Grants Are Temporary but Data Stewardship Is Not: Sustainability of the Data Curation Network

00:00 - Why don’t we go ahead and go live and start letting people in.

00:31 - where you need the waiting room music. Yeah, really.

00:35 - Welcome to this session music. Yes. Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us today we will get started in, probably about minute.

00:57 - Your you’re rightly so we need we need some theme music that we can play at the opening to these Star Wars.

01:05 - Great. Thanks for joining us, everyone, we will be getting started very shortly.

01:27 - All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Welcome all thanks for joining us.

01:33 - I’m Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI and you’ve reached cn eyes spring 2021 virtual meeting.

01:43 - This is the first day of our synchronous sessions.

01:48 - We will be doing synchronous sessions scattered throughout this week and next week we will have some plenary synchronous sessions. I do just want to remind you that we have also released a rich set of pre recorded sessions, which are an integral part of this meeting we’re relying considerably more heavily on on demand sessions. This week so please take advantage of those as your time permits, there’s a lot of really good material in there.

02:25 - I want to note that this session is being recorded and we will be making it publicly available after the.

02:35 - After the meeting is concluded. A couple of quick mechanical things. there is a chat please feel free to use it.

02:46 - And there is also a q amp a tool at the bottom of your screen.

02:51 - Please feel free to put questions in at any point, as they occur to you, we will address all the questions after the presentations are complete, Diane golden Burkhardt from CNI will be men and moderate those questions.

03:10 - I would note we also have the capability during the questions if you want to pose a question by audio you can raise your hands and we can enable your, your, your audio.

03:28 - There is a closed caption transcript available and please avail yourself of that if it’s helpful to you.

03:38 - I think those are all of the mechanical things I needed to mention.

03:44 - So let me move on to introduce this topic and I’m really delighted that we have this topic on the agenda, and Lisa and Heidi with us.

03:57 - Heidi incur is from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, I always seem to want to say Champaign Urbana, and Lisa Johnston is from the University of Minnesota.

04:14 - They are both key movers in the data curation network which is a really, to my mind, extremely strategic effort that has been running for a number of years in sort of experimental mode with support from the Sloan Foundation.

04:37 - It is one of the exceedingly few genuine examples of an effort to scale up data curation across the research enterprise and the higher education and enterprise and it’s, it’s, I think really important.

05:02 - There, one of the themes that seems to be showing up in the CNI synchronous sessions that we have going this week is the one of six sustainability. We have a lot of projects who are looking at pathways to genuine sustainability and those involved typically issues around both funding and governance, and I am very eager to hear what the data curation network is thinking along those lines. So, without taking up any more time I just want to welcome you all today to this session and to think, Lisa and Heidi joining us.

And I believe Heidi will begin the presentation so I will disappear and hand it over to Heidi, as well. Thank you so much Cliff that was a really nice introduction, and we really appreciate that and we may have quoted you later on in our, in our slides.

06:08 - So I’m Heidi, and I am from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign unit which we’ve used every permutation possible for that name so Urbana Champaign champion are being assigned.

06:19 - So Lisa and I are going to just sort of ping back and forth of it and we’ll try and keep this you know interesting and lively as we go through, but I’ll just give you an idea of kind of the structure of what we’ll be talking about today.

06:30 - So I’ll start with a brief overview of the data curation network for anybody who is unfamiliar or just sort of needs an update.

06:37 - And then we’ll talk about the timeline for our sustainability planning which has actually been going on for the entire time that we have been working on the data curation network with that at that will hopefully you know orient everybody in terms of you know what we’re doing and what kind of sustainability we’re really talking about. And so then we’d like to take a really quick poll just to get a sense from our audience members, you know where what why you came to the session and we’re what your role is.

And then from there we’ll go into specifics about about the planning that we’ve done.

07:10 - So the data curation network, our mission really is about connecting people and so that’s connecting people with curation data creation responsibilities.

07:18 - And it’s very much that idea of, you know, doing better together with that you know favorite African proverb that we all like to like to quote.

07:26 - One thing I do want to say though is that we came together really to figure out, data curation, so this was not because this group of, you know, individuals or universities had it figured out and we are banding together and our bonus.

07:38 - It was really because you know this was a problem that we felt like we needed to solve and we could solve it better together.

07:44 - So just to give you a little bit of context to I came from a stem background which had a pretty specific particularly in the way that I was academically raised in a specific way in which curation was talking about talked about and thought about.

07:57 - And when I interviewed for my position in 2014 I actually asked my, my search committee I said you know what is data curation, and nobody could actually give me a very concrete reply, so it was you know fairly nebulous and very much in flux and as nothing against the committee there is you know some serious, serious talent and expertise on that committee but it really did speak to the fact that it really hadn’t been nailed down in this particular context, in terms of generalist repositories and in terms of library services around data curation and this kind of really broad remit of, you know, this data sharing across so many disciplines.

08:30 - So my point really there is we wanted to try and nail it down and really to operationalize it what is it in practice we have these sort of nebulous I you know ideas but literally what do you do in terms of data curation.

08:42 - So that was a lot of the impetus for the data curation network is really to nail down those, those actions and then try to really standardize those across the different context and organizations that were coming from, and then really figure out what kind of expertise was needed because we could tell that you needed a lot but we weren’t exactly sure what it was going to be that would be needed. And then to share that expertise and share that work across, you know distributed across this network them.

09:12 - So, the DCM right there at the very top is really rooted in that curation doing the action of curation as a network, and the ability to then scale that you know our curation expertise and rely on each other and depend on each other you know in these actions, as I just told you, though, and I think it’s probably likely that many of the people who are in attendance today have experienced themselves. There was just not a lot of concrete cohesiveness in our practices, there are sort of similar but it was like, Oh, you do this when you do this that.

So that was one of the things that we really had to do was try to work out what it would really be so that meant there ended up being an educational component that really layered right in right after we started this, so then that happened in terms of professional development and then the creation of some best practices. So, for example, this has come out in the data curation primaries which may have heard about, and also codified the curate stuff, since between what we call our curation outline.

10:05 - This also ended up leading to just straight r&d. So, it turns out there’s a whole lot of questions that are just fundamental to data curation particularly in that context, who has data who’s trying to curious, what is valuable about it is it valuable to the same thing to the end user to the deposit or to you or to me.

10:22 - So there’s all these fundamental questions that have come out around it to which, which makes a lot of sense. But then the last part is really this piece about sustainability, which is what we’re going to focus on today.

10:31 - So how can we do this sustainably so the grant when we all know grants and that’s how they work. So what we’re going to do when it was over because we knew that the data stewardship without the over and we would need to continue to continue moving on.

10:45 - So I really wanted to frame you know where the DC and started. So what was it like when we first started in 2016. And what have we learned and figure it out, you know, as we’ve gone on and particularly about curation and scale.

10:58 - So we began with this planning phase so the planning grant that was funded by Sloan It was a one year grant from 2016 to 17 and we initially started with six institutions, and then move to eight.

11:10 - We were then awarded an implementation grant from again from Sloan from 2018 to now, 2021, we grew from eight to 12 partners at that point. And then now this is our transition.

11:22 - What do you do after the grant and so we’re smack in the middle of that transition right now. We currently have 12 partners, and then we after this. We hope we plan we believe there is a sustaining face that will come will come afterwards.

11:36 - So, at least, is there anything you wanted to jump in and say before. No, let’s take the poll. Okay, so yeah, that was a little bit of background on us.

11:45 - So just to give some context and so you know what we’re really kind of talking about here and so now just a little bit about youth quick three questions.

11:59 - I have launch the poll, can everyone see that we send it to see the Polk yep I can see it.

12:06 - Okay, great. all right we’re starting to get some responses now.

12:22 - Okay. We are at about 80% still taking up.

12:32 - Think I’ll leave this up for another 10 seconds or so.

12:42 - Okay, I’m going to go ahead and close down the poll with 86% right thanks everybody for participating.

12:51 - So I share those results out now. That would be great.

12:57 - Here we go. this will key in on some points that are important to you.

13:21 - So, back to this data curation network timeline that I had mentioned so this was in fact our sustainability timeline.

13:28 - And it was, it was literally built into the very first first grant planning group that we submitted and has been part of it throughout the entire course.

13:37 - So we’ll talk about some really great benefits to that that it’s been so integral to the entire process that we’ve been. We’ve been working through, but also a few things that that made it hard.

13:47 - So first, just sort of a kind of a clue about what our thoughts were at these different sorts of sort of phases. So, you know, like I said it was literally part of the grants.

13:55 - So, and especially when you’re just working on a grant you know you have no actual obligations yet and it’s you know seemed really smart. It was like, Oh, well it’s super productive everybody knows that that’s really hard and it takes a lot of preparation.

14:06 - So it was, it was terrific. It just, it made it made a whole lot of sense.

14:10 - And then we we got into, you know really trying to implement the network and we were trying to implement the network. And so that was part of it that ended up being really difficult because we were trying to, you know, figure out sustainability and, you know, we’ll give more details about that in a few minutes but it felt kind of awkward in the middle of it because the sustainability is somewhat of a research project, in and of itself and we were just trying to figure it out.

14:31 - So one of the analogies that we’ve used then it’s like a little bit like trying to figure out the market for an ice cream shop and we’re still trying to raise the cows.

14:38 - So, Lisa and I are both from the Midwest and actually grew up in a dairy farm so that speaks to me a lot.

14:43 - But it was very much like we’re like, what’s your, what do you do, what do you do and like sustaining something that is actually you know fairly in in flux, you know, just definitely are our ideas changed as we went along.

14:54 - So it’s definitely to the credit to you know the DC and cokie eyes and you know certainly Lisa and Claire and Tim, who did a lot in the sustainability summit we took it very very seriously and we did a ton of work so really that first you know kind of takeaways is the amount of research and prep that went into this was just was, was really huge and again will be more details in a minute, really huge.

15:17 - But despite years of knowing that this would happen, and the fact that we worked very hard on our sustainability plan, it’s still feel like that, that grant and came out of nowhere, it still was like we had the meeting we’re like, well it’s time and it was really, sort of, sort of alarming to us.

15:35 - So that’s the other kind of takeaway to, to think about is that it really does choir, you know this length of time to plan.

15:43 - I can only assume there’s probably one or two maybe on the call her like oh no, it took you that long we could do it in a month and I’m like no I don’t believe you like it was it was, and you’ll see in terms of what we did, you know, we tried to be super thoughtful about it we we did still end up moving, you know, multiple times during this process and we still are moving, so it’s still not exactly concrete.

16:05 - So what did our journey really look like. So, you know, again, the sustainability was outlined in both our planning and implementation grants so for example before we even went into implementation we were already looking at cost models and interviewing stakeholders, so that was mainly at that point, our own you know administration’s once we moved into that implementation phase that got more intense and we did a lot more activities.

16:28 - So talking with a lot of organizations who are similar to us in terms of the structure and kind of what we were trying to doing you know across multiple institutions or had tried to transition from a grant into sustainable so for example who talked to a seed and we talked portaledge and Texas Digital Library, lots of different places. Can I just interject on that Heidi to and Cliff mentioned this at the beginning, you know when we talked about like sustainability, it wasn’t just like the fiscal models and like the financial models.

We were also looking at other organizations to ask questions about their governance structure. Do they have you know memorandums of understanding how do they actually solidify that partnership.

17:05 - So all of these kind of pieces went kind of hand in hand, also figuring out how do we keep paying for this in the long term.

17:11 - Yeah yeah it is that it’s also similar to data curation and which it was a like a little bit abstract in some ways and like no this is literally what you’ll have to do and this was literally, you know how much, how much it takes things are things are happening there.

17:25 - And in terms of, you know we so we engaged a panel and so that included a variety of academic institutions have different scopes and sizes, and then also some data curation organizations to completely outside of you know academic libraries to try and get a balance in terms of what we’re trying to achieve. We also did a request for proposals for consultants and we ended up, which isn’t you know an experience all and of itself.

17:48 - And then we ended up working with lyricists, they have a report that’s available. If you’d like to read it, and they did end up sort of recommending are coming out with three different models for us to consider one was tears but the idea that Becca provide some broader representation. One was kind of a stakeholder model which was more tightly aligned, you know, very, very similar organizations and then the final one that was a fee for service.

18:11 - So I think Lisa let me maybe say a little bit more about that later. Unless you wanted to chime in.

18:17 - No, I can see more about another. Yeah. Great.

18:20 - So from there, we had a bazillion conversations within our group we talked to talk to talk to talk really tried to get to a consensus and figure out, you know what was really best for us and what we could do going on now.

18:31 - We did end up with a membership model, and we’ll talk more about that for sure later. and then basically you bite your fingers and you start the Ask and you see what happens when, when the rubber hits the road.

18:47 - Yeah, and I can talk more about the rubber hitting the road piece of the show here.

18:51 - You know when I look back on our journey I observed that even though we did plan early on, we didn’t, we actually had to change directions, a couple times during the way.

19:01 - So it really mentioned, like we looked at this fee for service model and in fact, in our, in our planning phase. When we were really just thinking about the network and building it out kind of on paper.

19:13 - We thought like you know there’s a lot of membership fatigue out there and all of the experts we’re talking to are sort of warning us that it’s really difficult to become yet another organization that you know goes Hatton and it asks for membership fees from a variety of institutions, so we thought maybe we should really test out this fee for service approach where perhaps we can package up curation and and really get end users to to pay for that and help us sustain the data curation network.

19:46 - Of course, once we started the implementation phase. Then we started to realize all of the real problems with that approach, at least for our particular, you know, service data curation.

19:58 - So one thing we discovered is, you know, data curation in terms of the network matchmaking type approach that we were using is actually very difficult.

20:08 - We share our curators across a group of institutions where, you know, Minnesota, might have expertise in biological sciences and we can curate the biological data coming into Illinois while they might help us with our computer science resources or whatever, there’s really not a lot of, you know, quantifiable like this is how much it costs, each data set, it’s going to take a wildly variety, you know, a wide variety of different steps and different expertise and we can’t always guarantee.

20:39 - All of these things are going to lie and offer that as a fee for service at least not today, dedication is also very professionalized work, a lot of ethical components, a lot of decision making has to happen, you know, behind the scenes and there’s really not a, you know, one size fits all approach to how we do curation and that’s something we actually have to teach in our workshops, you know, we take a very pragmatic approach to make data a little bit better.

21:05 - We can’t you know make the perfect data set. So that also is kind of difficult to translate into a operationalize, you know, high quality service expectation for every single data curation event.

21:21 - We also realized and this is through a lot of our satisfaction surveys that we did on our own curators who are doing this work as a part of our implementation phase.

21:31 - They are really busy people and curation is not their only job.

21:36 - All of our staff and the data curation network, our research data management librarians and reproducibility specialists and software developers working on the repository.

21:47 - So, they, they also do curation as part of their job but this isn’t the only thing they do so for them, and exchange of data curation with appear makes a lot of sense.

22:00 - I’ll do your biology data sets, if you do my computer science data sets, but doing that work for an end user where there is no exchange, except for sustaining the network.

22:10 - Didn’t really translate in value for our actual curators, So that was, you know, a huge realization for us that really mad that this wasn’t necessarily going to be the best approach.

22:22 - Finally, just the logistics of accepting fee for services from end users in an academic institution is quite challenging.

22:32 - We really did a lot of research on, you know, what would it actually take to set this up, and a lot of the answers we found was, well the DC and is going to have to become a nonprofit organization.

22:43 - And there’s actually quite a lot of benefits for, you know, staying housed is a fiscal home at a university.

22:50 - And there’s, you know, a lot of things that our university has been able to provide for us, that we just weren’t able or maybe to try to start doing like taxes and, you know, collecting the actual money and all of the the oversight that needs to go into that.

23:11 - Yeah. I just thought it’s like Yeah, exactly.

23:16 - So, so we really decided that you know this this approach that we thought, you know, theoretically would really work for us, and a lot of the literature and the research was really pointing us down this direction was really just practically not a good fit for us right now given, you know, the unknown market for some of these end user services. So we really had to look inward and say what is going to work for us, our current membership right now.

23:41 - And, you know, for that and you can go to the next slide it.

23:45 - We discovered that a membership model is actually going to be the best approach, and we might have, be able to scale up later on to offering a wider variety of services to end users but right now, we, we do really have a very strong trust relationship built up amongst our partners. And we want to continue to, you know, expand on that. So, we are creating three tiers of membership right now.

24:12 - One of them is that, you know, partner tier which is we’re actually you know looking for new partners to join us but you know these are institutions that have curators who are also interested in sharing curation at this network to scale and and really trying to as Heidi already described wonderfully build out the actual workflows and practices for how we can do this in our institutions.

24:38 - The other tier you know is completely untested and and that’s a tear that we’re hearing people are interested in that, you know, you’re just getting started with curation you might not even have a data curator on staff.

24:50 - But this is an area that you’d really like to move into where you see a need to move into, you need to learn more and you need to learn, you know, from a network of experts are already kind of doing this.

24:59 - So that’s where imagining you know where it might be a different kind of involvement, and we’d really like to beta test with that actually might look like in this this transition here.

25:09 - And then finally, we do still offer a lot of our educational workshops, and we see a real value in ensuring that you know we’re just preparing our curator community to tackle some of these problems.

25:23 - So we want to continue to do that and and we’re really looking to, you know, get support to teach these workshops and that’s what that that Ambassador level was for.

25:33 - In the future we need to look for other ways to continue to engage but maybe individuals. There are a lot of individuals who work in institutions that may not be at that level to, you know, partner in this this membership model, who also just looking to get involved in the community. And we just were trying to figure out how to create that opportunity for them. And then we’ve definitely recognize that the current DCM members are maybe large r1 institutions, and certainly there are a lot of opportunities to engage with a wider variety of institutions and we want to ensure that we are, you know, really making a welcoming and inclusive community for for everyone.

26:15 - So those are the two kind of future areas that we’d like to look to.

26:22 - So what’s great about this this current testing of this this new membership model is we actually got 11 of our 12 institutions to sign on as partners, and and what that means right now is we’re sharing all the central costs and that comes out to $10,000 per institution. Plus, the in kind donation of the curator expertise to the network.

26:44 - We also have been receiving interest from others to do beta testing at those different tiers, and and we just really appreciated the support that we we heard from cliff and wanted to highlight that we really are really striving to, to kind of meet these expectations that we are trying to test out a radical collaboration for doing this kind of work in in academic libraries, and it’s it’s certainly not hard but it’s it’s possible, I’m sorry, it is hard but it’s also possible.

27:14 - And we, we really are trying to, you know, learn by doing, I guess is what we’re finding out is is really the only way to try to do somebody sustainability approaches.

27:29 - I think I turn it back over to you, Heidi. Yeah, yeah. So there’s, I mean the things that are greater there’s a lot of enthusiasm and it by and large it’s working. So that’s a really terrific part of it.

27:42 - We do feel the pains of the things that aren’t so great about what we’re trying to do right now.

27:47 - First and foremost, we are baffling our campuses. So, Lisa can save me a little bit more from the fiscal agent perspective but I’ll just say even as one of the partners so I go to them with a draft membership agreement, and they totally don’t get the idea that we’re trying to share staff and try to share our time they’re like what are you giving away for and you’re like, no, it’s a swap it’s a swap.

28:08 - I don’t know how many times I use the word swap, you know, in that, in that conversation and we have a great got grants and contracts person it’s terrific it’s just not at all the way that they’re, they’re used to thinking, and also they’re used to thinking about you know sort of liabilities and those sorts of things. So, you come to it and they’re like, oh don’t agree to this don’t say this don’t don’t promise this don’t promise these things but make them promise it was like oh no no we need, we need everybody to agree to be obligated to these things, otherwise I can’t depend on Michigan and Cornell and Minnesota to do these things like we have to be responsible to each other.

28:40 - So that was really kind of going against, you know, a green, in and of itself and to try and explain to a lot of different people like what we’re trying to do and what it means to us, Lisa, do you want to say anything about the school.

28:52 - No, I’m I might need some therapy, you know like, that this is just a typical experience like setting up these agreements and pushing it through on legal counsel, like it’s, it’s pretty.

29:02 - Yeah, it’s not what I’ve been trained to do right you know, and we have a lot of structures that are universities in place to help us through these but they’re really not used to collaborating with our peers like this so it’s been it’s been a struggle And that’s been fascinating. Also, in terms of one thing that’s not so great is losing out on on talent. So say we have, you know, an organization that’s in the data curation network and they have to exit or they were never able to come in to begin with.

29:29 - So, you know, in one case maybe we only within on our curators, for example, and it’s that organization left, then there goes our art curator. So that sort of like there’s a loss of talent for us and then it’s also a loss of them being able to engage with us. So that’s been something that’s an awkward about this, about this the sort of model.

29:51 - Also, as I as I mentioned to sort of preventive sustainability planning so this idea that we’re you know trying to market our ice cream and best he’s not a twinkle in anybody’s I yet.

29:59 - We’re really trying to figure out what we’re doing, which means that we’ve been pivoting a lot. And we’ve also been forced to make decisions that may not be the right thing long term, they might need to be expected that probably will have to evolve.

30:12 - It’s not to say that you know it’s not good that we were forced to make decisions because the grants ending so we didn’t need to do that, but it was does mean that things aren’t as fixed as, you know, we think that they are.

30:23 - And one thing that I, you know, kind of have noticed is happening is like once you put something on a website or once you say it’s one way, it really fixes in people’s head that that’s the way it is.

30:30 - But we really are still trying to figure out what how do we continue to tweak this so that it works best for what we’re trying to do and also the the people that were trying to do it with.

30:41 - And then, yeah, I think Lisa just alluded to this maybe a little bit but we’re not right. We’re also not sales, sales people. This is not our natural inclination so this means, and we didn’t have some cohort of, you know, smooth talking people in the data curation network that we just you know banded together to go out and you know, give you know snazzy slides and pitches to people. It was just us going back to our administrations, and you know, some people are more comfortable with that than others and, you know, that can be awkward and then it’s also the idea that it’s also hard for administrators, so you’ve got a bazillion different you know things that want to be fun and he got this amount of time and you’re having to try and tease out, and maybe maybe extrapolate a little bit you know what is the value so that’s one thing that I think we’ve struggled with a little bit to what do you also mentioned it what is the value I mean I remember at one point we were like googling like value proposition.

31:33 - So we had a lot of really strong learning curve to really tackle some of the sustainability issues. Yeah market analysis okay what is that again with these were just things that, you know, even with the consultant they were still hard, kind of in the similar way that their grants and contracts there’s a little bit hard for us to wrap our minds.

31:51 - So, yeah. So just convert a wrapping up a little bit here. So really has come down to, you know, think about some sort of takeaways that you know we thought would be useful for the people really it does take an enormous amount of effort to try and really hit all the points that you’d want to do and it really does take a take a lot of time. So those are sorts of things. And then really a lot of this has also kind of really come down to two values, and there are different values for different people, of course, and I had found this quote from Paul Hawken who is actually an environmental sustainability activist, but it really spoke to me about this idea that the first rule is to align with your natural forces or at least not to find them.

32:31 - And I think if you had shown me this quote at the very beginning, I’d like yeah yeah that’s what we’re doing, you know, our natural forces us to bind together and then you’ll be able to do this thing and hadn’t actually really thought about these other sorts of natural forces that are in play, you know, first of all, you know this idea of how our universities are structured to work. They are individually universities that are set up to value themselves.

32:50 - Of course, we understood that but we didn’t really think about how that was going to apply and apply to the actions and the actual work, and the kinds of things that we were going to have to do in terms of moving forward and the amount of effort that it would take to, you know, really trying to get over those hurdles, you know, within our own own in universities.

33:09 - And then this also this idea that, you know, I think almost everybody on this is going to be part of academia, or at least closely aligned. If not, you know, and particularly those libraries, we don’t pitch.

33:21 - That’s not what we’re help, we want to help.

33:23 - That is the entire echoes of why we’re here. So that’s one thing to where we’ve really kind of struggled around, you know we can do this in certain ways but then who do we leave behind or how do we not help the rest of the community.

33:36 - So that’s one area where we’ve really been really continue to push on and to try and think through. So, just a few maybe final take home send for the DCM specifically, just to know that, particularly because of the timing and again we’re glad we were pushed, but because of that timing we did, we are still testing and we had to make decisions for what to try now, and particularly for ways to maintain but we do expect that we’re looking at all.

34:01 - And then just for sort of for this you know concept of sustainability and moving from one grants into an organization is looking out for all of the natural forces, not just the ones that that seemed most obvious to you, they like Lisa said they’re not insurmountable. But they will feel very uncomfortable, and they will just really take a lot of time and energy, more than you think that they will.

34:22 - And so I think at least me particularly I felt, you know, sort of blindsided by some of that and we worked it out it’s been going okay but I would have wanted here that presentation so I was prepared a message for you.

34:36 - So finally just you know thanks to you for your interest in attending, and we’ll take some questions in a few minutes here is certainly our thanks to everyone for contributing to the data curation network and Tim and Claire again for their work on the sustainability projects are faced to Josh Greenberg who at Sloan who pushed us, you know, very early to start this so I think it would have been very easy to push off and push off and push off until it was way too late.

35:03 - If it hadn’t been built in so much to the, to the, to the grant process as it was.

35:08 - And then, so there’s our website that our sustainability plan is available so under about under publications, and I can actually put in the link here in a few minutes to.

35:18 - If you’d like to take a closer, closer look at it, any closing thoughts you want to say before we open it up, Lisa, I guess I would just add that, you know, we, we ultimately we changed our minds about sustainability we thought we could sustain ourselves one way. And we changed, based on how we felt as individuals in this collaboration.

35:40 - And I think that that’s a good thing, I think, you do have to stay true to like your, your values and and we value our people and how our individuals feel about the work that they’re doing.

35:51 - We couldn’t collaborate otherwise. So, our sustainability model really had to reflect how our individuals felt about this work, and hopefully that’ll that’ll work out for us but I guess it’s okay to change, change your mind about sustainability.

36:07 - Really good. Thank you. Thanks Heidi Thank you Lisa, wonderful talk so interesting and really appreciate your your your honest description of the challenges that you faced and how you were called to bring certain kinds of skills to bear on a thorny problem with a situation that wasn’t necessarily. Part of what you were used to dealing with I think we can all relate to that and it was great to hear about it.

37:06 - You also have the option of raising your hand and I’d be happy to unmute you and you can read it, you can ask your question, aloud if you like so I’ll go ahead and begin with question that came in through the chat.

37:21 - This may be a question for another talk, but do the faculty or researchers have parallel concerns to the grants offices about sharing their data with people that they don’t know.

37:35 - I can take that one, if that’s okay Heidi. Actually we built our RTC and our dedication our workflow to address that very problem. We actually don’t share data with our institutions that isn’t already going into a public access data repository.

37:50 - So, all of the data that we curate is meant for public access, and we also talked to our researchers about this in different ways.

37:59 - Each local institution has, has the ability to, you know, very explicitly explain to their researchers that someone outside of the organization may be curating their data.

38:08 - But even when we do that, we, you know, the data is already going to be publicly available anyway, so we really do try to let the local institution handle that and we want the local institution to have all of that relationship building aspect as much as they need. So for example in Minnesota, when I, When I get something curated by the network, I’ll, I’ll just say you know our Python data curator is looking at this and that Python data curator might be at Illinois for Penn State.

38:36 - So, yeah, we we really do pay attention to that very much.

38:41 - Yeah, and that’s another area to where I think we’ve had to be pretty flexible because, again, different universities actually working a little bit different ways the way that they get their own funding is a little bit different.

38:51 - So, we’ve had to be, you know, those are ways that we had to be flexible in terms of, you know, determining how the network operated at Illinois we say hey we want to send this to the data curation network, this is what it is it’s actually kind of nice marketing for that for the data curation network. And then we give them, you know the opportunity for some reason they wouldn’t feel comfortable but as Lisa said they’re all of it is meant to be.

39:13 - Great, thank you. And thanks Monica for the question.

39:18 - We also got a question in from Emily, who, right, I must admit that I’m a little concerned about another membership model in the library space. Currently, I sit on a few boards and have worked in the library nonprofit space and I have seen memberships drop and all of those organizations.

39:36 - I often call it the new shiny thing syndrome, organizations tend to join early on, but then when a few institutions pull membership. there’s often a spiral.

39:47 - Is there an alternate plan of membership drops.

39:51 - Well first I just wanna acknowledge Emily, yes, that we’re afraid of that to go this direction, maybe in some ways because we knew that this was a problem but it’s trackable sorry.

40:02 - What we’re also trying to launch a new membership model in coded it that’s also when we didn’t mention that but that’s also kind of the the other major factor that we’ve been struggling with.

40:13 - So we’re really excited that we’ve been able to come this far. I think what we’re trying to keep in mind is that we’re not.

40:21 - We’re not just another membership organization I guess maybe we’re just blind ourselves but we really are sharing our staff in a really radical way. So, so it.

40:31 - Yes, you know, data curation is a kind of a new newer shiny or thing.

40:36 - But we’re doing it in such a way that we, we really are becoming interdependent on one another.

40:41 - You really are making our ties closer, as we work together. So, at least it’s our thought that our memberships will actually pull people together in ways that will make us, you know, very, very dependent on one another.

40:57 - What do you think it. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, just to be explicit we have thought of other things and we’ve sort of pared it down in terms of like well what if this didn’t happen or this and every people pull out and so what ends up happening is that you ever reduction have a reduction in what you can offer, or you didn’t really kind of dramatically. You know, so do we no longer actually share staff do we just have a Slack channel, so you know, you have to end up really changing your mission really quite a bit depending on how that goes.

So, you know, we’ve got our eyes wide open about that and yeah we were grateful and delighted that encoded you know we have been involved, we’ve been able to do this well because it’s absolutely our mindset.

41:38 - You know the third is that 14 watching right now I mean we’ve got 46 data curators in our network.

41:46 - You know, in for the $10,000 that it cost for membership, that’s much more affordable than trying to hire, even just one more data curator for our library.

41:56 - So we really are trying to show that this this is a way of collaborating it’s not just a membership to another organization, it’s, it’s really just the cost of collaborating in this radical way.

42:11 - Thank you. Yeah, thank you thank you thank you Emily.

42:15 - And thank you for for addressing that concern and Emily, just chats.

42:22 - I appreciate the thought you’ve put into this and that you’re doing this and encoded so.

42:28 - And I just wanted to comment also. Along those same lines, with respect to membership inquiries, we did, we did receive a private chat prior to somebody having to leave this webinar, asking the question about joining opportunities.

42:49 - Membership opportunities and so what is. And forgive me if I missed that during your presentation but if someone does is interested in joining, what’s the process and how can they do that.

43:00 - Yeah, and we intentionally did not make this a commercial but thank you for asking, how was that and be happy to share that information.

43:06 - We, we do have a membership application that’s open through the end of April, we will be reviewing applications based on the members that are interested in joining based on the expertise that they bring to be honest, It’s not just about the the fee we want to grow our network in a way that fills maybe some of the domain expertise that we may be lacking, or the the file formats for curators who can curate you know particular file formats. And so there’s actually a list of preferred, you know, areas maybe are ones that are maybe representing institutions that are just not like ours and will bring additional, you know, diversity and a variety of other concerns or interest to the group so that we can really grow in a way that’s that’s going to be, you know, more useful to the broader community.

44:05 - Great. Thank you, Lisa. I also just wanted to be sure that everyone had had noticed the comment from Carl Benedict.

44:14 - When you were writing about the process of planning for sustainability.

44:23 - And you know how much time and energy that took and when it was time you still couldn’t believe it was actually time and Carl commented that he’s connected to a couple of projects were two plus years out from the end of the project was still not early enough so clearly that’s a universal experience or very common.

44:45 - We do have, I’m sorry, go ahead. So the really hard thing about that is like you’re trying to do market research but you haven’t actually pin down exactly what you’re doing it because you’re trying to tweak the network, make sure it works.

44:57 - So that’s, you know, part of that is why people push it off because they’re not, you’re not sure what you’re selling and we don’t want to some.

45:04 - So that’s, that’s really that challenge there is trying to figure out how to, how to work in the context of figuring out sustainability while you’re still kind of jiggling around.

45:14 - Yeah. Very true. Very true. Thank you.

45:21 - Carl likes the, the ice cream shop count metaphor.

45:25 - It’s a good one. All right, well, we, we, we have, we have some more time to chat with our panelists and again we’re so grateful for them, for coming to see tonight to talk to us about their, their project.

45:45 - And this, this process we are so grateful to all of our attendees for making time to be with us here.

45:53 - As I see that we don’t have any more questions in the q amp a.

45:58 - I’m going to go ahead and turn off the recording.

46:02 - But I invite any attendees who would like to remain with us here and sort of approach the podium, ask questions, have a chat with our presenters, please feel free to do so. .