding resource for us at the libraries. So for example we are hiring two new employees now at the libraries who will be starting with us in this work from home environment and is really handy to be able to send them this canvas course and have that available to them so they can go ahead and get used to the different technologies that we use for accessing sharing and communicating at the libraries. Communicating share was the third piece of this. For that we implemented Microsoft Teams as a primary communications tool for employees. Microsoft Teams is something that we had available to us for a while but there was just never a good way or time to actually implement it. So in a lot of ways this crisis allowed us to finally test the waters and using Microsoft Teams and we feel that's been really successful as well. We've created different channels to encourage group discussion not just for say particular groups or for particular committees but we've also created social channels to help provide stress relief and to encourage that sense of community while we're all working from a distance. Some of my favorite social channels that we've set up include recipes because it gives me some really cool stuff to try out while I'm at home and to cook and pets of the libraries. Some people have very interesting pets which is pretty cool. And moving on talking about some of the lessons that we learned throughout this planning process. From the technology side I really would stress the importance of keeping your emergency plans up to date and emphasizing the need for disaster preparedness. Thankfully we a lot of the work that we had done in developing our business continuity and operations plan for the university helped really helped inform our emergency documents for COVID-19. So having that information available and being able to adapt it to this situation was extremely valuable and helpful. I think going forward we especially since we don't know if there will be recurrences of COVID-19 over the next few years we are always going to have our employees prepared to work from home with ready access to the essential technology and software that they need to be able to do that successfully. That will probably include issuing laptops for all employees that they keep on hand and maybe even keep at home in the event that they won't be able to return to their physical office. I would also suggest just being prepared to encounter unreliable internet challenges that's going to continue to be a persistent issue and working with whoever you can central IT to be able to find solutions to those problems and make sure that people are able to get online and are able to work and be productive. And finally I would end on I've learned that communications technologies like Teams and Zoom really do go a long way in sustaining that sense of community. I know for a close-knit community like we have at Clemson it was really important to maintain that social aspect of work and I feel like we've really been able to successfully do that through Teams and looking at the different interactions that people are having on Teams makes me feel good about when we go back to work in person that we can continue to maintain that system to keep them social online as well as in person and I'll hand the next lessons earned off back to Chris Cox. I'll bring us home here folks so one of the things we realized is that you can live without your print collections. It's hard to believe this is the case. It's not that there aren't a lot of valuable items in there but the fact is that I think we've done such a good job as libraries and offering a lot of electronic alternatives and moving our collections online as well as some agreements that have been developed and some new collections that were offered on an emergency basis from different organizations that we were able to do most of what we needed to do while those print collections were locked behind closed doors. We were able to do regular updates and communication on a regular basis. I actually do an email each day to all employees around eight o'clock sort of letting them know what's going on in the on the campus as well as what's going on with the virus. I think it's helped a lot to continue to develop community and to improve communication. Flexibility is key for both myself and any employees and Chris as well because we just need to keep shifting with the shifting sands as things change because we never know at one point whether we will do one thing and then we'll have to stop doing that and do something else. And lastly a lot of what we've implemented can be carried over into the new normal office environment. I've been really impressed at how much how many technology skills that myself and my colleagues have learned in this period and I think it's really going to help us thrive and do even better in serving our users once we return to the workplace. So we're going to open up to questions. And if anyone out there wants to see any of the plans that we had developed, surveys, our guidelines, all of that information we have available at this URL. Oh that's great. Thank you. Thanks Chris and thank you Chris. Sure. And just a reminder to everyone, we did chat out the link to these slides in your chat box a couple of times so you'll be able to find the entire slide deck including the links embedded there in at that location which is on the meeting website and your project briefing page. So thanks everyone for joining us today and again thanks to Chris and Chris for this great presentation and astonishing really to hear how early you began in the planning process I think. So yeah that was really interesting and to all of our attendees thank you so much for joining us here today. The floor is now open for questions. If you look at the bottom of the of your Zoom screen you should see a button that says Q&A. If you click on the button a little box will pop up and you can type your questions into the Q&A box. If you're more comfortable typing into the chat box please feel free to do so and we will read those aloud for Chris and Chris to respond. It looks like we have a question from Clifford from Cliff Lynch. Cliff's asking can you give a sense of how often people simply didn't have broadband services available at home? i.e. they weren't in a broadband service area for instance. Yeah and in the presentation we were able to identify I mentioned that we were able to identify five right off the bat. So I would say at least 10 to 15 percent of our staff have had general broadband issues especially at a place like Clemson. Clemson is a fairly remote part of the state and a lot of our employees live in that immediate area and broadband and even Dean Cox can speak to this broadband is not always reliable where he is and on top of that we had tornadoes hit recently too in the Clemson area and that knocked out internet service for a lot of our employees as well and I can't speak highly enough about our central IT department and how responsive they've been in working with us to provide those hot spots as mobile hot spots to employees who otherwise wouldn't have been able to access the internet. So they've really helped us stay in business in a lot of ways by being able to offer that. Yeah I was really struck by by that comment that you made that the IT was establishing those hot spots for employees and I wondered was that something that they were did that come about as a result of the work the planning work that the library was doing or was were other areas of campus starting to plan for this as well. How was central IT involved in all of this planning? They were involved at a pretty high level. I think Chris could speak to this a little better but they I think they were pretty proactive in identifying what potential issues would be with all employees going to work and really being able to prepare their workforce to prepare us in many ways. So yeah overall I would say their response has been really proactive. I think the best the best thing that occurred was that we were in negotiations and we have since signed on for Verizon to be sort of our main wireless provider for the campus and so as part of that agreement they were able to provide us with wireless hot spots. Also we're allowed we also allowed all employees that have Verizon accounts to expand their to unlimited data for free. That really allowed us to have people if they had a phone to use that sit at their wired internet home or their wireless that they might pay for otherwise. Oh how interesting. We have another question now from a Danushka Samarkoon who asks how is the funding structured for hot spots? Did the library pay for them or central IT since it has a recurring expense unlike the other one-time equipment like headsets? Sure yeah so we didn't have to pay a dime as a library for central IT covered all of those costs and I think they were able to recover some of those costs with those arrangements that Cox was mentioning with Verizon. And most of our expenses were for buying equipment like the headsets or laptops but just like every other university we've been logging those hoping that some of that money coming from the federal government will pay for some. Ah interesting thanks for that question Danushka. Thank you for those replies. From Nancy Turner did you have to modify work roles for staff to be effective when working from home? I can answer that. I think the majority of my staff were able to work from home and do their regular jobs in most cases but there were some and either in technical services or the circulation desk that were more inclined to work with print materials. What we were able to do is not only were we able to engage in other things like for example the tech training or the fact that we expanded to about 30 people our chat reference service which used to be about 10. And we did was we created two projects one was a metadata project for a collection of digitized images that were part of special collections and the other one was a transcription project for all histories and so we're able to engage those employees in those things so that they could continue to work and continue to work in projects in many ways had been kind of back you know kind of had been in in the works for a long time and we're able to progress. Interesting interesting we we heard we Cliff and I heard of other libraries doing things like transcription projects for staff who who needed other roles to expand access to special collections that's that's really interesting thanks thanks Nancy thanks for that reply. I was wondering also you commented that you purchased quite a lot of streaming media I think over 50 items and I was wondering were those did those tend to be individual items were they collections what can you give us a sense of what those things were. We tended to do them as individual things so faculty member would want a movie to show to their class or we're planning on having that as part of reserve item and we purchased it through whatever service we ended up being able to work with whether it's canopy or whoever had it available and then we would purchase access to that as a new purchase we looked at a variety of other streaming services I think it was just we're at a we're at a juncture where we're just starting to I mean in some ways we haven't really moved all in this streaming media at Clemson we have saw a lot of physical media and so a lot of librarians are starting to talk about new subscriptions that we can be part of assuming our budget doesn't get hit like everyone else's but you know that's important with online education being a priority for the campus and for almost every place across the country. Yeah for sure and that and streaming media is a big one. Such a fascinating overview of what you did to get your campus and your library prepared for this situation thank you so much for coming to CNI to share that with us and with that I just want to thank our presenters once again for coming to CNI we really appreciate it and our attendees for coming and being with us here today. Take care everyone. Thank you. Thanks so much.