 Good afternoon and welcome to the concluding celebration of the ARL research library impact framework. My name is Philip Walker from Vanderbilt University, and I'll be discussing our practice brief on how does the library help to increase research productivity and impact. Our project started back in 2017, which we did a pilot survey trying to gauge library impact and involvement in scholarly activities. This project was presented at the two chapter meetings of the Medical Library Association listed below in 2018. I'll be discussing some of the lessons learned throughout the presentation here. So the pilot project started in 2017 and we compiled and presented our information in 2019. Then, based upon the feedback from the conference and our own reflection, we revised the survey, added more questions and more response criteria but also added more branching logic. However, the revised survey stalled greatly with the responses with some of the lessons I'll discuss throughout the presentation as well. So what we did in order to stay on focus, stay focused and stay on objective was to incorporate some of that information from the revised surveys into our information desk statistics. Really, we were able to still capture the data, however, instead of our users completing the survey, we were actually just adding it to our statistics. So the idea was to create better tick marks for our reference activities. In addition, we saw some utility in promoting our partnerships with various users throughout the University Medical Center. So we created a live guide in which we have not only our research, but also the research in which we're helping with around campus and this has served tremendously as a wonderful promotion and marketing guide when people are trying to acquire as to what we can do with them and their potential projects. So we're actually showing people, these are topics we're working with, these are type of presentations we're working with, these are type of submissions and manuscripts and book chapters. These are the type of extensive literature reviews and guidelines that we're able to help you with. So that has helped greatly. And throughout the process coming on to the ARL initiative in 2019, everything has helped and there's been a great synergy between what we were doing, what we were trying to accomplish and as well as the professional development activities that were coming from the various presentations from the from the ARL speakers. So learning from the other participants as well as to what they were doing and how they were doing it too. So with that, one thing we were fortunate to do was to be able to utilize the IMLS sub award so that we could be able to look at our data much faster than what is typically done with the red cap data capture tool. So I can, we were able to, with the grant to go ahead and to be able to have the red cap programmers create a program that would allow us to have a interface, which I can just kind of go in and click the library staff questions type project type reference types and consultations know how they're contacting us, I can quickly go in and be able to look at some of this data sometimes I need to go in to the to either today US or to the university librarian, I need to be able to provide this information quickly sometimes. In addition to be able to capture this for the reports as well so this really helped us greatly with being able to go ahead and look quickly at our reference activities, especially when it comes to the more expensive extensive and expert searching activities that are listed under the project type. So as I said, this began in about 2017 and with the, the interactions between what we were doing here and with the URL activities and also that disengagement with the participants and speakers. We were fortunate to take all of that and say, you know, it's time to really bring this out a little in a different format so we were able to show all four phases in a manuscript last year and in 2021 medical reference service quarterly journal. And what we also did was we've noticed that there's a lot of talk about impact in and value in libraries and that we're trying to express to our provost and our other reporting deans and whatnot. So, but we said it just doesn't seem to be a lot in the literature anymore. We were fortunate to be able to acquire funds within the library system to publish this and open access and we're very proud of that hope to continue that in future publications. So few lessons learned. One thing that has come up of course through our professional development activities is one you do need to polish your surveys. It's we use the tailor design method that we discovered through conversations with a faculty member, and it really helps to one be able to express why this data matters why does someone need to spend two to five to 10 minutes completing your survey. Why does your staff, if in the case with in our case where staff also needed to complete more information and information desk statistics. Why does that matter. No, the big question in researchers is so what so I wanted to make sure that that was explained clearly. We also wanted to make sure that within the surveys the users could see themselves they could see the relevance here, not just that this is some time consuming burden but at same time this is important. And it shows what all entails within the research process. One thing that we did notice within the pilot and revise survey was there was a misconception of the perception of library usage. We would ask people about using the library for their particular projects. And some of them would say why didn't use the library, but I just use the journal so wonder, trying to understand we understand the context that they may not so we tried to avoid all jargon but at the same time context becomes misconstrued because people feel that oh using the library means coming to the library but we know in this day and time that that does not necessarily relate anymore. Also, speaking more from my level as director I do have to understand what are the important metrics within the library system also within the university system and medical center system with various deans and chairs. I did not send the same report to university librarian that I send to the dean that school medicine or school nursing or the various chairs within the medical center so I have to understand my audience I have to know which metrics are important for us to collect as well as which metrics are important to disseminate. Also, one thing to note with with impact studies and anything related to scholarly activity. We found that it's very important to understand timing so why not you're looking retrospectively trying to do something prospective. When a particular project was completed when in particular, when you asked about your involvement versus when the grant was submitted or when the paper was submitted or when the book was submitted that impact our responses and think that sometimes the survey itself got lost because maybe the literature view took two to three years to complete so they forgot about us after a while. A few other things just to note that we stayed focused on the objective, even though it changed it evolved over these five years, but we found that flexibility was key. We could still stay on topic we stay still stay on without scope, but at the same time not feel that we were giving up as we were finding new approaches and strategies. We just did that we listen we observe users we listen and observe to various colleagues and just on how and within the literature itself and how that we can find best ways to collect relevant data but also be able to disseminate relevant data. So that became very very important. And as I mentioned earlier with the live guide for one was that we were looking at looking at it as a marketing to these are the things that we're doing these are things we can do. So even if it's our research with library information science, or if it's a project we've been doing with the University Medical Center students and faculty, and, and staff, we can show you what it is we're doing. And, and that the skills that we have so with the thing that that's very important. It helps us tell that story. Beyond just tick marks that we're doing here in the library. This is, this is our skill set and our growing skill set. And this is what we are very, very proud of here. And lastly just want to say that even though this was a project based upon identifying impact, we've kind of found impact little difficult to really explain and describe and quantify. And this also came up with conversations with faculty on some implementation projects here in the medical center. What was called added value. So we began to kind of reframe our thinking from impact added value, and especially in the health sciences context we have what's called evidence based practice, and we know from the literature, over three decades of literature trying to be evidence based. You know, there's a barrier of time, there's a barrier of skill, there's a barrier of being able to assess the literature. Well, so these are, and also barriers of being able to identify which resources to use. So this is something we've been able to bring to our users here in health sciences areas where we can do the searching we can be the middle person between the literature and practice. So you find you identify the problem, we can identify the literature for you, give you that literature and then hopefully you can be able to solve the problem with the with the most relevant literature most relevant and most recent literature. So those are those things we feel that we can bring value to the health sciences community here at Vanderbilt University. And if anytime if anyone needs to continue the conversation feel free to contact me my information is right at the bottom. I just want to thank Sue and her team and everyone else at LL and I am ls and all the various presenters and speakers and all the expertise greatly appreciate it. And on behalf of myself just want to thank everyone once again in between the participants, as well as the staff, and also hope you are enjoying the concluding celebration. Thank you.