I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started and I'm going to have Kendra Morgan get us started here. Welcome to Kendra. >> Thank you so much. It is so great to have all of you here today. My name is Kendra Morgan. I'm a Senior Program Manager working on the REALM project and REALM stands for reopening archives, Libraries and Museums. This has been funded by the institute of museum and library services. The mission of ILMS is to advance support and empower America's museums, libraries and related organizations through grant making, research and policy development. This project is made possible by their generous support and the partnership of OCLC, ILMS and our research partners at Battelle. We are excited to have several presenters representing international perspectives about how they have been navigating the COVID-19 pandemic with their cultural institutions. It is a really great opportunity to hear about some unique solutions our colleagues have found around the world as well as some of the things that might inspire you in your efforts locally and we also want to take the opportunity to share a little about the REALM project if this is a new familiar. We want to make sure you know about the free resources available through REALM and how you can take advantage of what is available. I am joined by four co-presenters from the United States, from the UK and from Canada. As we get to each participant, I'll -- or panelist, I will be sure to introduce everyone. You'll also find our colleague in the chat, she will share some links to the project as long as Jennifer as WebJunction web theirs. Please do put your questions into the chat. We'd love to hear what questions you have for our panelists. They are each going to be doing a short presentation, but we've also saved time at the end of the session to hear from all of you. So, please put those in as we go through. We might pause after each presenter. If not, we'll also find those resources at the end of the session. So, again, my name is Kendra Morgan. I had the fortune of being able to work on this project since April of 2020. IMLS brought together a range of stakeholders and it has been a really amazing opportunity for me under really, obviously, challenging circumstances. But what we've been able to do is really benefit from strengths and expertise from support matter experts. I'm happy to share what I have learned in the past year. I hope you all will as well. I do want to give you a little bit of background on the REALM Project. So I mentioned that ILMS, a national institution here in America, they are both the project funder and they help to bring together a steering committee and working groups that are helping to advise the project. And they also help to define the project goals and activities. At OCLC, I have colleagues who are helping to synthesize the information that we are hearing from our stakeholders to help inform decisions and we're also helping to publish and distribute research that's being used by our cultural institutions, archives, libraries, museums, to help with their decision making. And then finally, our colleagues at Battelle are helping by conducting literature reviews and research briefings and very early on in the project one of their key responsibilities was actually testing the longevity of COVID-19 on materials that we often find in our cultural institutions. So things that were unique, so for libraries, books, book covers, CDs, DVDs, we tested archival paper. This was all done to help provide information to our cultural institutions to help them with some early decision making. Many of these organizations were quarantining items at the beginning of COVID-19. And now we've moved into a phase where we're trying to make sure we are constantly providing access to the latest information through our research briefings that Battelle is conducting. And those are focused on vaccines, ventilation and variants. So how is research that is emerging on those three topics going to be impactful to our cultural institutions? And all of these resources are free to anyone, so no matter where you are, you'll be able to access these materials and access the research that is made available. You can also sign up for a mailing list so you get the latest announcements when we have announced a new set of research findings. I wanted to clarify just a couple of points about the research we are doing. We are really providing data to help us understand the virus, right. Local institutions can use that data along with local information about risks to help inform their practices and policies. With so many of you joining us today from around the globe, every community has a slightly different situation. You may have a different rate of infection among the population. You may be seeing different restrictions on what people can and cannot do in terms of visiting your institution. So there are so many variables, what we are really trying to do is help provide some additional context and information that can be used as you navigate this decision-making process. We aren't making any specific recommendations as a project. Every institution is different and its team is going to need to develop the policies that work for them and their community. One of the things I wanted to share with you is something that has really resonated with me throughout this project and this is something -- these five rules to help with decision making I have found as we look to explore today how our panelists have approached some of the problems or maybe opportunities that they saw as a result of the pandemic. There are some challenges we come across when it comes to decision making. And this information is based on an article called "Managing Uncertainty in the COVID-19 Era. It was published in 2020 in BMJ, formerly the "British Medical Journal." And the authors pulled together five points which helped to put context around what it sometimes feels like to be making decisions in really challenging circumstances. And I have found these five points have helped me kind of name some of the challenges that I have felt around decision making or having conversations about what it means to not fully understand something. So the first is understanding most data is flawed and incomplete and we can be honest about this. With the REALM Project, very early on, we couldn't test all the materials that might be of interest to archives, libraries and museums. It just wasn't possible. There are endless number of items as well as a finite budget. We didn't have all the data that people may have wanted to have. The second is that there may never be a final answer for many questions. Do we wait for certainty or do you act on the evidence that you have? And this is a really good one to keep in mind as we think about things that are still somewhat unknown, like how much exposure do you have to have to COVID-19 to become infected and sick yourself? We don't really have a final answer on that yet. There are so many variables that come into play that we may never have a final answer, but we still have to make decisions about our operations. The third is that acknowledging that there is complexity, admitting ignorance and being open to exploring paradoxes. We have been so fortunate on the REALM Project to have stakeholders and participants on our steering committee and we have a scientific working group and operations working group. They have been contributing to the success of this project by bringing their unique expertise and pushing us on questions and trying to better understand things and we really have to look at times when we don't fully understand all of the items or all of the parameters that might be at play and trying to engage those individuals in helping us to better understand. And admitting when we don't know. The fourth is that different people interpret data differently. And seeking outside perspectives for solutions can be an important way to proceed through that time. For us -- or for each of you and all of your institutions that could include talking to local subject matter experts, so your health department, other colleagues who are doing similar work to yours, but they may have different perspectives that can help inform your decision making. And then finally, observing real-world interventions can really complement the findings of control trials and other forms of evidence. Sometimes we just have to try something, right? We have to get out there and see if one approach can be more successful than another. And it really takes some trial and error and a willingness to be flexible. I think throughout the pandemic we've really had to reinforce the fact that things may change at any time. So understanding that that is one of the factors we are dealing with and those real-world interventions as we observe what has been happening, as we move through our spaces and talk to colleagues, there is a lot there to help inform our decision making. I encourage you to check out the article. It's very short, but, again, I have found it to be really helpful and reinforcing as we move through this space and time. Some of the things you'll be able to take advantage with the REALM Project, again, these are all freely available, published under a creative commons license, so you are welcome to reuse them. Anything that might help you in your work. Our toolkit editors have been pulling together the findings of the research and helping to synthesize some of the materials that have been published to help contextualize what is out there. So you will find a decision-making checklist, visual aids of the lab results that we did last year, examples of library and museum reopening plans, resource roundup, so an entire section on how people are implementing their mask policies. So you will find a lot of different opportunities there to use the REALM materials. Again, anything that you might find helpful, you are welcome to repurpose them as you move through the next few months. All right. Well, with that, we are coming up on our first presenter and I have had the pleasure of working with Dr. Bertley for the past year on the REALM Project. He serves as a member of the project's scientific working group and he is the President and CEO of the center Of Science and Industry in Ohio. I have seen some pictures of their facility. I can't way to go there in person. Welcome Dr. Bertley, it is great to have you. >> Just a reminder to unmute yourself, Dr. Bertley. >> FREDERIC BERTLEY: Thank you, Kendra. Appreciate the introduction. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Trying to make sure can everyone hear me? >> Yes. >> FREDERIC BERTLEY: So tough year do be sure. But let's go down the slides here. I want to make sure I'm going through this properly. All right. Everybody can see my slides okay? >> Yes. >> FREDERIC BERTLEY: All right. One last thing. I just want to remove this here. Okay. So this is Cosi, stands for the center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio. You can see a picture of our building, the skyline. Our building is three soccer pitches long to give you a sense of the size. On our building on the outside you'll notice two names, the on the left, Cosi, The Center of Science and Industry. You see American Museum of Natural History, AMNH is in New York City and along with the London Museum of Natural History number one and number two natural museum in the world. Our building is three soccer pitches long, their building is 1.7 million square feet and that red circle, our entire three football field building can fit in there. I just say that to show we have an incredible partnership to have this great science much in central Ohio and natural history. It is the first time in the history that Venable organization partnered with somebody, they picked Ohio, Columbus and Cosi. I want to walk you through a story. I was asked to talk about two different things we did during the pandemic to get through so, so I will walk you through it. In 2019, what happened? Well, what happened was we actually sold more tickets than we've ever sold. We raised more money than we've ever raised and we had more people visit Cosi in our entire history of our existence. We had not just a local profile, but we actually had a national impact. We were super excited about that to the point where we won numerous awards. In the state of Ohio we won awards from the state Ohio association, one for community impact and one for exhibit design. We won a 40 under 40, our local business journal. One of our executives won that, one of our SBUGSs won smart 50 Guinn, and the bloo loop reward, in the UK, thank you for recognizing us. We were on a banner year and then this happened. We were voted the number one science museum in the United States of America. We were on a tear. This was February 2020 and then, of course, what happened? You all know what happened. This happened. Right? And so, you know, we went from being the number one science museum in the country to being the number one science museum in the country that was closed. So what to do when that happens, right? We went back to the proverbial north star. We dug in and looked at our mission. Our mission is to engage, inspire and transform lives and communities by being the best partner in science, technology and industry learning. And so we looked at our strategic plan and our strategic plan had five goals. It is important to understand this strategic plan was written in 2018, supported by the board in November 2018, voted and approved by the board November 28, 2018 and effectively put in place January 1, 2019. This is before the pandemic. We didn't anticipate the pandemic. We we went BA to our goals. Goal number one, establish Cosi as a leader in STEM learning with a local, state and national impact. Goal number two, ensure long-term economic sustainability for Cosi and grow its organizational capacity. Goal number three deliver fun, educational and formation. Goal number Favre, strengthing engagement and define partnerships in the community, goal number five, expand diversity and equity. This is before the #metoo movement. These goals were more important now we had a pandemic. We said, okay, what can we do with this? And so clearly we were closed, but there were several opportunities. And this was published by Mckinsey in April of 2020. It talked about 1.6 billion kiddos on the planet affected from an education standpoint by this pandemic. 7.8 billion people on the planet, half of those are adults and another half of those is 18-22-year-olds. So 1.6 billion children means every kiddo was impacted. This is what school looked like. You are at home, trying to figure it out. If you had a digital device, you are lucky. Teachers are struggling to pivot, how can we impact if kids are not coming back to school. We came up with two initiatives. We are a physical science museum. We are used to people coming in our building, having a physical experience to lead to an indelible learning movement. Two, what could we do to a digital space that become epically crowded. The first initiative, the physical one, how could we provide people a hands-on experience if our doors are closed? We came up with something called the learning lunchbox. It is actually a science kit. What is in the box? Each box had five distinct science experiments, but what is critical to understand are two fundamental things. One, everything to do each of the five experiments was in the box. Your mom didn't have to go to the grocery store or your father didn't have to go to Home Depot, what have you. Everything to do the experiment is in the boxes. Two, the boxes and kits and experiments were coordinated in the U.S. with the Ohio learning standards and next generation Learning Standards. That is critical because teachers were scrambling to teach relevant content to kiddos in the online space. It is critical to ensure your students are learning. The teachers and the parents were excited to go to Cosi.org and get these kits and information and kids were doing hands-on experiments, literally with their standards. We are a science museum, not in the kit building business. We were able to crack out 1,000kits per week. That was our limit. We outsourced working with regional folks to handle our fulfillment. What we did is worked with our partners and started delivering these kits, not just to everybody, but the community, where the pandemic didn't create an educational gap, it amplified the gap. The kiddos, in the toughest communities were struggling especially around STEM learning. We partnered with several groups, including for example in this photo, the children's hunger line. Every Wednesday in distress hunger lines they would give a SFREET of food to families and we gave away our kits. Feed hungry minds. It got so popular, this is what it looked like in tougher communities. Cars started wrapping around the corner for this. This is in Columbus, Ohio. We said wait a minute, this is working. On the one hand we are happy to deliver a great experience to lead to learnable outcomes for kiddos, on the other hand this allowed us to get funding from the city of Columbus and started branching out. We partnered with the Ohio Mayor's Alliance. We are moving from the city of Columbus throughout the entire state of Ohio. The mayors were engaged. They were giving away these kits. You can see how long the caroline is. Other elected officials, members of Congress coming out. This is a shot in Dayton, Ohio. We thought we were going to give away 800 kits, 1,200 cars came. This is the Governor of Ohio. I like to show this picture, he is wearing the Cosi tie I gave him announcing this incredible program that Cosi was doing during the pandemic to make sure the kiddos rural and urban areas got access to STEM information. This is us working with the Lieutenant Governor with the holiday season. We gave away 1,500 kits working with the National Guard and Lieutenant Governor. This red shows you the line of cars coming to pick up stuff. We were excited to impact locally in the city of the Columbus, the county and throughout the state and we continued to migrate beyond the state of Ohio, working Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, Et cetera, now we are going further West in the United States and to date we have delivered over 100,000 learning lunchboxes and we are on track to deliver 200,000 by December 2021. We were really excited about that. As I mentioned to you, we talked about feeding hungry lives and feeding hungry minds. We were about this education in STEM. Something almost magical happened, frankly. We realized we are giving science education kits, it is more than that. We are a science museum, we are a cultural institution and culture is about elevation of folks. We added on this concept of fulfilling human services. What am I talking about? It turns out now we are partnering with folks in recovery houses. If you are a recovering adult, it is tough to connect with your kiddo. Our learning lunchboxes prove to be a great way for these adults to connect with their kids. Here is a slide with a quote from one of the parents receiving one of these kits. I will give you a moment to read it. This is exciting. We started working with foster care systems. These are two young ladies in foster homes so excited to receive our kits. We started working in homeless shelters, families struggling, especially in tough times looking for something to do to support family bonding and our kits actually help do that. That was in a nutshell this whole ecosystem of feeding hungry lives, feeding hungry minds with a simple hands-on kit. That is our hands-on piece. The second initiative is the digital piece. One thing that became super apparent during the pandemic is this issue around science literacy. What is happening in this great country, the U.S., Canada and much of the western world is there is a growing gap of science it literacy, and as we all know the only thing getting us out of the pandemic, I wish I could say got us out, but we are not there, getting us out of the pandemic is science. The silver lining is looking how science impacts us differently. We are a science museum, we looked at how can we work with broadcast, digital, educational, how can we ensure that it is engaging to a wide audience. We launched a primetime television show called QED with Dr. B. What it is, a partnership between Cosi and our public affiliate, WOSU. It is a primetime television show that anchors this concept of science is everywhere and science is for everyone. We break down science concepts, highlight stories, demystify STEM and build community around science literacy. We had programs, decoding viruss, that was a hot topic, to what is race, bacteria and superbugs, to the science of exercise. What about art firm intelligence? Climate science. Searching for extraterrestrial life, stress, what is the science behind that. The science of taste. Addiction in the community. Addiction in the brain and entertaining and get more people to feel comfortable. That was a primetime platform. This whole QED with Dr. B is a larger ecosystem that back maps to digital assets. Remember I talked about the kits, for example, all these kits come with rap cards with qr codes to upload the information. The human body kit, you have a whole bunch of information around advancing and gene editing and why we exercise. Similarly with the nature kit and kits around space, you can look at extraterrestrial life and looking for intelligence. Any time you are ready, I implore you to watch QED with Dr. B. All sites are available for free. Here is a picture sent to us, these are dinosaur kits. This is a distribution site in a more challenging zip code in Columbus, Ohio. We are partnered with Cover My Meds giving away 500 of these kits. The most amazing thing happened, parents were coming with their kiddos, this is us doing a liquid nitrogen demonstration. And this happened. These two kiddos came with no adults, no mom, no dad, no older brother, no uncle, no cousin. They were so excited to get their human body kits, they opened the kits right there at the park adjacent to the parking lot. They started doing their science experiments. A picture is worth a thousand words. These kids were changed by this experience. They were so excited to do science, be part of the scientific enterprise. We won more awards, a second of one executives won 40 under 40, power institution, smart 50 and bloo loop called us one of the top museums in the country and we won back-to-back number one museum in the nation. I couldn't be more proud of my team Of Central Ohio, when we were closed physically, we were metaphorly opened to the community. With that, I thank you very much for listening and I look forward to hearing my colleagues. >> MODERATOR: Thank you so much. It is great to hear all the projects you have undertaken. I am curious, just real quickly, how did your team go about making those kits? Is it something they had an idea about or was it trial and error? How were they able to be successful at that? >> That is a great question. I didn't go into details because of time. One of the things we did in our strategic plan, before the pandemic n the museum industry we know museums, I will speak to western society, museum attendance is declining, science or art museum, it is steadily declining. One of the reasons why is our computers in our pockets, we have instant access to information. Anything you want about science or art so museum attendance has been struggling. One of the challenges I gave the team working on a strategic plan, what would a museum be if we no longer had bricks and mortar? We claim we are a science center. We claim science is everywhere for everyone. What would we be if we didn't have a building? How can you engage in community? How can you take exciting stuff and get into the homes of the people who need it? We had that mettle working in our brains working over time and when the pandemic hit it allowed us to activate some of these ideas where we said, listen, we are more than a physical building. Let's put stuff in a box and make it relevant by linking it to what the teachers need to teach and what the students need to learn. That is how we came up with that. >> MODERATOR: I see that. I see we have Chewbaca. >> FREDERIC BERTLEY: That is Jamie. She built the sasquach outfit. Thanks for calling that out. >> MODERATOR: Thanks, Dr. Bertley. We are fortunate to have our next presenter is Stuart Hunt who joins us from the University Library & Collections Services of Reading, UK. Stuart, when I saw your slides, I think you have a great perspective and I'm looking forward to letting you share all of that with our participants today. So thank you so much for being here. >> STUART HUNT: Thanks, Kendra. Good afternoon to even, good afternoon or evening depending where you are. I will give you background about my institution. University Of Reading is a research intensetive for the UK. Average size for the UK, that is around 20,000 students. In U.S. terms that is quite small. In European context that is relatively large. University Library & Collections Services comprises the university library, university museums and special collections services. Quite a wide remit in terms of the services and facilities we have. So what I would really like to do is talk through some of the thinking we've had through the pandemic and where that is kind of I think taking us now. With some of the changes coming on. Look back and try to lookforward a little as well. So the first thing kind of the subtext of this presentation is around problems. That is the first think we need to think about COVID-19 as a problem or in the worst possible sense an opportunity. It is an absolutely awful thing for humankind, but thinking about how do we understand it as a potential opportunity for us and our services? Well known overused phrase, don't waste a good crisis really kind of shapes my thinking about what we should be doing. I start to think about, well, what is the problem we are actually trying to solve here? What problems did the pandemic actually raise for us? Potentially, has the pandemic highlighted already existing problems we already have that we somehow need to address anyway? So trying to think around turning the problem into an opportunity which starts to get you thinking in slightly different directions. I think one of the things might be to think about COVID-19 as a catalyst for really changing the way we work. And I think there's some very simple obvious tools that can really help us when we start to think about those issues and what we do as a service. Things like, stop, start, continue. What do we need to stop doing, what do we need to start doing, what do we need to continue to do, dialing it up or down? The I.T. side, run, grow, transform. What are the things we just need to run. What are the things we need to grow and scale up, what are the things we need to radically transform delivering our central mission to do? Those are useful ways of addressing what I think are the opportunities rather than the problem the pandemic has given us. There were really practical issues as well that the pandemic threw at all our institutions, around risk management and business continuity. We all very rapidly had to make some really significant changes in terms of how we deliver a service through a rapidly changing environment. I would really be interested to know is how many of your institutions actually had a pandemic on your institutional risk register? I will hold my hand up and say we certainly did not. We had nothing like that on our risk register, but it is something we had to deal with quickly. Scenario planning at institutional level, we were presented by the wider university, three potential scenarios we had to consider just before everything went pear-shaped. And within 24 hours we had gone all the way through those three scenarios in terms of severity and come out the side. Our thinking had to be fleet of foot, agile in how we think about our services, our community and how we think about the safety of our staff as well. One of the things we are hearing a lot about is the new normal or the next normal. If I had one plea, it would be please stop tacking about normal, the new normal, the next normal. I look back and I don't think normal was working particularly well in the first place. I think our notion of the normal is itself a problem and the normal, if you like, is broken. What we really don't want to do is go back to what might be the elements of the bad old ways we had in the past. Our budgets were really stretched. The publishers were taking us for every dime we have. Lots of challenges in terms of how we actually can maintain our continuity as a service in fairly challenging situations already. I wonder if the notion of the normal is a quite difficult one for us. For me, it immediately defines what is not normal or what is abnormal. As the inverse of normal. That is the problem. It is not just about semantics, but the way we actually think and start to address the problems of services as cultural institutions how we emerge from the pandemic and start to think about what we are going to look like into the future. I'm reminded of a really great quotation, if they give you lined paper, write the other way. It like that. It challenges us to think about not follow on those same railroad tracks going down the same way. We need to think slightly differently if we can emerge from a better evolved, transformed service. That circles back to Kendra's comments, what is the evidence base for our decision making. There are really interesting points. My one takeaway, let's not talk about normal. Some of the practical stuff we are starting to learn is the agility of our workforce. We discovered right in the beginning certainly in the UK and western Europe, we went into national lockdowns in March of 2020, lockdown 1.0, which appeared to be a very severe change for us. We saw our staff have strong resilience and capacity. They were challenged to start thinking about what we do and how we can deliver what we want to continue to deliver in a really different situation. I think the pandemic, if it presented an opportunity, it gave license to think and act differently. I hope that my teams felt they had the agency to do that as well so they could really start to think about what they are doing. So as we have moved from that, we have made lots of very quick transitions. We all closed our physical buildings, transitioned online. How do we move from transition moves to transforming moves. Now how do we embed that more as business as usual? What we have been doing in my work space is moving toward smart working, giving people the ability to be adaptable and agile in the way they work. So for example, the photograph on the screen, that is my workstation. That is my head set and my laptop. I have had that since day one, pre-pandemic when I started in my role because that is the way we want to be working. Enabling staff to be agile, working where it is appropriate for them so we start to think about the who, what, when, where, how and why? Those very journalistic questions, but what are we doing and how are we actually doing it? We can learn a lot from doing that. I think the other issue has been, I'm sure many colleagues on this web their will have had the same experience, recruiting and onboarding new staff during the pandemic. What was that like? We were all doing that online. We may have done a bit of that in the past, where we interviewed people at a distance and gone through the selection process. Now it became the norm for us. It very much became a learning experience for how we recruit and onboard staff who are working entirely remotely at that point. It also became an interesting one because it enabled us to indirectly challenge our candidates in terms of aptitude and skills and confidence in how they might deliver services. So I think lots going on there. That is kind of about us and the way we work. The other key things is around our services, about being digital, which is very much where we are at right now. This is a photograph -- we would normally use this room and image for a one-on-one consultation for a member of staff and student. That has moved entirely online. Our faculty and student liaison is digital first, but that is not to say it doesn't happen face-to-face. With the move to digital, we found an increase in attendance and engagement in our workshops and programs. In some cases 10 fold. Digital allowed us to reach new places where we hadn't before, getting more embedded into our community. That is something we really want to learn from in terms of what does that hybrid future look like? We provide physical first and DIJ TALG services, too. Special collections and archives relied on visits and face-to-face engagement. We had to pivot to make AKcess digitally. How do we make that content available. Doing on-demand scans. If researchers are interested in materials, scanning that to them and delivering to them in a very bespoke manner. Working on our four fee services. We sell high-quality digitized images so how do we build on that as well? There has been amplification of demand in the area that has been customized and the spoke for the individual users and entrenching that as business as usual. One example is a move towards a virtual reading room. This was launched in the summer of 2020, last summer, just over 12 months ago. Enabling people to engage with our digital collections, digital objects, digital items that link them to the analog materials. Effectively this is a digital content management system, but is a lot more. It led us to do a lot more around digital preservation and archiving as well. Alongside that we have been doing digital teaching spaces. Where we had been running face-to-face seminars with people handling items from our collections, interrogating collections, able to do that in a digital environment where an archivist or special collections librarian could be online handling the materials, engaging directly in a seminar in an online environment. The question now becomes how to we enhance and augment the physical with that digital aspect? It is a really exciting area for us to continue working in. What about our physical collections? The chart on the left gives you an idea of physical print loans. Our academic financial year runs August through July. You can see when the pandemic hit it was the middle bar chart. The bulk of our closure of our physical estate happened in that middle period. You can see in our most recent year, recently finished, that is when we saw the biggest decrease in print loans. Partly because we were using curb side or click and collect services, which didn't have too much attraction, not a great deal of use. We started to see, if you like, a breakdown in the physical collection for undergraduate course materials and a much more strategic move toward content. We understand content in a strategic way rather than thinking about we have these physical items we must put on the book list. The interesting thing is getting away from the collection mindset, there is the library collection. That is hybrid now, dynamic, continually in flux. As our reading list for undergraduate becomes 99% digital rather than including print and/or analog. And the other issue is obviously around the physical estate itself. I teasingly said call that the demise of the physical library. Perhaps the fall and rise of the digital library. Our library was closed physically for four months, our museum was closed for a similar period. That changed things. It was helpful for us because it enabled us to know we are not just about the physical estate. Our service is content, collections, the services we offer, the spaces we offer and the people, as our staff, that deliver those things. The close of the building enabled us to continue to do 75% of that at a minimum. That was really helpful because it enabled us to promote the digital as opposed to just being focused on the physical. The irony is with the reopening, the eyes come back to the physical estate, there was pressure on us, when are you reopening the building? What are the opening hours like? That really almost closed down again so the building became reduced just to its bricks and mortar. The challenge for us in that context is how do we get a better understanding of the use of physical space in our estate, but also the interrelationship between the digital and the physical within our estate itself. That is the thinking we have done and the background in terms of where we are at. I will leave it at that because I'm conscious of time. Thank you for listening. >> MODERATOR: Thank you, Stuart. That broader picture of how do we couple the digital and the physical and use both of those to fully meet the needs of our constituents and students and our communities. I think it is a really big question and I would love to come back to that once we have heard from all the panelists because I would like to talk about that tension we see beyond being able to reach more people possibly through the digital realm. You noted a 10 fold increase in usage, but how do we not leave people behind. I will ask our panelists to think about that as we move into the question and answer period at the end. Please welcome Gwen Mayhew, for the Canadian Centre for Architecture. I'm looking forward to what you have to share today. >> GWEN MAYHEW: Thank you. I would like to thank you for attending today's session and of course OCLC for organizing it. The CCA is developing a long term land acknowledge MMT in clap ration with the members of the kanien keha ka nation. We also recognize the many nations who are the original inhabitants and care takers of these lands and waters which is new home to many diverse first nations. Nuit and metis peoples. The CCA is a settler institution and we are working forward to fostering affirmative relationships with indigenous and other peoples across tiohtia ke mooniyang montreal. So for those of you not familiar with the CCA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture was originally founded by Phyllis Lambert, an architect and Philanthropist in 1979. Today we are a museum and research center focusing on contemporary architecture and how it might shape or reshape public life. We fulfill this mission with exhibitions, research programs, publications, collections, and more. Our collections include about 200 archives, prints, drawings, photographs, architectural models, toys and, of course, the library. Now, the library is part of the collections division and features about 250,000 items. All of the collections are united by the study room, now the study room here at the CCA is where library users including the CCA's staff, university students, faculty and architects as well as independent researchers come to view materials in our collection. So just to make it really clear, everything that is part of the collection division, all of the library books as well as the prints, drawings, photographs and archives can all be viewed in the study room here at the CCA. Now, the pandemic just as it had an impact on all of the institutions you have heard from today, had a pretty significant impact on us. You can see here in this e-mail we sent out on Friday morning, March 13 of 2020, we still expected to be able to have researchers coming into our building the following week. However, by the end of that day we realized that was no longer going to be a possibility. We canceled all of our researchers for the next two weeks and went to work from home with the idea that we would be working from home for about two weeks but, of course, we all know that ended up lasting quite a bit longer. We were finally able to reopen just for our staff in the summer of 2020. And then we were able to reopen to the public in September of 2021, just after Labor Day. So a few weeks ago. Now the transition to working from home was quite a bit difficult for us at first, but I know we all came to eventually appreciate and value the flexibility of being able to work from home. However, the requests from our researchers never stopped coming in, as you can see here on this e-mail from March 17. We helped remotely when we could. We are really very service-oriented people and we wanted to be able to continue to offer our services, but it wasn't always possible without physical access to our collection. There are many images on our website. We would help people find them and we had additional access to images on our servers and shared them when we could. I can say those early pandemic days felt lonely, we went from working from a building with 100 colleagues to work at home in our kitchens or living rooms. Many of us, like myself, had young children to keep us company. I was asked when asked to give this presentation, asked by OCLC, what other institutions were doing and pandemic practices I found inspirational. I will say an e-mail I received early on from the museum of Modern Art that went on this listserv I found helpful. She was looking to connect people because she felt, correctly so, many of us were going through some of the same issues. I ended up meeting with a number of librarians. Dan Lipcan and Leslie Cade. We would meet and exchange e-mails where we would go over the issues we were always facing. I found many institutions dealing with similar issues and having similar conversations. I saw the independent research Libraries Association, as well as the art libraries Society of North America. Once we were back in the building in the fall of 2020, we were able to develop a method for live streaming collection material from the study room. Now, remember that when our researchers would normally be coming in person or now they were able to remotely access our collection, they expected to be able to access not just our library collection, but the added challenge of trying to figure out how to share collection materials, prints, photographs, drawings and archives to our researchers remotely. We came up with a system where we would have a Zoom on a computer screen so we could see the researcher. And a second camera from our cell phones to show materials on the table. We tried more complex setups with a tripod and robot arms. We found our phones worked best because of flexibility. If we wanted to show a close detail, we could get very close to the item, from an aerial view, we could hold it way above the item. Now, the real advantage of this is is it would allow for researchers to access the collection that wasn't already digitized. It improved access to the collection for researchers who couldn't come to Montreal. Of course, even without a pandemic, researchers can't always come here. It is not necessarily a cheap city to get to or stay in. This is something we were really mindful of during the pandemic and thinking about what it is going to be like once it is all over. Now, of course, there are disadvantages to this approach as well. First of all, it could be extremely time consumes for our librarians to help researchers narrow down what they are looking for. If you think of archival research, a researcher can look at boxes of archival material in a few days. Having to do this remotely in the span of 40 to 50 minutes on a Zoom screen was challenging. I will say researchers found it helpful and preferred this kind of access to no access at all. There are other programs the CCA used to offer in session, such as our open sessions where local professors would bring their classes to the CCA study room and discuss the items in person while the students listened. We have research programs with Ph.D.s and Fellows which transformed to more remote approaches. We have been open now for just a few weeks to the public and my team is already feeling overwhelmed with these requests. While on the one hand we see all of the advantages of being able to share our collection more widely with researchers who cannot come in person, we also do now need to provide access and support to the researchers who are coming in person. With the same amount of staff as before. I know there were conversations during the pandemic, I don't know why it became a discussion for unfair treatment of museum workers. I noticed a lot of articles on art net news and instagram accounts like change the museum, where people were talking about the difficulties of working in a museum and there were so many conversations going on, there were also a number of headlines I noticed about museums, like the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney and the art Institute of Chicago unionizing for better treatment for employees. Was inspired by this article by Ellen spangler. Talking about museum staff burnout. When museums are better at preserving objects than staff. We can use these same ideas here. I'm a strong believer our staff is the museum's most valuable research and it is important to be mindful of their needs to avoid burnout and dissatisfaction. The administrations need to recognize institutional knowledge is valuable and think about how lessons we learned in the pandemic can help staff satisfaction in the future. As we go back to working onsite more, what can we do to improve our staff morale? Well, if there is one thing we discovered during the pandemic, we can all work from home and a lot of us like it. It is especially helpful for parents like myself or care taking experience for their older adults in their families or pets. I will say our team felt really busy before the pandemic and during the pandemic. Now we are trying to figure out how best to balance the request for remote research assistants and the requests for researchers coming back to the building in person. We are going to do our best by setting clear limits and boundaries for what kinds of support we can provide and I'm going to do my best to listen to employees across the CCA, share their concerns with administration and advocate for changes that improves staff satisfaction across the CCA. I'm other excited to hear what other presenters are going to speak to today. Thank you so much. >> MODERATOR: Thank you, Gwen. I will echo that our staffs are the strongest asset across archives, libraries and museums and figuring out how to support this staff through this tumultuous time needs a lot of grace and commitment to doing the right thing. All right. Let's move on to our fourth and final publicist. Lynette Schurdevin comes to us from the Rio Rancho Public Library in New Mexico. How her perspective impacted the last 18, 19 months. Thank you for being here, lynette. >> LYNETTE SCHURDEVIN: Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity to share on public libraries, especially what our public library has done since March 13, 2020, when I had to inform staff that they would be going home and not sure when we would be able to reopen the library. It was a sad day, but I'm glad to say as ei go through the story here we have reopened and doing quite well. When I was given the notice we would be closing the library, I really wanted to find ways by working with our managers, because they continued to stay in the building. Our library staff were on administrative leave during the time before we were able to reopen, but the managers and I sat down on a daily basis to talk about ways we could use this unusual time to reach out to our customers while our doors were closed and such. So we had to suspend library holds. People wanted to get their books and they couldn't do that. We had a few phone calls to take care of -- social media was a wonderful option along with our website. We used that to push out a lot of information to our public, our patrons. So I'm going to go to -- okay. I'm not moving. >> MODERATOR: You might need to hover -- there you go. >> LYNETTE SCHURDEVIN: There we go. I was fortunate, I am going to give a shoutout to our mayor in Rio Rancho, Mayor Hall. He called me and said I will be over Tuesday morning and we are going to do virtual story telling using his mayor's facebook page and did a shoutout. And we did story time every day at 10:00 a.m. for almost four weeks. And it was a wonderful opportunity. He challenged other mayors to do the same thing. But we were averaging 70 to 80 children, families, attending the story times live. Which is fabulous because that is one of our popular programs we offer to our community here in Rio Rancho. One of the features and I just have to do a shoutout, but we do have one of the local teachers is a member of the 501st storm troopers. She came in and read a Star Wars story to not only her students but anyone else on the feed today. I think we had 150 people watching that day. They engaged in a laser sword fight and that was a lot of fun. We had a lot of humor and fun. Our mayor is a great resource. And continually supported us through this closure we had at the library. During that time I also worked with the managers in figuring out ways we could reach our community as much as possible. Not only our library card holders, but also anyone who just wanted to know what was going on or wanted to have access for their family and children. So I went through a lot of library journals to look for ideas. I went through the WebJunction and some of their ideas that were coming out and also following the REALM Project. I didn't want to jump ahead of anything and make sure we were continually offering a safe environment for not only the library staff, but also for the public. So my staff did return to work the first part of May. We were not open to the public until mid May of 2020. We continues to do -- we had phase 1, phase 1.1, phase 1.5, and we continued to get input from staff also as to what would work and what wouldn't work. Also included sanitizing the products, books and media coming in through the book drop. We kept that open the whole time we were closed to the public. So we wiped down all the books and DVDs and music CDs and such as they came in. We set them out for a three-day period before we put them back on the shelf. We continued to create different ways of -- we first started with a newsletter for the families and then we moved forward to creating storytime online once we brought the library staff back. I bought the subscription for world book kids online. We did a lot to outreach to our families and we found that we didn't want to lose our teens, so my teen librarian took the time to find a way to offer dungeons & Dragons virtually. We had 20 to 25 participants at a time on that one virtual. And it is very popular. We also worked with our adult services librarian to find ways of offering virtual book talks. We called them literary musings. Basically based on a topic of a book that people would read. This one is "Islands". They have done one on dogs. You read a book about that topic and have a nice discussion. That continues on to this day. They have now moved to be in person, but it has been fabulous to continue to offer programs in a lot of ways and we learned how quickly it was important to get a Zoom account. Not only for our use services department, but for staff because we would have virtual meetings also because we wanted to maintain social distancing as much as possible. We also started looking out and finding what are other libraries doing during this time? And my staff came up with their own ideas or twists on these grab-and-go bags for parents. We knew children wanted to still read their stories, but they didn't know what books to -- what titles to ask for. So we set up an online forum or the family could call us and the reference librarian would take down the age of the child. If it was a boy or girl. What their likes are. I have a 5-year-old son who loves trucks. The librarians would then go and pull five, six books and put them in these red bags and when we did open to the public, which is mid May, we started by appointment only and we found the know of people were something that wasn't over our limit of people in the building, so we just set those out and to this day, we still do the grab & go bags. We started Doing Make & Take Kitts. We had a holiday Make and Take kit. They would stop by every Wednesday afternoon, early release day for some of the middle school and grade schools, so the parents would come up and pick up these Make & Takes and the Grab & Go bags. Wednesday was a very busy day. And they would have an activity to work on. We found the adults liked The Make & Take kits so we set up some for adults also. That middle one is a rock and they can paint a picture on the rock. We did some for teens also. I have a question, we are not quarantining any longer. We do wipe down some of the materials or books if they look like they have been well used at this point. But, no, we are not quarantining or sanitizing at this time. We also found that the grab & Go Bags for the children, the parents and adults, we have a lot of retired seniors in our community that love to read. They are like, well, there is something for the children. What about us? They couldn't browse the shelves any more for a title. We set up an online forum for the adults. They would tell us a genre they enjoyedenjoyed, an author they like, how many books they would like, whether they want large print or regular print. We created curelated literary lottery books for adults. It is very popular. I know several public libraries are doing that. I think I saw quite a few in the American Library Journal, I read the journals a lot to keep up on what was going on out there that was successful for many libraries. I know that many libraries and didn't matter if you are a public library, academic library or special library, digital services went -- mine increased over 2,000 downloads per month. We added Flipster so people could get to the magazine. We had Hoopla and Libby. We adjusted and added a lot of our book funding into digital services so we could increase that. It continues to stay up. A lot of people are using -- once they found the digital services or people who were using digital services. There is a question about event attendance digitally? Yes. We would average 25 to 30, which is normal in person, they would go back and do later also. We had good numbers on virtual programs. I asked the staff how can we continue to engage our public? So one of them was doing a Halloween costume event. So we did this virtually and people submitted a photo of their costume, whether it was children, families, pets, and then we went through and we had a group of staff members that went through and selected a winner. This is our winner last year. It was very popular. We did a few other virtual ones, such as your favorite book, and why. Just so we could go through a lot of different things. Utilize social media news letters so much. It was fabulous. So didn't address tech help virtually. We did have a librarian available so they could always contact us for questions if they weren't able to connect. It was amazing. We didn't have that many questions. I thought there would be more. It is amazing how much our community of 100,000, we had family groups that would work together and watch together. So that helped a lot of those virtual issues, too. So, we did a lot of the summer reading and throughout the year and including this summer, we did a hybrid summer reading program, but last year we did totally virtually, but we continued to work with a variety of authors or the museums in Las Cruces, the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum did a program on sheep that was very well attended. I can never say this right, the nanowrimo program. And we had one of the local authors present on doing the national writing event in November. Explora is the local science museum. They were wonderful. They used to come into the library on a regular basis to do science programs for the children. They now offer that virtually and so we offer it virtually. We had a wonderful cooking program demo that we had to run twice. We asked the chef if they mind we run it again. He said, no, go ahead, because it was so popular. There is a question in chat, consider unattended delivery options or lockers. Yes. I am looking into the book vending machines. I think that is another option I'd like to explore even further, so, thank you. I had to do these pictures because it was so much fun. These are my used services librarians and they work very hard to do The Take & Make Kits, the pulling items for the grab & Go Bags. We have jiggle And Jam, the music story time. We did one of those weekly. I finally actually early in 2020 pandemic time I went in and ordered some updated material or equipment, recording equipment so we would have good equipment to do recording. We got a YouTube channel through the city. We are a municipal library so they helped work with us so we could also give the captioning option on there also. But they continue to work hard and really appreciate what they do along with our adult services group also does. I also wanted to include, for safety of staff, which is my main concern and also the city, we did install glass, not plexiglas, but actual glass at all service points and we continue with those are permanent glass structures at our circulation desk and reference desk. Currently at this time, our Governor does have the mandate that in any public facility masks are required whether you are vaccinated or not. So this is another extra protection for staff. We also set up prior to opening up a little further, we did -- we showed our hours. At one time we were doing pick up by appointment only and we switched that over to just come in between the hours of 9:00 and 3:00 to pick up items. If you can see it over in the far right side is a book truck filled with donated books. Might have been extra copies, double copies, ones we didn't need for the collection, the Friends Bookstore wasn't open at that time, so we set them out. That cart would be full in the morning and by 3:00 it would be pretty much empty. We did that every day. I have two locations and we offered that service at both locations. We still have the cart of free books. People continue do donate books to us and we go through them and those we can't add to the collection we add to the public for them to just take, which is a wonderful service. Someone was asking about lending cooking kits. We haven't done that yet, but we are looking at doing a library of things lending, cake pans and cooking kits and such. I do want to extend that. I appreciate that. I think that is a wonderful idea. Before we opened up, staff had returned to the library. Part of that, we had our wood floors polished and waxed. We got the holds that people -- we opened up the option for customers to place holds. We had, I don't know, 500 holds we had to put on shelves for people to pick up. Staff were sanitizing. They continued to sanitize and to this day they continue to wipe down service point areas. These are protocols I want to continue to keep not only staff safe but the public safe. We've gone through a lot of Clorox Wipes, that is all I can say. But it has been great and we've been able to manage. When we first reopened we were also using alcohol wipes to wipe the self check machines of each person. After the vaccinations started, we did it as we felt we needed, every few times and keep alcohol wipes nearby if customers ask for them. They are continuely being wiped down and sanitized. Yes, we do have a story walk in our local park. It is very popular. We are looking at adding another up with. So thank you. With all the different phases, I had Phase 1.0 to GSH -- I got up to Phase 4, lending hot spots and chrome books. Our school used Chrome Books so we wanted to make sure if a parent needed a Chrome Book in the summer we made them available and regular laptops with a hotspot. Those continue to be very popular. And we also just got some additional hotspots through a grant and we are very pleased with that. New Mexico has a very up-and-down broadband. I drive up to Denver to see my brother from Rio Rancho and I have -- I hit more dead spots than anything else, so the state is really working hard to expand broadband to those areas that need it. So we offer different hotspots for the public to have that. That is ongoing in our Phase 4. I'm hoping I don't have to do a Phase .5, but we will see as we continue into the winter and hopefully have everyone stay safe. Finally I want to say thank you for letting me be a participant in this and sharing what I have done here in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. I have a lot of one-person libraries out here in our state. And I take ownership to help them out as we can by giving them ideas. A lot of those libraries have done some fabulous things also and many libraries throughout the pandemic when it began in March of 2020, they were offering the curbside service and wireless and setting up laptops outside for people to use. Our weather allows us to do that through pretty much the whole year. I do know that some public libraries throughout the country, a municipal library, they might have moved some staff over to other municipal city departments to help out where they were short until things settled down and got back together. I have seen a lot of articles on that. I did not have to move any of my staff. They all came back and they are working. They continue to work and they've done some fabulous things. So I know there were a couple of other questions in chat. I will get to those as we move along. I want to thank you. >> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Lynette. It is great to hear all your library has accomplished. We definitely had some comments come through and questions. I know you were able to address some of those. One of the things I had asked early on was that tension I think many of us felt with pulling together additional online opportunities and serving people virtually with our traditional face-to-face services. I would be curious to hear from any of the panelists how you see this evolving now? How are you addressing that tension? Is it tension at all? With so much participation in those virtual events, how are you thinking about balancing that as you start to increase face-to-face opportunities? >> LYNETTE SCHURDEVIN: I can address what I have seen. Our public is so happy we are open again. They want to come in and say hi to everybody. But they also want something to read or watch. It is -- it was surprising how much my numbers for attendance of public coming in has dropped about half. But my digital services have increased. So I know I have not lost a lot of my patrons and they are slowlyly coming back in. But we have continued a lot of our virtual services to, and that makes a difference. >> FREDERIC BERTLEY: Frederic here. Stuart nailed it. It is not about normal. There is a different baseline, a different level, a new steady state and it is really a hybrid. At Cosi, for example, we don't refer to the tension anymore. The reality is we've seen what we can do with these digital tools. They definitely have created a bunch of efficiencies, but people want to come back. It will be a blended balance as we web and flow in the pandemic. We are forever changed. Sometime in three to five years there will be a steady state, hopefully synergistic. >> MODERATOR: I like that. A blended balance as we move through this time. As Stuart was mentioning about, there is no new normal. Let's not talk about it that way. I think a lot of us can benefit from that approach of understanding how much we can be open to the evolution of these things changing that we might not have considered curbside services in our libraries. To see something take off and be able to provide services, for example, for people who may not easily come into the building for various reasons and you opened up a realm of possibility for people to access something if we limit ourselves to any one model, we might be missing a fantastic opportunity to do something that will truly serve our constituents. So being able to maintain that flexibility and find a new balance, I think, is going to be really helpful. I did see one of the things I wanted to note is that synergy happening at Cosi with the learning lunchboxes, Take & Makes, Grab & Go boxes, the idea of giving something they can do is so popular and being able to harness that in a range of ways from the complex situation and opportunity that Cosi is able to put into those boxes, I bet, using staff with great science backgrounds and instructional design capabilities, but that is a model that many of us can follow, that allows them to bring our institutions into their home and it is really a great way to think about expanding. >> FREDERIC BERTLEY: Kendra, if I could comment on that. You really nailed it. Our situation at Cosi, we were closed, laid off team members, survival guilt, it was a tough time. The kits allowed us to leverage the expertise and creativity of the team members. The people in our design department made it look beautiful, the people who did the exhibits. This is a pretty sucky time, but oh my gosh, my specific skill sets are needed to make this thing called a k IX t come alive. I love how you mentioned that. It was like a north star. We can do this and our skills are still needed in this weird ecosystem. Thank you for calling that out. >> MODERATOR: Absolutely. We are at the bottom of our time together. I want to thank all the panelists for being here and sharing your perspectives on how your institutions have been responding, what you see as being important as we move through the future of our institutions and I want to thank all of you who were here today as participants. We know you are continuing to invest time and thought into what your next thing will look like and how we continue to evolve and meet our services. So thank you for your contributions and your efforts and we look forward to staying in touch through the REALM Project. JP, anything as we close today out? >> Thank you so much, Kendra. Thank you to the panelists and to our captioner. I will be sending you an e-mail later today once the recording is posted. And I'll also send you a certificate for attending today. As you leave the Webexspace, I'm going to be sending you to a short survey, to collect feedback for our presenters and helps guide our ongoing programming. Thank you for taking the time to complete that. Thank you again. Everyone have a fantastic rest of your week and thank you for all the important work you are doing in your institutions to stay connected to your communities.