 My name is David Wright. I am the Associate Library Director for User Experience at the University of Southampton. I joined the University Library team in October last year, and I've only just joined RLUK as a committee member as well. So this is quite a baptism of fire for me today to go very quickly into the chair for this session, but I'm absolutely delighted to be doing this topic, I think, that is of interest to all of us really at this point in time. The aim of the RLUK space program is to develop a forum where RLUK members can engage in dialogue and share their knowledge and experience around spatial redesign and capital builds. As part of the new RLUK strategy, the program is aiming to hold three events in 2022 and to develop resources on themes that are going to be of interest to RLUK members. So today's event has three presentations for you. All of them will be focusing on the impact that the recent shift in working practices has had on the design and use of library spaces, that's both physical and digital, and the implications for their development and running. Our speakers will also share their experiences about how change in working places and in working environments has affected the roles and practices of library and information professionals in their institutions and how they deliver user services. I'm going to introduce our first speaker, who is Ben Monnier, the director of operations for UCL Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science overseeing estate developments, health and safety and communication. It's quite a job description that you have there, Benjamin. He's the strategic lead for sustainable estate developments across 18 sites and is leading the development of library services in UCL East, a major development on the Olympic Park to create a model for the university campus of the future. Over to you, Ben. Thank you very much, David. And it's pleasure to be here to share with you some of the projects that we've been doing over the last couple of years and to talk to you about library space in a blended environment. And so what I'll be talking about today are two research projects that we've been undertaking since the pandemic started. And one project is unusual because my background is very much in physical library spaces, but project one has a footprint of virtually zero square meters and is about thinking about virtual learning spaces. I'll talk about that project. The other is looking at inclusive learning spaces for hybrids and blended education. So this is looking back at our physical spaces and how can we make them genuinely inclusive spaces as we build back after COVID and think about how accessible our libraries are. So I'll start off with a bit of context and then at the end, I'll put forward a few thoughts about the way forward. So to start off, when our students apply to universities and join research intensive libraries or research intensive universities like UCL, what they're expecting in terms of the physical environment that they'll be coming into is akin to the slide on your screen with grand inspiring spaces. Some historic like the Donaldson library pictured here in the Wilkins building at UCL, some more modern learning spaces as many of us have opened over the last 10 years or so. And what we found students experienced after March 2020 was quite different to that. And typically students would find themselves in their bedrooms, either at home or in their halls of residence with very little opportunity to get out. And obviously during the lockdowns, they were completely isolated in their rooms by government instructions. And so that created a real gap in terms of the expectation of students, notwithstanding the understanding and the goodwill that students had towards us during a pandemic and understanding that we're all stuck in an unexpected situation. But there was a real gap, which I think, well, all of us experienced in some form or other, and all of our students experienced. So if I talk a little about the characteristics of the spaces, which we've created and been used to providing in our physical libraries, think about the Donaldson Reading Room as an example, I know we've put a lot of effort as a sector into creating special, inspiring, motivating environments for students to be able to study in. And that's a factor which has drawn students into our buildings for the past couple of decades. There's also been a real sense of community and students in those libraries, in our libraries, have a sense of disciplinary cohesion of student body or cohort that's focused on similar goals, whether it's working on projects, working on assignments, they have a real sense that they're working maybe independently, but together as part of a wider academic community. We've also found that many of our open plan spaces are very effective self policing environments, where students will apply peer pressure to each other and feel peer pressure, so that disruption and distraction are limited by that peer pressure. And also, many of our libraries are deliberately designed to be quiet or have got some gray noise that muffles out the distracting background noises in busy cities like London, which obviously UCL is based in. It can be hard to find quiet spaces and libraries are one of those few havens of quiet that students and staff come to for that quality of quiet. Our libraries also have Wi-Fi throughout and powerful laptops and many of them are accessible 24 hours. So all of those features make them really attractive and busy popular destinations for students to come and spend time in. But one thing which we know students don't do again because of the way that our spaces are designed and the way that we expect students to behave in libraries is there are limited chances to interact with others and some learning buildings are better suited than others for that interaction. Certainly in many of our historic libraries at UCL, we don't have social learning spaces or group learning spaces. So really, the focus is very much on quiet spaces and there's a question about how might we facilitate more interaction between students and opportunities for that. And thinking about the qualities or characteristics of the student bedrooms that students were working in during lockdown. Many of them were very familiar to students, quite dull environments, either their own bedrooms at home or the kind of university halls that students were based in. So relatively little space, quite constrained in terms of study desk space, very isolated and no peer pressure. So any distractions, mobile phones ringing or fencing, watching another episode of favorite series, all of those things could be done with no sense that others were studying and that you might be distracting them by not focusing on task. And also many student rooms aren't quiet because of the fact that based in a home, they have other students maybe living in the same building or that the noises of the city permeate more in many bedrooms than our libraries, which tend to be more remote and quieter. However, students throughout lockdown typically had access to Wi-Fi and powerful laptops. So that was one way that we could we could reach students and hopefully provide them with some window into the library. And really the research question that we asked ourselves at the time on a very practical question that we were asking ourselves in 2020 was how could we close the gap between the physical space that students had access to and the experience that they expected to have at universities and how might what might we reduce the gap between our physical libraries and the digital presence that we had as a university. And to inform that we undertook a research project or a series of research projects which are detailed under the virtual learning spaces project I'm going to talk to you about now. So the first thing that we did was we conducted a piece of research in November 2020, which ran for three months. And we had two researchers appointed who reported jointly to the library, through myself, and the UCL interaction centre, which is an academic centre of expertise around human computer interaction. And we surveyed 500 students, found some really high levels of interest from the students in having access to a virtual study space. We know we found that just under 50% of students had used physical study spaces regularly on campus before COVID and about 75% to 80% would like virtual study spaces and the reasons for wanting to have access to a virtual space are listed at the bottom of this slide. It was interesting to note the importance of privacy from students and wanting an environment that was safe and familiar. And I think there's an element there of replaying the safe environment that the library provides in many of our academic libraries. Students feel very safe, sometimes so safe that they'll leave their laptops unattended. But there's a real sense that students want a virtual library to be as secure and for them to be able to be anonymous and not to have trackers and things, so that it's somewhere that they are genuinely safe and don't feel followed. So that was the first piece of research that we conducted to ask students about their interest. We also had a couple of discussions with a, at a time, a small startup called Study Stream, who were developing an online learning space. And they've since grown a lot and they continue to provide virtual study spaces. But those conversations were happening in parallel with us consulting our students about the types of spaces that they wanted. And from that piece of research, we developed a brief for a virtual platform where students would be able to study alone but together with others. So to be able to see others students studying in an environment where they ideally would be able to have 24 seven drop-ins. And they would have access to chat facilities that they could connect with others across disciplines and also have opportunities to get support from study buddies was something that's came up. There was also a desire to have a sense of connection with the institution. And one of the ideas that came through was having Zoom or Teams backgrounds so that you could apply those and give a sense of being within the same community, being part of UCL and part of UCL's libraries. So from that brief, we developed a project which was very fast. We developed it within two months of finalising the brief, put together the concept and implemented it. It was low cost. If I recall, the budget that we had was in the order of seven or 8,000 pounds. And it was something that the library and our information services division jointly undertook without any consultants or third parties. We did discuss options which would entail third party providers. After discussions with IT experts within UCL, we decided to adopt an in-house solution using the institutional Zoom license, which we had procured to support blended learning a few months beforehand. And there was also in-house expertise, there is in-house expertise around using Zoom. And with that, we launched a pilot in June 2021. And so the virtual learning rooms opened. And we also appointed a researcher to analyse the usage and the student opinions about the virtual learning spaces. The image here shows you a snapshot of what the virtual learning spaces looked like. So it was very much a Zoom room with people from different bits of the university. This is a staged photo with colleagues from ISD and myself. So the equal-eyed amongst you'll probably notice that I'm on there twice. And the features of the virtual learning spaces were that we had two separate rooms. One was defined as a silent space, which was there were no chat options so students could see each other. They could use a chat function to talk to one of our library information assistants. And we had library information assistants monitoring the space at all times because we were quite nervous about ensuring that students behaved themselves in those rooms, basically. And we used the team of information assistants based in the student centre to do this in addition to their usual responsibilities. The social space allowed students to chat with each other through the chat function on Zoom. But there was no audio in either. And as an additional privacy measure, we allowed students to change their name in the silent spaces so that if they wanted to go into a room anonymously, they could do that and wouldn't have to share with everyone on the call their name. We also incorporated two library backgrounds or two shots from our library spaces to the UCL Zoom app selection so that students could choose if they wanted to have a UCL background. So the research that we conducted ran for four weeks. We had also a series of focus groups and information gathering sessions. And we enticed or encouraged students to participate with some vouchers. And we got some really valuable results and findings from that piece of research conducted on the virtual study spaces. So I'll run through those findings with you now. One of the things that students said they missed during the pandemic, I think this is something that will apply to students from across our institutions, were access to physical libraries to reduce distraction and to reduce boredom, as well as motivation. And also, having that access to a physical collection and feeling like you are physically part of a part of a part of the university was something that students felt was desirable. They did like having library assistants in the virtual spaces over half of the students, I think 60% of students said that they were very happy with library assistants being in and a very small minority, about 15% said they would rather have unsupervised learning spaces. And students also indicated that they missed informal spaces on campus like cafes, which were more relaxed and again, provides a sense of being away from the home, a kind of genuine sense of being away. When we asked them about virtual study, we asked them about their experiences of the virtual study and found that no students, as one would expect, had used virtual study spaces by the time the survey was happening, which was around July 2021. And we got some nice quotes from students like the one on the left hand side of screen there about a sense that the idea of virtual learning spaces was surprising, but it was something that they found when they used it was quite helpful in having that sense of being part of the university. We did get mixed feedback about the virtual learning spaces. We had some positive feedback like the one I mentioned and the quite top of screen, but also because we launched in, I think it was end of May, early June, we were very much into the exam revision period and coming towards the end, in fact, of the exam revision period. Not many students were particularly keen to trial a new place to study as they were coming to the end of the academic year. So we did have relatively few users of the spaces. And that was that played out in the feedback because one of the issues was we didn't really have the critical mass in the rooms for students to feel that they were in a room full of of their peers. And that was something that showed in the in the feedback. We are students about why didn't access the spaces. And the opening hours were one of the features. So no change there from physical libraries to virtual libraries, students want access 24 seven. But we also found quite a lot of the feedback related to lack of awareness and not knowing how to get into the virtual learning spaces. And quite a high proportion as well 19% describes the poor or unavailable broadband as being a factor in not being able to access the virtual learning spaces. So that's something that we took on board. And after the pilot closed, we thought about how we might address that. So the benefits of the virtual learning spaces, we are when we are students, a lot of the brief requirements that we had set out to try and help students feel better connected to UCL help them feel connected to each other. Did students did feel like they got that from the virtual learning spaces. And it's something which we were pleased with with those results, even though there were some mitigating negative feedback in the in a previous slide. So over the summer, we tweaked the virtual learning spaces, we added a live stream from one of our newest learning spaces. So it was so that if you go into the zoom room now, it's like looking out of a window from the UCL student center. And we continue to promote it so that this academic year, during the exam revision period, we'll we'll keep it running until the end of June. And then we'll we'll review again, whether it's something which is, which has got a place in the university beyond the pandemic, or whether it's something that was a sticking plaster during the pandemic, and doesn't have much use beyond that. So those were the key benefits that are described here. The whole project around virtual learning spaces is documented. And we've got a report on the UCL discovery portal. So if you want to find out more, I can happily share the link to the reports that's available. And you can read more there about this project, which certainly made a difference to the students who used it. And we're continuing to make that accessible for students this academic year. The next project I want to talk about more briefly is creating physical places where students can study online, and making sure that those spaces are fully inclusive. The project comes from a Grand Challenges bid that we put together between the library, the Institute of Education at UCL, the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, and again, information services. It's funded by Grand Challenges. We've got a researcher who was appointed earlier this year. And the research question which was developed is around looking at the different ways that the pandemic has affected students access to quality learning spaces, and thinking about how can we create more optimized physical places for students to study online, regardless of physical impairments or disabilities in the broadest sense. The reasons that we're focusing on this question is because it does relate to the UCL Grand Challenge of human wellbeing. It also relates to the UN's sustainable development goal on quality education. In our surveys and thinking about blended learning support, we are thinking about how the educational system is changing and affecting all students. But this project is really looking at how can we make sure inclusivity is at the heart of the creation of new spaces. And what we want to do urgently as part of this project is to make sure that for students with accessibility needs or with impairments, we create spaces which work for them by default that we've got an inclusive by design approach to our learning spaces. The methodology is set out here. So we've got a series of focus groups we'll be undertaking. We'll be creating a pilot space in the student centre and trialing some of the ideas that stem from students during the project. And then we'll have a second phase in the summer of survey and observation. I've noted here that data analysis approaches being adopted. I won't delve into that because I'm mindful of time. The possible outcomes from this project, we're hoping that the student centre will be an example of co-designing inclusive blended learning spaces. And we want to make sure that we go beyond the reasonable adjustments approach. We're also going to be producing a research report on this project. So again, we'll make that available publicly so that it can be useful in terms of good practice and hopefully inform national and international developments around learning spaces creation. We'll also use the project to help us at UCL in terms of interventions in other learning spaces and develop our policies on accessibility and disabled students again to go over and above the reasonable adjustments concept. And finally, we want to use this project to further our participatory methodologies that we've adopted as a principle for developing learning spaces over the last almost 10 years now. So to conclude and think about looking forwards, we are research libraries that that's what our UK is all about fundamentally and increasingly our role is evolving to not only support research and enable excellent research from our academic colleagues, but also to partner with academics to boost research impacts, for instance, through open access publishing and open science initiatives. So what we want to do here is to for the library again to lead in terms of taking that agenda forwards of developing spaces. Many of our institutions have experts on education, learning technology and the built environment. What we found during the pandemic was a huge appetite from academics to work with us to explore ways of facilitating students learning. We also found sorry, we also found that ISD were incredibly willing to work with us at pace. And unlike pre covid trial and error is allowed. So as we consider our spaces in the blended or hybrid environment, we can see ways of not recreating what we had, but rather to define environments that preserve what works for users and address some of the traditional barriers to access for our spaces. Over the coming years, we hope to build up research findings as we accompany students and staff as they learn to navigate the new ways of working post covid and to use that data to inform future state developments on our own campuses. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much for a really interesting overview there of some of the things that I'm sure some of us are getting to grips with in this new phase of living with covid as the government puts it now, I suppose, and how we can actually move forward with our students to, as you say, to meet them, not only in our physical spaces, but also in our online spaces. Really interesting. Thank you. We'll move on to our next speaker now. And I would like to introduce Sandra Brace-Girdle. Sandra is the Associate Director for Collection Strategies at the University of Manchester Library and is a member of the library's executive team. She has strategic responsibility for the library's content budget and for the management and development of the library's modern collections. Sandra has taken the lead on a number of estates projects on behalf of the library executive, including plans for a new staff space due to be completed in summer 2022. Joining Sandra on the discussion this afternoon is Olivia Wallsby, head of teaching collections at the University of Manchester Library. Olivia has over 20 years experience in academic libraries, focusing on resource provision, the student experience and digital technologies within HE. She's a member of the library's leadership team and their hybrid working with and is also the leadership team lead for library spaces, governments and operations. Sandra and Olivia, over to you. Thank you very much, David, and very nice to speak to everybody today. I'm going to start off the presentation hand over to Olivia and then come back to me further on. So just to set the the context for what we're looking at today. The hybrid working has been introduced at the University of Manchester and how we in the library are managing this process with our staff. We'll look at the management of spaces, the use of team charters, staff engagement, collaborative spaces, as well as some of the issues and the challenges that we've faced. We'll also discuss how this has impacted on our plans for current and new staff spaces. Just having a slight issue moving on. Right, I have the next slide. So the library is at the forefront of the university's hybrid working pilots, which is called Working Smarter, Living Better. It's running from June 2021 until August 2022. Although the library had already made a significant shift towards agile working before the pandemic, this has put us in a really good place to embrace this opportunity and radically rethink the way we're working. This is set in the context of our library reshaping project, which was a significant restructure for the whole library held last summer so that we can equip ourselves to deliver our imagine 2030 vision. And we see this hybrid pilot as a really great opportunity to empower our staff to work more effectively and to build on those good practices and some positive changes that we've seen to service delivery and ways of working during the pandemic. So I'm now going to hand over to Olivia for the next section. Thanks, Sandra. So yeah, I'm just going to talk a little bit more in detail now about how we implemented the pilot and the hybrid pilot. So ahead of the university wide pilot implementation, we establish a project team from across our leadership and exact teams and work together to create a library hybrid working charter to establish our expectations from the pilots and the opportunities we saw and also how we would work the pilot in practice. So it's based around five themes. We had experiment and evolve. So our return to campus and the way we work was going to be characterized by trust and a commitment to try new approaches, recognizing that not everything we tried would be successful first time round. We wanted to empower our teams. So empowering managers and teams to introduce hybrid in a way that worked for them, best for them and for their services and their teams. Outstanding services, this was really at the forefront of it was to make sure that whatever we developed was a model that worked and allowed us to deliver outstanding services and partnerships that met the needs of our academic staff, students, PS colleagues and faculty colleagues. Shared spaces. So we wanted to implement a cultural shift in the way we use our spaces to encourage collaboration and creativity. Library spaces would to be shared and not owned. So spaces were going to be allocated for specific purposes or activities only. So for example, we might have collaborative spaces, focus workspaces or specific tasks related areas for certain teams. And we also wanted to make sure that we bore in mind and carried on with a healthy work life integration. So looking at well being of our staff to support our individual well being of our staff and say we wanted to make sure we engaged them fully in the process to ensure that they understood what we were implementing and that the well being was still at the heart of what we were doing for their work, both on and off campus. Each library team was then asked to create their own charters to underpin this, to support hybrid working with a service first approach, allowing for the diversity of all our services and team needs. And these covered things like how the teams plan to communicate with each other, how they were going to meet and how they're going to work together in a hybrid environment. And these are going to be reviewed or have been being reviewed regularly throughout the pilot to date. Every member of our staff and teams as well also work with their line managers to determine a hybrid category for return. We had four categories as predetermined by the Central University Project was category one, which was predominantly campus based. So this was a role that was needed to be carried out on campus predominantly where 80 to 90 percent of the member of staff's time would be spent on campus, but they might then work from home say one day a week. We had category two, which was 50 50. So this was a role that was suitable for an even mixture of campus and remote working. Category three, which was predominantly remote. So this is a role in which it's suitable for approximately 80 percent remote working, meaning the nature of the work undertaken means that individuals may be able to effectively undertake the significant amount of their work and duties at home. And finally, variable hybrid. So this was introduced to cater for the fact that during an academic year, people's roles change. So we may find somebody who would become predominantly campus based during welcome or exam times, but at other times of year may become 50 50 or even predominantly remote in their role. Next slide, please, Sandra. So to our spaces, the approach we took meant that what we wanted to make sure was that only a small number of teams were actually where the service or work demanded it were actually going to have an allocated workspace on return to campus. And often this was going to be for things like our collections based teams who needed to have things within the offices with them. The remainder of our spaces were going to be shared amongst all staff to encourage collaborative working. We did have an additional driver here. Our North Campus building was closing. We'll be closing this summer and ahead of that we did need to re-house and a large group of our staff. So we took this opportunity to actually approach it slightly differently and on return from working remotely. We looked at this in terms of our staff more holistically and instead of just trying to re-house that group of staff we decided that nobody would return to their old owned offices or spaces and we would introduce this new way of working. So this allowed us to introduce a real cultural shift in the way we worked. We'd already implemented prior to the pandemic. We'd already implemented a clear desk policy and an agile approach to working across our buildings and sites on campus. So many staff already had laptops and obviously when they didn't they had been assigned them to work from home during the pandemic. In terms of technology all our workspaces were set up with docking stations, screens, keyboards and mouse and a mouse each. We continue to use Microsoft Teams to communicate across our library and our hybrid categories which was allowing us to foster a sense of community online as well as when teams based on campus. This has been really key to supporting the move. We hold most of our formal meetings online as this has been established as a preferred and most effective method during our working from home period. But we're beginning to investigate better tech to support fully inclusive hybrid meetings as well as more staff returning to campus on different days etc. The library's digital support team helped support return to campus providing lots of tips and guidance for our staff as they came back in about reconnecting to Wi-Fi, ensuring that whilst using laptops and moving around more security and confidentiality etc. were considered. In terms of logistics for managing this shared space the main piece of work we had to look at was introducing a booking system. So we've introduced something called resource booker, which was already being used on campus for managing bookings of teaching spaces. We've made some of our spaces bookable and others we've left open. We've tried to introduce clarity on which spaces offer best provision for different types of work e.g. a collaborative space or a quiet space etc. And also being clear where our spaces are particularly as we've recruited a number of new staff during the pandemic who have never been on campus and others who have been based in different buildings and won't be familiar necessarily with all our sites. We've encouraged the use of outlook calendars and team statuses to indicate whether staff are working at home on campus and if they are on campus where they are and this is assisting with collaborative working as well. One final important bits of logistics we had to consider was the big question of whether people would want lockers and how they would store their personal items and belongings and laptops if they were moving around campus and coming and going. We weren't sure what sort of demand we'd get for that so we carried out a short poll and consequently we've made lockers available throughout the buildings for ad hoc use in the majority so we've only actually allocated a few lockers to specific staff and that tends to be within those fixed allocated spaces and a number of a handful of lockers to people who have a sort of run or cycle commute and needed something larger. So far this has been working so that's something that we'll carry on with. So the project team been working on this since May 21. All library stuff have been involved at some point just to quickly go through our timeline on this. So we carried out a tech and space audit initially to assess what we had what changes we could make within limited budgets. We created our team charters through June and July and obviously the teams created theirs using the library wide charter as a guide. We formed a priority return list. This is assessing originally at the first return to campus assessing which staff needed to come back in to deliver services. Although naturally many of our staff had been on campus throughout the whole pandemic. Staff support and consultation. So alongside planning for hybrid we were implementing our new structure as Sandra mentioned earlier. So the library reshaping projects and we felt it was really vital therefore that we really got the support of our staff and brought them in on this. So we held an open meeting with our library exec team online to launch the charter and to gather staff feedback. We set up hybrid working a hybrid working channel on our all staff teams space. And we've run a number of online manager drop-in sessions online to support managers implementing hybrid in their teams. And actually they've been really successful and I think a method of working with our staff and our managers that we'll hope to continue for other elements as well. We organized grab and go sessions so to ensure those spaces were fit for purpose and when we're cleared of all personal belongings people came in took all their personal belongings away from old offices and made sure they were all clear. And then the final point after our the planned beginning of returning our staff to campus in September was the review and evolves. This is coming back to the idea this is experimental and will evolve and reinvent itself as we move through time. One thing I will say is this chart this timeline was written back then. And unfortunately, as you can see, I think really the review and revolve starting from September reality is that really the pilot is only only just got going in earnest with with staff returning to campus into their hybrid categories due to plan B and changes in government advice from working from home. And that probably brings us I think on to the challenges we've faced and I'll hand you back to Sandra for that. Thank you. So challenges well plan B was was a major challenge. So the reintroduction of restrictions meant that our hybrid pilots phased approach to return to campus really hadn't got going. So but we had had opportunities to have feedback from staff. Some of the challenges we faced was there was confusion about what workspaces were available when problems with the workplace environment, too hot, too cold, feeling that not very many staff were around. So there was concern about what was the benefit of coming onto campus and then doing online meetings, not helped by our awkward spaces within our main library where staff can be in the same building but but not cross paths during the day unless they know somebody's there. So so there was on there was a general feeling of good will really, I think, in terms of hybrid. So these were more niggles that people are finding about how to implement the process and really helped us in reviewing what we've done so far. So what we're now in a phase that we've called reenergising hybrid where we're taking the opportunity to remind all library staff of the university's hybrid working part pilot to ask them to resume working within their hybrid working category so that we can thoroughly test the hybrid working programme and make sure we continue to have those opportunity for staff to feed back their views as we work through this next period as Olivia's outlined and a reminder that being on campus isn't just about attending in person meetings. It's about feeling part of the wider library team contributing to student experience being visible presence on campus. We learned about spaces as well the types of spaces that are needed when staff are working on campus which was much more collaborative spaces one to one online space meeting spaces and the general theme being flexibility. We learned more about the tech equipping staff to be more agile making really good use of teams of location statuses and we are testing hybrid meeting kits so I can't claim to say we've it's worked sometimes and sometimes not been quite so quite so positive but so we're still learning in that area. Staff communication engagement is key really and the fact that each team owns its charter has been very successful and also shares that charter so everybody can see the charters of other teams and continue into survey and review through our meetings. We've noticed in terms of challenges that there's sometimes been a blurred line between hybrid and flexible working and we've wanted to remind staff that hybrid working is really about place so where they're working so the flexibility is around their contractual place of work or working remotely whereas other forms of flexible working compressed hours part-time working etc is connected to time and those requests are dealt with through the university's flexible working policy. So experiment evolve is key to what we're doing monitoring occupancy levels reviewing the booking system is it working is it not working have we got the right balance of spaces are all the things that we're starting to look through now. So in terms of going forward as we've mentioned we are moving out of North Campus and into a new staff space so this is our space that we currently have our lovely big collaboration space on North Campus which to be fair was not used that much pre pandemic but we've noticed it's been hugely popular since we've started to return to campus and that's because it's got this mix of fixed working spaces docking stations meeting spaces comfortable furniture so it's got that real mix where an entire team can come book this space and work together for a day or people can come from across teams to work on a particular project. So we're wanting to recreate that kind of space in our new environment and as part of that we've been visiting other spaces on campus so this is a photograph here of a place in our engineering campus a building called MECD huge building and this is a space for staff which actually the photograph probably doesn't do justice to it's a really nice space lots of space around a mix of lockers a mix of individual comfortable spaces to work these the soft furniture has been very well liked in these spaces and as well there is also desks by the windows in broken up with different types of furniture to avoid that call centre approach that people have concerns about. So I think what we've learned from this is that although people ask for a lot of cellular space I'm returning to campus for those online meetings that wasn't actually what it's worked out in practice in practice people are quite happy with headphones on having those meetings being part of that buzz of an office and that the silence that perhaps we've been used to working to at home in some ways it is not what we go into the office necessarily for but these mixed spaces do mean that people can move if an area is too busy to a different space if an area is too hot, too cold they can move to a different space so it's making instead of the space having to be everything to each individual person they can move around to the space that suits them for the tasks that they're doing at that particular time. So I think another thing we've learned is that by having moving away from owned spaces a team doesn't own a space that we've had to set up an internal group to manage spaces and to have that ownership of spaces to be managed internally so that someone's responsible for dealing with those niggles of managing a natural space when it's not owned by a particular group or team. So we've very much tried to adapt and learn and are still in the process can't claim we've got all the answers here but we're working through this and I think it's been a really interesting way of looking at how our spaces are using which we'll continue to work through. We'll be really keen to hear from other colleagues about anything that's worked for them or any ideas and suggestions or to answer any questions when we come to the Q&A. So thank you very much for that. I'll hand it back today. Thank you so much, Sandra and Olivia. I think it's really interesting to we saw our sort of student experience at the beginning of the session today and then moving on to the staff experience. I really like the phrase you use experiment and evolve. It feels to me like that's going to be our mantra in academic libraries and research libraries probably for the next few years really and it's really interesting. Thank you for sharing your experience of your approaches with that this afternoon. So we move on now to our last session. This is Bringing the Best of Both Worlds quite aptly. It's titled and William Nixon is our presenter on this session. William is assistant director at the University of Glasgow. His role cuts across academic engagement, repositories and digital libraries. He's also the co-chair of the RLUK associate directors network and he chairs the digital shift working group. So William, if I can hand over to you at this point. Can I just say sorry before William starts do remember that you can post questions at any time for our speakers and we will feed those into the Q&A session at the very end. So please feel free to post those during the session here. Thank you. Thank you very much, David and I hope everyone can hear me okay. I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to share a little bit of our experience in blending the best of both worlds about our kind of hybrid working journey University of Glasgow. And I've had the opportunity to collaborate with a couple of my colleagues from our special collections team and from our frontline student services team to inform a couple of mini case studies which I hope helped to kind of flesh out some of the journey which we've taken at Glasgow. First of all, I think we have perhaps a bit like sort of Manchester are have taken a broader University initiative around as little response to the pandemic. We've called it people first and launched in the summer of 2020 and it's really focused around understanding the issues and the impact of COVID on the kind of pandemic on our colleagues all the different ways in which it's been felt and we've identified sort of some of these six pillars around that, which really have helped us to commit to working kind of and supporting our staff kind of moving forward. And one of the areas that I particularly wanted to draw in today is the new ways of working element around this which we have been looking at. So as part of people first there's sort of three key strands around the kind of new ways to work. There is hybrid working and I think Sandra described that very well, thinking about that as space rather than time, use of agile spaces and different approaches, modern ways of working, use of agile, use of the agile manifesto, trying to keep things simple, continuing to do that experiment and evolve and it's been interesting in the sessions for this as well. There's almost a reassurance now amongst the community that sometimes it's actually okay to try and fail to take a more iterative approach as we actually learn to look at how we're going to be more effectively adopting some of these new practices and really embracing the best of both worlds in some of this journey. So for us, hybrid working is that ability to vary your place of work. It is that mix of work on campus and at home and for us at the University of Glasgow we've created a new sort of portal. We've taken the new really kind of embraced step around hybrid working. We recognize the benefits gained between colleagues both on the workplaces and in campus and the role that that plays in supporting overall student experience, in supporting the work and the outcomes which we do. And it's very clear as well that hybrid working is not 100% only remote working. There is that expectation, that balance and blend between working from home and working on campus. Many cases regardless of the kind of nature of your role being able to come together and see in some cases some of the spaces as collaboration destinations, being able to meet with your colleagues not just be perhaps in those Zoom meetings or in those team meetings, those technology tools that we become so familiar with over the last couple of years. And I think it's been fascinating for us at the University. We had COP26 back in sort of October, November last year and it was the journey in which we've taken with hybrid working enabled us to very easily pivot back to a mix of more working from home during some of the travel restrictions, some of heightened security surrounded COP in a way that felt much more straightforward and realizable and doable than any kind of scenario which we would have been able to do in the kind of pre-pandemic times. So looking here at our portal, I just want to kind of draw on some of the process kind of diagram approach. This is perhaps similar to some of the kind of charter work which kind of Sandra and Olivia been talking about. But again, it's about those kind of the journey and the steps for managers and for teams, collaborating, working collegiately around how we can support the environment, addressing the circumstances and preferences around how this can potentially work, the approach that you're going to take, where that's actually going to sit. And again, critically, the sort of that experiment and evolve rather than the test and refine element of this to test the approach to adjust it as we continue to move that forward. And a key part of the hybrid working architecture for us is our move towards what's called Glasgow Anywhere. And Glasgow Anywhere is that sort of critical IT piece of the jigsaw about being able to seamlessly deliver the on or off campus technical experience, the desktop, all of the backend material and so on. Everything that we originally pivoted to as a result of the pandemic, but we have continued to invest in, continue to evolve and continue to actually build up for right that. And certainly in our direction of travel, it's our intention to move from the current environment where many staff have multiple devices to, I think ultimately we will see a streamlining of those where you become kind of much more kind of agile depending on the nature of your job with just one device, you know, which can work between different parts of the state, whether it's working from home or it's working in offices around campus. And there's a lot of discussion with the work going on around that now. And one of the things that I'll close today's session around is our kind of modern working, modern group that we're looking at within information services. So just a little bit about information services and where the library sits at the University of Glasgow. We are now a converged service. We have four directorates, library services, business relationship management, IT services and infrastructure and cloud services. And we were already just the pandemic was coming in. We were starting to do some more restructuring. We were starting to move staff around. We were starting to look at our estates. And I think one of the things that this whole process has accelerated is the way in which we are really going to be working more differently and I think more effectively across some of these estates. So our information services estates journey for those of you who haven't been to Glasgow recently, we have the University's main library where the bulk of sort of library staff have and where pre-pandemic. But we were on the process of moving some of our IT staff from their offices and space on campus into the building. Up on the top right here is city centre premises which we have where staff were about to go in and we've been looking at rethinking how we use some of that space. And the bottom right is our James McEwen Smith learning and learning hub which just opened in April last year and talk a little bit about that in a minute. And then the little home with the wifi icon because I think that has become another interesting part of our kind of campus estate and the way in which we work around all of that. So we have been very much already moving in the direction of rethinking where staff are working, where they were going to be based. And then in the midst of the pandemic we had the opportunity to open a completely new learning hub. But what I wanted to do was just kind of focus on a couple of examples of kind of case studies around different uses of space and the impact and that intersectionality between space and skills and resources. One of those is our archives and special collections reading room. It's based on the level 12 in the main library there and COVID-19 has really been a catalyst for innovation for us in terms of really deepening our engagement with our academic colleagues in terms of being able to deliver new virtual reading rooms and new virtual collections classrooms so that we can really start to do some further deeper online collaboration. And this has gone through a number of different I guess, experiment and evolve phases. Obviously at the very height of the pandemic in the first year, everything was completely online. We were delivering everything online with our academic colleagues as we moved into the 2021.2 starting to look at a more blended experience starting to have students and staff back in the building doing some mix and match around some of the technology being able to repurpose and flip some of our spaces. We used that time to outfit new visualizers, new RECO 360 technology in that space demonstrate how this could really work and be able to use that to showcase ways in which that could be taken forward by other parts of the university. And looking ahead to the next academic session how we further embed these new blended models which we've been working with the collaboration that we've actually done ways in which we can start to open up beyond just our kind of Glasgow and national community but more internationally collaborative work that we're doing for instance with the University of the West of Indies on a course in reparative justice. So being able to start to globally connect much more of our materials in our collections in a really exciting, really dynamic way. So here on the image we have the sort of the new screen some of the visualizer work which we've put together and it's enabled us for special collections to start looking at these new teaching models being able to look at new ways in which we can reinvigorate and re-engage some of our resources and our content. And as I said, staff and space and resources these are all intertwined, they are all absolutely interlocked but I think we've really demonstrated both an appetite amongst the staff for the upscaling, the engagement, the investment around these spaces and also for our academic colleagues in being able to actually think about new ways in which they can use some of our collections so they can embed them into their teaching. Sustainability is absolutely critical I think around all of this so it's how we look at where we can continue to invest and fund both in the space and the resources and in the technology that we are doing. But as I said, this has been a real catalyst for innovation and really deepening that staff and academic engagement which has emerged out of this. The other case study that I just wanted to draw on this afternoon is the launch of our James C. Kuhn Smith Learning Hub. This is the state of the art new teaching facility over 90 million pounds of investment and the first building delivered through our University of Glasgow campus development program. It opened in April, 2021. Now it was designed for high volumes of students up to kind of two and a half thousand and is very much kind of led by our frontline student service who are called Reach Out. Reach Out cut across a range of virtual and physical support for students. They are literally the frontline in that student engagement experience. They have been incredibly visible on campus and the library has been incredibly visible on campus as a key part of the campus experience over the last couple of years. We're incredibly proud of James C. Kuhn Smith building and as part of our ongoing engagement with the wider community, it was named after James C. Kuhn Smith, the first African-American who was awarded a medical degree at the University of Glasgow in 1837. And with the Learning Hub and the Reach Out team, as I said, they were some of the first staff that students saw when they returned to campus. When they returned to campus, the University of Maine Library had opened in August, 2020. I think like many of the rest of us on this session, we were running the Click and Collect services, we were trying to provide managed study spaces and it was the Reach Out team who were there. When we launched the Learning Hub in 2021, that gave us a really exciting opportunity to further engage with the students there to get a sense of that building and that space and how that is actually working so that there was some kind of lead in towards that. And in this first semester and now, it is certainly one of the most popular buildings on campus. It's incredibly dynamic and vibrant when you go through it. If ever, I actually needed a reminder that both libraries and Learning Hubs are so critical to the student experience. They were absolutely, we were fully booked and chewed out of the door quite literally on Sundays with students wanting to have that study and that in-library experience during the pandemic and that momentum has carried on. So there was a number of lessons for that. It was really designed, we've been, the Reach Out service has been designed for high-volume in-person interaction in that hub. They've also been able to use their experience and work there while there was a limited campus experience. There's a lot of technology behind that as well. So although it is very much a face-to-face focused service in the building, we have a knowledge base. We use Infanti, they have tablets, they will help and support the students with what they're actually looking at and supporting it doing and they're really learning again to blend the best of the virtual and the physical and what we are actually delivering. So we know that something's worked really well when we are doing things as course graduates, reaching out to tutorials, other things that you'll perhaps better in a more face-to-face scenario. And just to reinforce again, that visibility piece is absolutely critical. Being able to have someone that the students can go to, we employ a number of students as part of the Reach Out team was a lot of collegiality and a lot of clear experience around part of that. So I really just want to finish with where we are kind of moving forward in terms of information services and particularly focusing on our modern working group and this is looking at the advice and guidance for the move to hybrid working. I think hybrid working is very clearly very much a journey. It's a forum and a focus for this group to actually share ideas across the directorates and to agree more of our operating principles and as the challenging job of continuing to look at how we build on the best agile technology and the best kit as we move towards that approach of one single device which can be used and across a number of different scenarios. So again, we are revisiting a staff survey and an audit. A couple of my teams are part of some of the pilot within this in terms of how we can really effectively move them to kind of hybrid working. And again, it's very clear that that is not just about technology. It's about the technology, it's about the space and it's also about the staff themselves. Where we can model different kind of staff personas to fit what are some of the particular needs. Staff maybe sometimes need to be more agile between building on campus rather than necessarily carrying a laptop backwards and forwards from home to work. And as I say, we have teams moving into the new office space which we have in Tay House and starting to look at scope there, moving away from some of the fixed desktop models which we have where it's appropriate to a much more agile scenario. That mix of lockers, that mix of docking stations and USBC connectors and so on. So again, we don't have all of the answers but a thousand mile journey does start with that single step as our Chinese philosopher friend Lao Tzu once said, we've made more than a few single steps in our journey but we have that scope to continue to work collaboratively and collegially to look at how we can best further unlock the potential and the opportunities for our staff and our students to make hybrids working a success. Thanks very much for your time this afternoon. William, thank you. That's a great session and really interesting to hear that you had cues into your buildings that students keen to actually come back into study spaces. I know, whilst that might have provided us with some challenges over the last few months as the COVID cases remain quite stably high. I think it's also been very reassuring really that students have come back to us after this very uncertain period really and really, as you say, the library continues to be seen as a really safe and secure place for them to come and work and study. Could I ask our other speakers to switch their cameras back on at this point? We have probably about 15 minutes in which we can take some questions. Thank you to everyone who's submitted some questions through to us this afternoon as well. I'm going to start going back to the first session that you presented for us this afternoon and we've got a question from Annalena who has asked about the way you're organised in actually internally and getting feedback into your digital and physical spaces from students and what she's asking are there staff who are dedicated to carrying out user experience research at your institution? Thank you, it's a really good question. So in terms of how we're structured, it depends really on the types of projects and initiatives. But for any estates or library-led projects, we do have within library services a customer service team and the customer service team is supported by a customer services coordinator who helps to facilitate focus groups and arrange surveys and plan activities, etc. We also have within library operations, so the unit that I lead in the library, a facilities and projects team who liaise with architectural teams and design teams and they facilitate sessions for groups of student users with design teams on specific projects. We also have included students on governance groups. So for instance, the Cruciform Hub, which opened back in 2014 or the Student Centre, which opened in 2019, had student sabbatical officers representing the student body on the project board for each project. And for large estates projects, we also have undertaken large-scale surveys or workshops, sometimes calling on the services of external consultants. So for instance, we had Alexi Marmot associates conduct a survey for the Student Centre's briefing exercise back in 2012 and obviously Alexi Marmot is associated with UCL in that she's a professor there, but the survey was conducted through her consultancy service. In terms of student feedback on priorities which aren't part of space projects initiated by estates or the library, we have termally meetings between the student union sabbatical officers and the library senior management team members. And there's also a UCL, a scheme called UCL Changemakers which allows students to work with staff in departments and faculties on specific projects. And the Changemakers Scheme provides a small amount of seed funding for students to spend time exploring a particular pain point and to find solutions to that. So there are a number of internal mechanisms to enable feedback to be brought in but we don't have specifically dedicated staff for carrying out UX research. The way that is done is either through our network of customer service champions across our family of libraries at UCL library services who do occasionally carry out UX research for their sites. But we are also, and this was really what I was getting at in the presentation, we're also trying to leverage academic and student interests. So getting students based in departments to come in and conduct research in library sites. And I think that's probably the more viable and sustainable long-term approach that we'll pursue. And recently, I mean, a few weeks ago, we received an approach from a PhD student who was eager to look into what characteristics of physical library spaces and make them more or less desirable to students. And so if we can get some funding to support that piece of work, it's something which we could continue at and do in the long-term. It certainly sounds like an interesting project. I'm sure there'd be interested readers across the country and that one as well. Sandra and Olivia, I wonder if I could come to you with a question next as well. What Michael Williams is asking is it sounds as though you were already working in a more agile way perhaps than standard when before the pandemic. And he's interested to hear more about how you achieved an agile working culture for those of us who are actually much closer to the start of that particular change. Okay, I think I can take that one. Thanks, Michael, for the question. The, in terms of agile working, I think before the pandemic, it was very much a way we wanted to go. So most staff had laptops, most had the concept that we were to move around and that was a good way of working and a more modern way of working. I think in practical terms, it was more successful with some staff than with others. And for some, it was probably that their laptop was really just there, came to the same space every day, turn their laptop on and just occasionally took it places. So I think that, so in a way, we set the culture before the pandemic, but actually the practicalities for all library staff is much more widespread now and the understanding of the value of it because we've worked from home in that way. So I think it was very useful in assessing the groundwork early on. The other thing we've found probably has precipitated a kind of increase in this way of working is the pressure on space with the closure of our North Campus. So it meant that teams couldn't go back to where they were working. So we had to displace some teams within the main library so that the collection-based teams could work in those spaces or the customer services teams, those teams who were on campus throughout. So those who needed actual physical spaces displaced other teams and that also generated a kind of cultural shift as well in that there was pressure on the other spaces to move around and the clear desk policy, it's absolutely working. Everybody has removed all personal items so you don't feel you're invading somebody else's space. And I think that's been quite important as well. Yes, that's really is the constant battle, isn't it, between juggling space and increasing, either increasing student numbers or increasing staff numbers as well sometimes. Always a tricky one to do. I've got to, can I stay with you, Sandra, for another question, which is asking about, this is from Isabel Hollowayt, how you support line managers managing staff and particularly perhaps managing performance when they're working in dispersed places. I think I was going to take this one actually. So, yeah, I mean, I'd come back to really, back to actually our library charter in terms of the introduction of hybrid is one of the first things we talked about was trust. And actually that is how we've approached this very much from a trust perspective. And so the hope is that's reciprocated you're not dealing constantly with any issues of performance. However, obviously we all know this happens. I think in terms of the ways of working and the way we've established the use of Microsoft Teams whilst working remotely, making sure that teams were having daily check-ins, weekly meetings, check-ins with staff, that that constant availability or contact with managers was still there no matter where you're based. And actually that's not, there's no need necessary for that to be physical. And I think establishing that way has moved towards that. In terms of supporting our staff, we do have a staff management network and as I say we would rerun drop-ins for those staff. We continue to have topical discussions and drop-ins to share good practice and to discuss these sort of experiences where people are having issues and we try to take a collegiate approach to supporting each other in how you might tackle that. But I would say it's something to date that it's not proving to be an issue. We will see as time moves on though, I think. Thanks, Olivia. Can we stay with you and Sandra as well for another question that we have from Jane Cook, which is around different grades of staff and different types of work and whether everyone in the library is actually kind of moving around when they're in the building or is it mainly for those who are working remotely part of the time? I can start with this. So the concept is there for all staff but some staff do have designated spaces. So those ones, like I say, working with physical collections. But that's not to say they can't work elsewhere in the library. So although they have, unusually they will have a home base, they can still move around. So we want all staff to feel part of the hybrid project even if you're predominantly on campus. So this is something we've discussed a lot with our staff to make sure that the opportunities are there for everybody to work in a different way, where possible, where service needs allow. Right, thank you, Sandra. Could I just add a little bit to that? I was just to say, yeah, it was just really to say, I think one of the other things when we looked at the hybrid charters and looked at categories was really focusing on activity rather than role in terms of where we looked at people's categories and that hybrid category was not necessarily based on a specific role, it was on the activities you might undertake as part of that role. And therefore you may have a team of mixed people with different categories and really thinking about activity approaches to it rather than I say a role focused approach. Thank you. Thanks, that's really interesting. I'm going to throw this one open to all of you. It's again another question. So William, it may be something you would like to come in on this one. Jeremy Opton has asked or said that technical staff have been some of the hardest to persuade back to campus because they feel they can do 100% of their work at home and have you found you've delivered the fact that you've actually got nicer spaces, well-designed spaces for them? Is that a kind of lure back to campus for them if you've been able to provide that? Have there been particular blocks with certain staff do you think that you've faced more than others perhaps? Well, I would comment that I think one of the kind of challenges there perhaps less so around the space is just the part of the kind of opportunity to do that sort of collaboration and that training that we'll kind of face to face. So we've looked at scenarios where for instance you can have sort of particular teams days. So there will be days where teams can decide, this is the day that we will all particularly going to be together, that would be the day that we can still have that face-to-face meeting. Again, I'm mindful we have had teams where, I'm sure like everyone, teams have had new members of staff join, new members of staff kind of leave, particularly where new members of staff have joined. Until recently, you've probably been in a scenario where sometimes they've not actually met face to face depending on what that situation has been. Talking with IT colleagues or with other colleagues, I think screening and some of that kind of work can be really good driver for more of that face-to-face because sometimes it's things that we might be able to do which we did by necessity over Zoom or over teams. It's actually many cases just much more straightforward if you've got somebody sitting down next to you or within a socially distanced space next to you, around all of that. So it's really about those kind of activities. And I think for a number of our IT colleagues as well, there's usually been kind of certainly more of the IT in its spectrum when they've been in our building. More of that has also been to do with some of the work that they've wanted to do either in terms of hardware or kind of fit for some of the setup in terms of our colleagues come in because it's more straightforward to do some of the upgrades, some of the other things that you want to do from your on-campus rather than just trying to do that completely remotely. So I think there's a spectrum of reasons. But again, it is coming back to some of that blend because one of the things that we don't want to throw out with the backwater is when you can now suddenly have a much more flexible scenario where people could also remotely from home do upgrades which perhaps we've done with one of our vendors who is in a completely different time zone so that we're actually able to do things now from home quite late in the evening or early morning as we've had done in some of our systems in giving us that flexibility and that benefit around some of that as well. It's really interesting, William. Yeah, I think that picks up again on different experiences. Certainly as somebody who joined a team during the last few months, it's quite challenging for me now to be seeing colleagues in the building who are partly masked up now and trying to identify them and match them with the people I've been used to interacting online. We're coming up very close to time, but we have one question left which takes me back to Ben again. So Ben, if you could maybe kind of keep your answer fairly brief for this one. We've got Diane Job asking whether you facilitate virtual or physical shut-up and work sessions for PGRs. I'm not entirely sure what shut-up and work sessions are, but also wondering about the training you provide for the library staff who are actually present in the virtual study space as well. Okay, thanks. Yeah, we did host a series of virtual Friday sessions for postgraduate research students where they could get their heads down and study together at the request of a group of students at the Institute of Education. And those were helpful for that particular cohort, but we've not had demand from students this year. We're not running them as a regular feature. To answer the question about training from Diane, the initial session, there was training delivered by ISD on opening and closing the Zoom rooms and on etiquette for the spaces. There was about a two-hour session and then team leaders cascaded that training to their teams. We've got FAQs for the staff who manage the rooms and there's a UCL netiquette. Probably other institutions have got something like that. So staff had something that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel. We could just say these are the behaviors that are tolerated and expected in UCL spaces. And if anything moved away from that, then we had some ways of booting students. But happily, students have been very well behaved in the virtual learning spaces when they've used them. So we've had to invoke any disciplinary actions or anything. That's really nice to hear. And certainly, I think we probably all feel it's been a very challenging two years for young people, really. I know we've focused a lot on older people in the risks that the pandemic has posed to them. But I think we've felt very strongly that our students who've all come back onto campus at Southampton back in October, their behavior has been terrific, really, considering everything that they've had to take in their stride this last couple of years.