 Welcome back, everyone. Thank you for coming back after the break. We are in our closing session as we wrap up our celebration this afternoon. So it's been such a pleasure to have all of you with us today. Our last session will be facilitated moderated led by Mary Lee Kennedy, our executive director for ARL, and she'll be joined by Kevin and Joe, and you, you were participating just a few minutes ago with some conversation with the two of them. This afternoon, Mary Lee, Joe and Kevin will talk about the 2023 to 2026 action plan, the work that's underway with the association that Mary Lee is leading with the board of directors and my ARL colleagues. And Joe and Kevin will join in and to extend the conversation about the research and analytics program, expanding on a little bit on what you were hearing and what we were talking about earlier this afternoon. So with that Mary Lee, I think I will turn the podium over to you. Thank you so much, Sue. I just want to add my thanks as well to all of you, particularly Ava, Greg, Steph and Gordon who took, you know, leadership role during extremely challenging time. I really appreciate the way you showed, you use the word grit and curiosity and empathy and really dedication and flexibility. You've created a community, a learning community is what how I would define it and really this ability to sustain this over time is is something that I'm hoping we can continue to do and I know we'll explore more as we work through it. I would be remiss if I didn't know that none of this would have been possible without Sue. So I hope everybody will join me in thanking Sue, because she has been the anchor the brains and the energy that has kept us going since when I got here so and I know starting before then so just huge huge thank you Sue. There's two other people I want to thank and then you know honestly. So Steve Manneville Gamble really got this going with others but really brought me into the loop in terms of understanding how this all worked. And so I really appreciate Steve's continued interest and also to Joe and really Kevin who are going to keep it going or figure out what to do next. So I just want to thank you so much for that and it just speaks to what an association like this is all about, which is a community and I'm just pleased to be a piece of it. And hopefully today as I talk a little bit about where we're going you can see that same spirit of community and curiosity and learning. And I really like what Eva said about, you know, there's no failure and there's no failure in community either right and so, so really just just keep, keep that spirit going and let's hope that's hope that as we create a future for people who are doing it with that in mind so I am going to share some slides because I think I want to put something in your hands that you can refer back to. So, I'm going to do that right now and let's hope it works because once I did this it didn't work very well so I will try. Here we go. And honestly if there's questions at any time. Please raise your hand. I do hope this will be a little bit more interactive maybe at the end that would be the easiest thing for you so I'm going to talk about the work that's underway right now. In the association and that by that I mean the community that makes up the association not only the staff that work there around establishing a vision mission and strategic goals for 2023 and 2026. This is part of a longer term project which really began in the midst of the pandemic as we began to see the world shift a lot around us and and and sometimes it seemed like pure chaos and perhaps that's how it felt to you too. We sort of began to get our legs under us but we weren't always really sure exactly where we were going to end up and I still think we're a little bit in that process of figuring it out as we just talked about hybrid and workplace culture I think these are these are things that I hear a lot about in every conversation I have and so this is, this is where we are it seemed like it was a really important time also because the member representatives so the people who actually have the voting rights at we've seen over 40 new member representatives join ARL since 2018 and in February was like to that it was like 44 and I think we actually have more now so I don't want to give you the exact number because I know there's been a few new members. In just the last few months so there's just a huge shift of 127 that we will be 127 new 127 member institutions starting July 1 with the Atlanta University Center joining us on July 1 so we've just got this massive change happening as well as we really began to open up. Who is who is engaged in our community at ARL with much broader engagement by employees and staff and faculty from within the institution so not only the member representatives themselves which is delivered and we're all really happy about that. So with these big changes under foot felt like we had to look back on where we where we say our vision and mission is which have have really not had sort of a serious look at them since the last strategic, the really big strategic planning which was done I think in 2017 so it was really is time to look at that so that work is underway, and if you haven't participated in a focus group or received information you will very shortly receive sort of some information on where we're heading to get some feedback. The, at the same time, in April of this year at the member session we took a really hard look at the vision and mission statements, and look at them in the context of the strategic goals because they need to align right we. A mission is our purpose a vision is where we want to go and the strategic goals are the way we want to get there, and so we're, and so, and how we'll know it when when we are there. So that work that work I'll speak a little bit more about today at the same time. So looking at what kind of member experience do we want to have and mean that for anybody who's participating with the association, including something like a community of practice or alumni or board members who are no longer on board how do, how do we engage their expertise and their mentorship and their knowledge and other ways there's a lot for us to explore there. And we'll soon be kicking off a task force that's going to be looking at our membership model and our financial framework going forward based on what we determined this year. So that's sort of like the overarching project and we're in the vision mission guiding principles and action plan stage. So I'm just going to move this so you can see it. So there, there were two real very, very foundational reports that helped shape the work that's in underway, because we were trying to create a shared understanding sort of a shared knowledge base. And knowing that every institution really has a unique context in which they need to look at how the association benefits their organization. Well at the same time, speaking to this collective or community needs that represents where we're going and how we want to understand that but also how we represented outside so not just represent one institution but representing the field. So we had two reports one is the ethnic SNR report which was focused on what higher education leaders perceive as them as their strategic objectives, and where they see libraries playing in that space and also what their expectations are of library leaders in advancing the strategic priorities of their institution. The information is available to you on the links are in this in the presentation so you'll be able to get those at the end if you haven't seen them already. This has been actually a foundation reported it doesn't make. Again it's, it's a report that needs to be consumed in the context in which any institution find itself or any research library or sees themselves. And this was for Canada and the United States, it's 63 presidents provost vice presidents of research and CIOs who responded to the focus groups or individual interviews. And what you're seeing here are sort of their, the four priorities that came out as themes in all these conversations which is the pursuit of growth, particularly in the context of the stem research enterprise, particularly in public higher education institutions efforts to engage the state both through its political system and in its with its population, redressing relationships with the historically marginalized communities. And there are definitely significant variations between Canadian US higher education institutions, as well as defending the residential experience so this, this gives you sort of a very high level summary of looking at it from the outside in so how research libraries are seen to be aligned or not aligned with these strategic priorities of higher education institutions. And so it took time to do a value proposition survey, which we hadn't done since 2018. And this value proposition, I love that I can actually say this to you, not that I'm a thought researcher because I'm not, I'm not I benefit from it but I'm not a researcher We had a 69% response rate which was very high he's invited everyone who was actively involved in the work of the association. So people who were BPO's anyone on a committee task force or working group and the member representatives and so that went out 1098 invite tease. The response rate, we have a confidence level and a level of plus or minus 5% at 95% confidence level so so we have, we have, we have a very good information here. The top reasons for engagement with a RL are listed here and I just want to highlight that the, you know, the second top one is benching benchmarking my library or archives performance among peer institutions so that was 55%. And so I think of the research and analytics committee and that you are doing really really is very important to, to this community. I got sure you can read this so I apologize it looks pretty small. But in, in April, we took most of the better part of a day to really dig into the vision mission and strategic goals in terms of what resonated and and didn't resonate with the member representatives and the each one of the these visions was developed by the task force on vision mission and guiding principles which has been read by Susan Parker who's the vice president of the board. And basically what you can see here, I hope you can see is sort of what she called out what is called out as common. You know about air air I'll collect catalyze and then mobilizes what we do something in partnership, how we're recognized. And that we create trusted diverse equitable and inclusive learning and research ecosystem so this is a, this is what we began to work on, and to identify what resonated what didn't resonate, and to really get feedback back on the vision statement. So we did the same thing with the mission statement. The, again, the task force had drafted this based on existing mission statement and rather than getting into the, the wording of it I think just looking at what stood out as sort of the themes that are on the side here helps to give you an idea of the mission, which is really most implicitly why this organization says so why does they are all exist. And what's our purpose. So this gives you a sense of what the particular theme for such as shaping influencing policy and practice. It's a collective creates and shares and sustains global knowledge. So we have a lot of advocacy can be sharing the dog. These are some idea. These are some of the key key phrases that were in the mission. And we also looked at what are our five, we have five strategic goals, which we've also called priorities that went forward we'll call goals just to keep consistency, we have five strategic goals and we actually have two commitments to the two goals not to focus on because these are commitments that no matter what they are all needs to offer its membership and so so those are those we know we will continue to do that we really wanted to dig into the strategic goals and and so these are the five strategic goals. And we began to dig into those as well. So where did we end up. So on the vision, sort of the big thing framework here was our vision tends to focus on what member institutions do and not what ARL does and so we will be focusing more on what ARL does as a community. And that is true for the mission statement to so both of those things were taken into consideration. There's a lot of discussion about using terms, national international and global and whether those that that actually was a more were inclusive terms are actually exclusive terms and whether they were confusing or not confusing so when we wouldn't see the revised vision saving you'll notice that's been taken into account and then in terms of the vision. And it was also noted that we really need to bring leadership and development and the exercise of leadership up to the front forefront, along with something that didn't make it on the side but I should have put on it was just the you advocacy and public policy is a main is a key part of what we do as an association and then really to mark the importance of the AI and sustainability. So that those are the things that came back on the vision. The mission, again the same thing about talk about what need to ARL offers to its members take all the tactical component out and move it to the goal. Focus on ARL as our purpose as a community and our purpose on learning and partnership and advocacy and influence and avoid talking about whether we're national and international or how many institutions are there so some of this seems a little bit formulaic but I think this section right here was really around what is ARL's purpose is really uniquely stated in this sentence. So on the strategic goals. I'll leave this with you but I think what's important here for for this group is that, you know, these were the, this was the summary of all the feedback and we'll see two of these are directly tied to the kinds of things that you've been talking about today is helping ARL measure and benchmark ARL so it may be stats, it may be quantitative, it may be qualitative. It's not always pure data and providing a corpus of data to providing guide bridge that need of providing a corpus of data to providing guidance, expertise on analytics and research intelligence in other words, creating this sort of research agenda. So I think, I think what you really been talking about over the last couple of days as we concluded this work is really, is something that's been a really resonant with the community at ARL. So what happens next, we're actually holding the guiding principle focus groups right now like they're today, tomorrow, we'll be holding another one with fellows and scholars because guiding principles are so fundamental to the culture of ARL we want to make sure including everybody's participating in them. We have the vision mission and strategic goals drafts will be shared in the next week or so for feedback. And with everybody so we're looking forward to your feedback on that. Based on that will take a draft action plan, and which includes the strategic goals, plus the draft vision mission and guiding principles to the board for their review at the July board meeting which is at the end of July and then updates as needed will be brought back to the task force on vision mission guiding principles the association committees in this case, Joe and Kevin and then the staff will, if we need to do some work we will answer then we'll bring it back to approve in October and kickoff the new action plan in January of June. So the deliberations that you're having today, and the insights that you're offering today about this incredibly rich set of work as well as what it could mean when forward is just perfect timing. Lastly, I just, again so you have this. If you're a member rep, you can find all this information for this link, or there's also a link to the past quote for anyone else who wants to find all the information that's informing the work we're doing. So with that, I just love to open it up for any questions. And look forward to talking to you. Hey, I see some things in the stats in the, in the chats will just say that if 55% use stats for benchmarking, or I would say not using it but they see it as the reason for belonging like that that's, that's really the question was what where does the value the value is in this makes it even more central that those methods are meaningful and demonstrating why they're affecting this 100% answer can be so much other questions. Okay, well please feel free to reach out to me at any time you M Kennedy at al.org you can reach me there and we'll make sure, so I'm not sure how to make sure we get this back to everybody, but can you do that with the links. Thank you. I'll circle back to you and we'll get them from you and I can send it out to on our lists are email. And so just to enclosing thank you so much really. I think we've all learned a lot and it's thanks to you that we've been able to learn it so really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you Mary Lee. So I think Joe, you and Kevin we're going to, to jump in at this point and share your react your reflections on what does this mean for the research and analytics program, and I know you've touched a little bit on this, or probably feel you've touched on this a little bit at the beginning or earlier this afternoon. But so how does this all connect with the work that you've been doing with, like, broadly with Mary Lee in the board and all the members. How is it funneling into the research and analytics committee. Yeah, thanks to I so part of what we've been asked and Mary Lee plan to is, you know, the committees are, are being asked to do a couple of things, you know, very specifically things around goals statements and objectives and what initiatives we're taking on so obviously working within a strategic planning framework. I think the language that the committee is using really resonate with with this group with those of you who've worked on our life, but especially around the idea of research agenda. And articulating our, our goal which is, you know, the very specific, you know, the short, the kind of thing you, you know, you can put on your, your laptop sticker or something like that. You know, research analytics have described their work as, actually I could read it really quickly to you demonstrate the value and contributions of research libraries and archives to their communities. So it's really aligns well and I think if you wanted to articulate what our life was the goal of our life I think it'd be very similar. And then the overall, how to do that kind of statements. I think really resonate also with the kind of conversation we had earlier around their state. And I'll keep this a little bit more general because these things get a little bit more refinement throughout the process but there's the idea of development implementation and evaluation of tools necessary to do that demonstration. So lining that with what it means to be inclusive impactful effective research libraries and or archives and so I think it on both ends of the kind of needs that were articulated around going forward on a research agenda, but also some of the things that I think we're also articulated in the conversation earlier. And so it's, I think it's, it's, it's interesting to me or noteworthy to me that these are happening somewhat in parallel and I think out of the some of the root, same root documents right so the research and analytics committee is still working very strongly with that visioning task force report. The next step for us is the root document and obviously our life is as well. The next step for us is is going to be to articulate a set of initiatives, one we've we've kind of discussed earlier and that is definitely the work of the task force to overhaul or make recommendations around the statistics program. It's a very discreet initiative, it'll take up a lot of the time over the next few years. In a couple of directions obviously that task force as I mentioned before will bring back specific recommendations around statistics but also they are going to hear and make kind of parking lot recommendations around the research agenda that may not be completely aligned with the statistics program. The committee will soon select additional initiatives, but we have kind of teed up the idea of taking this celebration and articulating something around advancing the research agenda. I don't know exactly what form that'll take but I think the next steps from our life. And then when one of the pieces of work that the committee has been involved in just this year or so and this is an area where I'm really appreciative Mary Lee's leadership is a little bit more coordination of the efforts around assessment and data. And on the research and analytics, we've had Nancy's been attending so we have a better sense of what's going on with the, with the assessment conference we've had Eric Mitchell is the incoming chair the vice chair now. So we're coordinating the effort around iPads. And then the overall with an ARL for those of you aren't familiar there's the program committee I think if that's I have the name of that correct, which is coordinating all the different chairs of the different committees and assessment and have a potential role to play in all these areas and so there's a really nice coordinating effort a desiloing if you will that I think there was likely to be some initiative that reflects the work that's already underway to do that. Kevin did you want to add. Yeah, sure. I think Joe really did a great job of sort of going over all the different pieces of this, you know, in the sort of the context in which we find ourselves at the end of the RLF program and one of the things that I was thinking about is regarding the committee's role in sort of putting forward some sort of recommendations on what would happen next with with RLF or something like it or whatever, whatever that shape that takes. And it occurred to me that I don't know, maybe I'm just searching for a silver lining here or something like that but I know that all the program teams, you know, experienced, you know, all these challenges and delays due to COVID and the upending of all of our routines and things like that. But I think about the sort of confluence of items we have going on in the program right now at the same time that the committee would now be offering recommendations on RLF had the committee been offering recommendations, I don't know, pre 2020 or around 2020, you know, we may not have been in the same situation where we're also considering changes to the statistics survey. Right, I think the fact that those two things do go together so well and can inform one another is actually kind of fortuitous as the committee kind of wrestles with with two of these large efforts. Be is listening to the two of you. I think a question for me is, what, what questions do you have for this group of colleagues, or what would be helpful to hear from them at this point that you are not sure we've talked about that would help the committee, as it continues its work around priorities and action planning and, you know, etc. I think one of the issues that came up was training. But is there are there questions you all, you all have or two of you have for our colleagues here as we, as we continue to wrap up this initiative that might help you in the work that you are doing now. This isn't necessarily a question but a few times during our conversation today I thought about the fact that, you know, the concept of sort of providing some resources and information about how to approach the types of studies that were done under the RLF pilot was sort of seen as something that would be valuable across the membership and it might be a good opportunity to point out that. So I know, you know, we've been working on the sort of little side project under the umbrella of RLIF with some folks to put together some training modules that are a bit of a, you know, sort of a meta narrative I guess on the RLIF. And so those will be sort of coming out to the community later this year. And so, you know, we're still working through the exact sequencing and content and things like that but there'll be a series of training modules meant to sort of, you know, put some structure around. If you were going to embark on a research project like the projects that we've seen in RLIF, what do you need to know? What are the types of things that you need to think about? What types of methods might be available to you and where do you find more information about them? And we're actually sort of trying to integrate some examples from the pilot projects as, you know, sort of ways to highlight some of the work that was done. That would be great. Good point. Good point. So let's, we have time for just a little more exploration and then we'll wrap up and send everyone on their way. And this is really a question for everyone, including Joe and Kevin. And I think, again, it comes back to as we've talked this afternoon about priority shifting and just taking a look at, you know, what matters most. So what are the issues that libraries could explore now that we have these tools and resources at hand? Our teams have worked on various projects. They've enhanced their skills with different tools and methodologies. Are there issues that any of you feel we could explore with our toolkit that we now have? Go ahead, Eva. For me, one of the things that that surfaces is going back to that idea of advocacy and using the work that we've done to leverage making decisions to address some of the issues that we've uncovered. There's some advocacy stance. So we're not just doing assessment, but we're also able to advocate for ourselves and the needs that we uncover in our assessment work. Thank you. Doing more of what we've been doing. In other words, comments or thoughts. If I may, I do think there's a good opportunity. We've kind of mentioned it a few different times about the hybrid work or the impact, you know, future of work and in some ways, you know, libraries, if we want to keep with the framing the wider framing of the almost libraries as a case study, but as a way of exploring issues beyond our profession, libraries are dynamic work environments, especially within higher education. It's a different job class. I mean, you know, you can get into all that. We might really have a great opportunity to partner with HR researchers on our campuses with different, different researchers overall, and still explore topics that are of real interest to us but make an impact in the overall future of work discussions. And I think it'd be really helpful. And this is one of those areas where we could partner across institutions and get a sense of different policy environments differing. There are obvious DEIA components to this kind of research. So I might consider this as we go forward a bit. I think that's a great point, Joe. And we were just talking yesterday about the library as a nexus for interdisciplinary research. And that to the extent that that's increasingly important, you know, the library is a neutral space. And so it's, yeah, it could be a model for a lot of things that are happening across the organization or across the institution. And just to build on that Nancy taking some of the work that these teams have done on various aspects of these five particular questions and in looking at it from that through that lens could be a really interesting thing to do. Other thoughts or comments. I do wonder, because I know, what is it, of course we have a new chancellor and new provosts. It's weird, because we have a new provosts who is heavily data driven, even though I personally would love to be able to explore more qualitatively as many of us have done. But that's not going to work. So if you have to create two documents for for these communities. But I'm also like, what is it doesn't there's a new position here like assistant director of digital education or something. So it seems that we're really begin to explore. Not only the hybrid education but it's like the solely online. I know I know we have it in the Peabody College. So we have to a doctoral level nursing school has been doing answers and doctoral for at least a decade now, but I do wonder as that that really permeates the campus more how we need to be able to look at, not only the libraries and the students and faculty who are not here and who may only see campus once, or maybe once a semester, like some executive programs, how our role in making those students and faculty feeling included, as if they were here. And also that that that also dovetails until a lot of accessibility issues to with especially everything so heavily technology big so sometimes I do wonder, because I know here with school medicine school nursing, some of that those discussions with nurses already doing it, at least with medicine this discussions. So trying to figure out, not only saying okay well we can do this and we can do that but also just trying to make sure that we can really reflect and assess that we are doing something. We are doing something effective and not just doing something. So, so whether or not that needs to come from a higher level, or a broader, a broader think tank, maybe that's something to to also think about. When it strikes me, Phillip that your your comment about the collaboration is is really key and I think that was that was one thing we were hoping to explore in this initiative and we did do some, which is, which is great, but thinking more and more about how we could make that more across these issues and certainly the discussions we've touched on today about DEIA, our work environments culture everything that a number of you have mentioned several times, what an opportunity to look at those through a collaborative lens as well and share those resources and tools and expertise now that that we now have to do this work. Yeah, thank you. Well I think on that note, we will bring this closing session to a close. So thank you to Mary Lee, Joe and Kevin for leading us in this discussion. Let's turn off the recording.