CNI Fall 2020 Virtual Membership Meeting

The University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries planned a full website migration during the Spring of 2020. This move involved moving the library website and content from an old content management system, with dated design and limited responsiveness to WordPress. This process involved the Library Technology Services, Web Unit, and also included over 60 web editors from around the libraries. Just as the WordPress training had started and the initial migration activities were initiated the library staff were all moved to working remotely due to COVID. This project briefing will focus on the efforts to keep this large project moving, while needing to be highly flexible and adapt to the changing pandemic situation. From adapting training needs, to using new project communication tool sets, the project was able to keep progress moving towards completion.

https://uflib.ufl.edu

Sourcery, in its conception, is a sharing economy app designed to help researchers access not-yet-digitized documents held within archives and special collections. Developed by Greenhouse Studios at the University of Connecticut with significant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sourcery works by connecting researchers in need of scans of remotely located documents to registered users located near the archive where the document is located. When a researcher submits a request, a user retrieves the document, scans the requested pages, and then sends the scans back to the requester through the app. During the COVID-19 crisis, however, many archives remain closed to the public and travel and social interaction is restricted. The need for remote access is greater than ever, but so are the challenges involved in providing it. In an attempt to meet some of these challenges, the Sourcery team has begun working directly with archival institutions to develop an institutional version of Sourcery that allows researchers to place scan requests directly with the archive. In addition to providing researchers with a convenient, single-login interface for placing remote requests across multiple institutions, input from archivists will help ensure that the institutional version of Sourcery streamlines document scanning and provision workflows and allows for the efficient processing and aggregation of small-dollar transactions on the institution’s behalf.

sourceryapp.org

In support of the University of Texas Austin's mission to provide captions and transcription for all remote course videos, the University of Texas at Austin Libraries Information Technology group partnered with the University Captioning and Transcription Service to develop a cloud-based automated transcription tool utilizing Amazon Web Services’ speech-to-text API. The tool represents an expansion of traditional manual efforts to create transcripts and closed captions. The service manager will discuss details around tool itself, the process of creating it, and the vision for future enhancements.

https://captioning.lib.utexas.edu/
https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/
https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/captioning/services/

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted regular campus operations at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in March 2020, the UT Libraries had to quickly adapt to providing geographic information system (GIS) services to meet the needs of students, faculty, and staff who were suddenly working from off campus. Core GIS services like research support consultations, guest lectures, and workshops which had traditionally been provided via live, in-person interactions required particularly significant transformations. While there was initial concern that changes to established procedures might negatively impact GIS services, in many cases the opposite actually proved true – when forced to explore new ways of doing things, the UT Libraries ended up discovering previously hidden efficiencies and opportunities. Among these discoveries were newfound avenues of virtual collaboration via Zoom meetings, new sources of data about our services which could be used for assessment purposes, and attendance numbers for virtual events that surpassed expectations. While there have been unexpected benefits of adjusting to a virtual model of providing GIS services there are still challenges to overcome and questions about the future format of GIS services that need to be resolved. This project brief will provide an overview of the ways in which the UT Libraries adapted GIS services to meet the needs of the university community, the positive outcomes that have resulted from these changes, the difficulties that are still being dealt with, and the work that is underway to further improve services and prepare for a post-pandemic future.

Slides: https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Shensky__Adapting_Library_GIS_f20.pdf

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted so much about our lives, work practices, and personal commitments. For those of us at the UCLA Library working to preserve cultural heritage globally and construct digital libraries that openly share knowledge, we are lucky, knowing that our work remains vital in these times. In fact, the need for digital access to primary source collections is more important than ever as researchers, teachers, students, and community members are at home, unable to travel and access libraries, archives, museums and their collections. Moreover, COVID adds to the already precarious environmental, political, and historic conditions of archival collections; intervention feels more urgent. While the UCLA Library has been working to create Open Access collections through post-custodial partnerships for the past decade, we have been forced to reimagine parts of this work in the time of coronavirus. This Project Briefing will offer an update on two UCLA Library Projects—the Modern Endangered Archives Program and the Sinai Library Digitization Project. Both efforts connect the UCLA Library with repositories, libraries, and unique collections around the world and rely on UCLA expertise and infrastructure to preserve at-risk materials. During the pandemic, our team has continued to support projects by navigating a range of challenges—from safeguarding the health of aged monks at Mt. Sinai to brainstorming shipping routes that will allow project teams to secure necessary materials such as cameras, scanners, and acid-free file folders. Our presentation will share strategies for sustaining relationships, leveraging resources from a large campus, addressing logistical and technical challenges, and adapting to the ever changing landscape of the new work environment.

https://meap.library.ucla.edu/
https://www.library.ucla.edu/partnerships

Slides: https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Deblinger_OA-during-COVID-f20.pdf

This presentation will introduce the evolution of the Johns Hopkins University global COVID-19 dashboard. From an unassuming side project started by a graduate student and their faculty advisor, to a vital global resource reaching millions of viewers per day, the JHU global COVID-19 dashboard reflects a trend towards public projects in higher education. The demands for supporting such a large-scale project with international impact transformed how the university, and in particular the library, has come to approach and manage such projects in collaboration with both internal and external partners. This presentation will detail the work of the JHU Sheridan Libraries, particularly in the early months of the pandemic, in managing the global COVID-19 dashboard’s underlying infrastructure and developing a framework for future public projects. The presentation will share lessons learned for libraries planning to engage in similar projects and provoke conversation about the role of libraries in public research.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ 
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

When Marygrove College closed in 2019, a central question for the Board of Trustees was “What will happen to the library?” Serving its local community in Detroit since 1905, Marygrove College had launched the nation’s first Masters degree in social justice and had curated a collection to support the program, along with all of the other degrees offered by the college. After considering various options, the administration decided to donate the entire library to the Internet Archive so that the full collection could remain intact and be digitized, preserved, and made available to students all over the world through controlled digital lending. In this panel discussion you’ll hear from Dr. Elizabeth Burns, president of Marygrove College, Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, and Michelle Wu, the visionary leader whose scholarship led to controlled digital lending, as they discuss how the 70,000-volume library has been preserved and made available online at https://archive.org/details/marygrovecollege.

Safety precautions put in place to address the pandemic on campuses have resulted in the removal or reduction of access to lab computing resources, connectivity, and licensed software (in University of Texas libraries' case, titles such as Matlab, Adobe Creative Cloud, NVivo). Concurrently, coursework has moved almost exclusively online, many times without equivalent computing support for the curriculum in place. This discussion will explore the attempts to address this need at a Tier 1 institution and the solution selected, Apache Guacamole. The final product allowed us to provide access to both Macs and PCs, as well as meet our university’s requirements for single sign-on and multifactor authentication. We will discuss our selection process, solutions that were trialed but ultimately not selected, use metrics, user adoption/input, and how we see the service evolving over time. Specific attention will focus on evaluation of these solutions based on cost effectiveness, security, maintainability and low barriers of entry given the short runway the pandemic allowed to roll out an enterprise service.

https://labs.lib.utexas.edu/

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) was founded in 2013 with a mission to ensure equitable access to the nation’s cultural heritage. In 2019, DPLA developed a new strategy that emphasized our commitment to empowering institutions and communities that have been historically marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented and promoting diverse and inclusive collections and stories. As part of this work, in September 2020, DPLA  launched the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection, a collaborative project that provides access to 200,000+ archival materials that help tell the story of the critical role Black women played, and continue to play, in the voting rights and civil rights movements. In order to address the inclusion of harmful language in collection metadata, the DPLA Metadata Working Group created a Harmful Language Statement to explain the work librarians and archivists must do to balance the preservation of the history of people who have experienced trauma and harm with sensitivity in how it is presented to users. In addition, in the summer of 2020, the DPLA Network Council drafted and approved a statement on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access, and Social Justice (IDEAS) to commit DPLA contributing institutions to address “deficits in the ways our profession has documented Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, the LGBTQ community, and others whose voices have been drowned out by those with more power or organizational standing.”  In this session, DPLA community manager Shaneé Yvette Murrain and former DPLA network council chair Ann Hanlon, Head, Digital Collections and Initiatives and Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee will discuss opportunities, challenges, and learnings encountered during the creation of the IDEAS Statement and the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection, as well as outlining next steps for DPLA and member institutions in creating more diverse and equitable collections, and anticipated challenges as this work continues.

Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection: BlackWomensSuffrage.org
IDEAS Statement: https://pro.dp.la/hubs/dpla-membership-ideas-statement 
Harmful Language Statement: https://blackwomenssuffrage.dp.la/harmful-language-statement

This past spring, Ithaka S+R released the results of our U.S. Library Survey 2019 - fielded just months before the COVID-19 outbreak - with the CNI community. Since then, the pandemic has greatly changed how the higher education sector supports research, teaching, and learning at a distance, under extraordinarily complicated and difficult circumstances. How has the pandemic changed the strategies and priorities of academic library leaders? What approaches have leaders taken to balance institutional priorities, financial constraints, and staff physical and psychological safety? In the face of these challenges, we fielded a special edition of our ongoing library director series to capture the strategies library leaders have adopted during the crisis. We heard from 43% of library leaders nationally on their approaches to budgeting and planning, staffing, collections, and digital and physical services and space. Comparisons with previous survey cycles will illustrate shifts in leadership practices and perspectives as libraries worked through the challenges of the pandemic. Join Jennifer K. Frederick and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg as we discuss key findings for the first time in conjunction with the Fall 2020 CNI meeting.

https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/transforming-library-leadership-strategy-in-a-time-of-crisis/

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped over 50 inches of rain on Houston, causing approximately 100 deaths and $125 billion in damage. Research indicates that Harvey’s impact was worsened by climate change. More recently wildfires, floods, and droughts - as well as concerted action by climate activists - have demonstrated the urgency of fighting climate change. The library community is beginning to take action; for example, the American Library Association (ALA) recently adopted sustainability as a core value and launched the “Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change” grant program. Rice University’s Fondren Library is one of five academic libraries to have won this grant. Fondren’s core grant-funded activities include organizing a panel discussion featuring four Houston women at the forefront of climate justice work, screening a documentary on queer responses to climate change, becoming a climate resilience hub, and developing a workshop for middle school students focused on understanding air quality data in their neighborhood, a frontline community. The grant is part of a broader series of sustainability initiatives at Fondren, including the development of a sustainability plan, the formation of a staff “Green Team,” and the appointment of a student “eco-rep.” This interactive presentation will examine how and why academic libraries should prioritize sustainability initiatives, using Fondren’s experiences as a model for community and student engagement around climate change. Participants will then engage in discussion about how the library community can come together to fight climate change.

https://library.rice.edu/sustainability

Slides: https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Spiro-Fitzpatrick_ClimateChange_f20.pdf

Our collective behavior over the past 7 months has contributed to saving thousands of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Our ability to have the fortitude and vision to build upon the paradigm shifts of how we work, interact with each other and our communities, and wise and intentional use of technology in the next few years has the potential to save millions of lives with even greater threats such as climate change and other global challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Cincinnati libraries (UCL) looked at ways to define, pivot and thrive within the significant challenges of COVID-19.  By first focusing on how we could work collaboratively with UCL faculty and staff, UCL was able to develop a comprehensive plan that ensured that we continued to provide excellent service that our faculty, students, staff, and community members came to rely upon during the pandemic while placing the health and safety of our library and broader university community as the top priority.  Simultaneously, UCL developed strategies by which we could respond to real-time challenges and concerns while operating in an environment fraught with both uncertainty and opportunity.  This strategy was focused towards the future and building a solid foundation of agile and collaborative decision-making not possible before March 2020.  While all libraries have been facing the same threat with the same lack of models to draw upon, UCL approached this response practically, collaboratively, and with wide open eyes to how we could identify and build upon the opportunities so necessary in order to face greater challenges we will certainly face in our lifetimes.  We will discuss how libraries can apply our shared COVID response experiences to survive, thrive, and move forward to face the certain threats of imminent enrollment decline, significant budget cuts, and more challenging issues such as climate change.

As highlighted in the CNI Program Plan for 2019-2020, the acquisition and creation of instructional materials is of primary concern for academic libraries. OER are held up as a major solution, and this is the direction the University of Waterloo Library undertook with the development of the Library’s Online Learning Object Repository (OLOR), an open-access repository of Library asynchronous learning objects. COVID-19 shifted the locus of university instruction from the physical campus to virtual spaces: a situation where we were able to showcase instructional resilience by prioritizing the launching of the OLOR. In this project briefing, we will explore the challenges and successes we have had in moving forward with the OLOR at the center of our learning and teaching strategy, from inception pre-pandemic and soliciting buy-in from stakeholders and colleagues, through the launch of the repository to the continuing efforts to develop learning materials of use and interest to faculty, staff, and students across the University of Waterloo community.

https://lib.uwaterloo.ca/online_learning/