 Should we start? Okay. I think we should start. Okay, so let me share my screen. I'm also, I'm sharing the link to our slides in the chat just because I know that the screen is kind of small. So just in case you wanna see them, it's there, but I will go ahead and get started. Okay, so hello everyone, and thank you for coming to our presentation today. We'll be talking about the theoretical framework of service science and how it can relate to alumni university library relations in specific regards to open access electronic theses and dissertations. If you think of questions as we talk, please enter them in the Q&A chat section and we should have time at the end to answer a couple of them. So, but before we get started, we wanted to introduce ourselves. My name is Michelle Gibney and I am the head of publishing and scholarship support at the University of the Pacific. My fancy title means I oversee the IR, the OER program and scholarly communications on campus. And I also used to work at NSU with Jamie. And my name is Jamie Goldman and I am the lead librarian at the Nova Southeastern University Oceanographic Campus Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I work with our graduate students in submitting and publishing their capstone theses and dissertations to our IR and ProQuest. And I'm also the ProQuest administrator for our university. Today's presentation will include results from an alumni survey conducted at University of the Pacific, preliminary results from an abbreviated alumni survey conducted at Nova Southeastern University as well as a brief history of the previous surveys, hopes for the future and the theoretical grounding of this work in service science and the co-creation of value. So in 2017, we embarked upon a project to compare our institutional transitions from print to electronic theses and dissertations and the impact that may have on the alumni authors. Our two universities on opposite coasts, Florida and California, are both private not-for-profit universities with doctoral programs. So I could spend our entire presentation today summarizing our poster presented from the 2017 E.T.D. symposium, but in the interest of time, I will provide a brief overview and share some results later in our presentation. I'll also refer you to our friendly URL that we will post in the chat as well for more information on this past presentation. So this poster shared the results from an E.T.D. Administrator survey, an alumni survey and statistics on our individual digitization projects at our institutions. The alumni survey conducted solely at NSU due to the longevity of our digitization process was of primary interest in the outcomes. So questions that we were assessing included how can the digitization of a print thesis or dissertation affect the alumni author? How does it improve or prove detrimental to job or academic goals? How can it influence the research of others? As we only surveyed one population at NSU at the time, we wanted to revisit the survey idea and create a more robust survey and administer it to all of NSU and University of the Pacific alumni. And the questions then coalesced to form the topic of this updated presentation on co-creating value in theses and dissertation digitization. So but before we get into the data, we wanted to give a brief overview of service science and what it means. So this is a partial literature review list of titles showing the progression of service science. Well, it can be traced back to the mid-18th century in Adam Smith, who was an economist and philosopher. It really picked up steam in the 2000s. Originally, it focused on the service economy, so more business and retail services oriented. In 2009, a new journal was launched called Service Science, wherein the editor in chief, Jim Spora, pens the opening editorial column. Stating that service science had emerged to define an expanding world forged of global connections and integrated systems. Specifically, he claimed that service science is meant to provide a means to study the value of co-creation phenomena. So in terms of the university and the library and the graduate students, the co-creation of value occurs in exchange and in use. So picture it as the graduate student creating a work and the university hosting the work, it's an exchange. So it creates value in that the student created something unique in their original research and the library is providing a hosting site for it in their IR. So value in use comes about once the ETD is live, the student, now alumni, will receive authored readership reports and be able to track use of their research as it is discovered by researchers. In addition, value in use is created by others beyond the university, the library and the student as well. So think of the original exchange value, the ETD being posted as a single pebble thrown in a pool and the use is an expanding circle of ripples in the co-creation of value between the provider which is the library and the customer, the alumni. The use value is not intrinsically tied to the original customer. Additional customers are affected at each ripple in the water. Some of those that are easily identifiable are external researchers and prospective students for the institution. The convenience of the research work being made available online affects researchers working on similar topics and their use expands the ETD's reach and consequently it's value in use. It is being doubled and tripled infinitely and the same can be said for prospective students researching potential universities and programs and advisors. Previous research can affect their decisions for good or ill which also falls under a value in use scenario. So let's dig into the data and discuss the results from the surveys going back to 2017. So starting with the poster session that I discussed earlier, NSU administered a small department specific survey in 2017 to assess the impact of ETD's on alumni after graduation. After working to design a more robust and IRB approved survey as a follow-up University of the Pacific was able to send out the survey to all alumni in the fall of 2019 in a follow-up in 2020 with a more targeted alumni outreach effort to drum up more responses. NSU was also a part of the IRB approved survey of 2019, 2020 but in working with the NSU Office of Alumni Relations and due to the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to hold off on sending it out to the alumni as they focused on other more critical outreach initiatives. After continued communication with the NSU Office of Alumni Relations they did agree to add one of the survey questions to a broader alumni survey that went out in the spring of this year. And we left the next survey wave open in hopes that the full IRB survey will be administered to the University of the Pacific alumni that was administered to the University of the Pacific alumni can be sent out to the NSU alumni population within the next year. So here are the results from the 2017 NSU alumni survey sent out to the Oceanographic Campus alumni and is seen on the poster shared earlier in our presentation. So we received 19 responses out of 129 alumni contacted which is about a 15% response rate. 84% of the respondents graduated between 2000 and 2017. 79% reported working in a career related to their degree and 10% had posted a link on their online CB or academic social network to their ETD. And the pie chart that you see shows how having their ETD online affected them after graduation. So the highly rated section of nine to 10 stars was 15% of the responses. 21% rated highly at seven and eight stars and 53% rated moderately at five to six stars. And luckily nobody would zero percent that was four stars or under, so no zero to four stars. And we did receive some text responses from the survey as well. One quote was that they found it interesting how many times their paper had been downloaded and where it was downloaded from referring to the readership reports. And another alumni called this an indispensable and efficient tool for showcasing their graduate work to a large audience. And they noted that they could not have reached as many people without having their work in the repository. Okay, as Jamie mentioned, Pacific completed two iterations of the same survey in 2019 and 2020. In the 2019 attempt, the survey was sent out by the Alumni Relations Department in November as part of their newsletter to all graduate students. I received a grand total of 14 responses from this survey which was highly disheartening. It's possible that people might just have had other things on their mind as we headed into the holiday season and then obviously into COVID season. But I eventually decided I couldn't let the low response stop me. And I pulled a list of all the graduate students from 2017 to 2020 that I had email addresses for in the IR to email in September of 2020. So that was 224 individual email addresses. And that got a total of 42 responses which brought me up to a grand total of 66 responses for the survey. It's still not stellar numbers but it's enough to make generalizations with. So you can see a lot of this is similar to the results Jamie got in 2017 with her 19 alumni responses. The majority of my responses like hers graduated after 2000. This could be because it's more likely we still had working email addresses or it's just that they were more invested in caring about their ETD still. So it was more recent for them. For the 18% of responses I got that graduated pre 2000 most of them did not even seem to know that their ETDs were online in RIR based on their responses. So mine had a higher percentage of working in their degree field as a career than Jamie's but I was also surveying more degrees than Jamie who in 2017 had sent it to just oceanographic students. Mine went out to a multitude of different kinds of fields because I was doing it to all graduate students. And then I also had a higher percentage of alumni who checked off that they were sharing a link to their ETD on an online academic social networking channel or sorry, online CV are an academic social networking channel. And this might be because I had more responses from 2017 to 2020 than hers in online CVs like LinkedIn and academic social networks like ResearchGate or Google Scholar are more of a big deal in the last couple of years and use more frequently by those that are job hunting. And then the pie chart is very similar to Jamie's. We did get a couple of one to two star radians without explanation. So I'm not sure how that it might have been highly negative impact for them but the majority of the responses was 64.3% were neutral. Some were positive at 17.9% and then highly positive at 16.1% which is more of what we wanted to see obviously. And then we also got responses to a question the follow-up question to the on a scale of one to 10 how has it impacted you? The follow-up question was, can you share any details on that impact? How have you experienced the impact? And while multiple people said something along the same lines as alum number three on this of how they didn't experience anything, there were also several instances where a positive impact was shared such as expanding future research, getting a full ride PhD program and receiving accolades from peers. So after talking with our office of alumni relations for almost a year about the same IRB approved joint survey from our two institutions, I was able to tag on to a short NSU alumni survey that went out in the spring of 2021. I had to pick one question from our longer survey and wait for the results and it actually ended up being a mashup of two of the questions. And 24% of the respondents who took the survey were graduate students who had published their thesis or dissertation somewhere. So the question that we were able to ask was if your NSU thesis dissertation is published online either via NSU works or ProQuest dissertations and theses global database, how has having your thesis or dissertation online affected you post graduation? So those who published and answered this question 46% noted a positive impact, 54% noted a neutral or no impact and this could also include people who may not have answered the question because they don't believe they required it and less than 1% noted a negative impact. So unfortunately with just this one question the results left me with more questions than answers. So I do hope to be able to still administer the full survey via the alumni office soon. And this slide shows the ETD downloads of over 5,000 by location globally with NSU represented by the darker blue dots and University of the Pacific by the lighter blue dots. And this shows the global ripple effects the ETDs from our institutions have in the co-creation of value. It is the hope at both institutions that the co-creation of value in this project will advance alumni relations with their alma mater and increase use and reuse of the research by additional parties. Furthering the scholarly communication lifecycle and involving disciplinary knowledge. From here, we hope to reach more alumni from both institutions, especially NSU with our survey and possibly partner with other institutions to compare findings as well. And we both have anecdotes demonstrating the impacts from our alumni. My library was contacted by a peer reviewer in the final stages of approving an alumni's first peer review publication in a scientific journal. As the article mentioned their master's thesis work and cited it having an accessible open access online should the final stages of peer review were passed. Both the reviewer and the alumni informed us that without their ETD digitally available, the publication would not have made it through the peer review process. And then one of our 2018 graduates wrote his thesis on the experiences of black Americans in visiting national parks. And during the summer of 2020, due to the reckoning of social justice and the upswing in the Black Lives Matter movement, his thesis became very popular and was cited in multiple news articles. It was used in social media posts and he was invited to give quotes and presentations. My library invited him to give one of those presentations during our library research talks, which was really amazing. And he was then also invited by Pacific's Graduate School to give a presentation during their research lecture series for current graduate students as well. So you can see the use value of his thesis was astounding and led to us co-creating new moments of exchange value. As of course, both of those presentations were recorded are now available in RIR. So as Jamie mentioned, we are hoping to continue this research due to forces outside of our control, namely COVID-19 and some alumni relation office things. We have yet to perform a survey at the same time or the same survey. However, we are hoping that perhaps next year are the following, this will change and we'll be able to jointly survey our alumni comprehensively. We would also be interested in speaking with other institutions who might wanna take part in the survey as well in the interests of gathering and additional data. So if anyone here is intrigued by that, please feel free to follow up with us. Our email addresses are on this slide and we will now any answer questions that might have come in the Q&A box. And so there is one from Kayla. So how did you get the email addresses for the alumni for the surveys? So for the one that went out from the alumni relations office, they have access to email addresses for all alumni. And then for the one that I sent specifically for the 2017 to 2020 graduate students, the email addresses are in our IR because when the students submit to ProQuest, they enter in their email address and then I get a data dump basically from ProQuest and have all of their contact information in that. So I just pulled those from the IR by creating a spreadsheet of all of the work in the IR and then just used the column that had the email addresses. So that's what I did. And I think Jamie did something similar like she mostly had the alumni relations office give her the email addresses. Yeah, so same thing, the bigger survey that they sent out, I never saw the email address. They have a big list there. And then we also use the IR download of the contact information, but we also contacted the alumni office and found out that a lot of the information's very out of date. They had multiple addresses on file, multiple emails. So we actually helped them clean up their database as well. But this is actually why we encourage our students when they submit their thesis or dissertation to our IR not to use their university email address because there were years that they didn't get to keep it then there were years that they could. So we actually tell them to use a personal email address for the readership reports that they received from our system and for future contact. So just food for thought when working with students. And we did also in the big survey, like we had a question that was, are you not receiving the author readership reports that are sent out automatically? We both have the digital comments, the press IR platform. So we asked if they didn't receive those and if they want to, they can send us an updated email address. So I did actually get a couple of responses in the survey that asked me to update their email address so that they would get those. And I shared those with the alumni relations department so that they would have updated emails too. So yes, that, this is that question. Were there any other questions that we can answer? And like we said in our presentation, if you guys are interested, we did post some links in the chat that get to see you to more information about what we talked about today and feel free to reach out to us if you're interested in more information or partnering on our survey in the future. Thank you, Jessica. Or Jessa, sorry, I came up for you. All right, and I guess if no one has any other questions, we will let you go a minute early. Thank you again for coming. Thanks, everybody.