First of all, let me introduce myself. I'm Katie Wolfenden. I'm the Deputy University Librarian at the University of Manchester, and I'm going to be co-chairing today with my colleague David Wright from Southampton. David, do you want to just quickly say hello? Hello everyone, nice to see you all. My name is David Wright. I'm the Associate Director for User Experience at the University of Southampton Libraries. OK, thanks David. So our jobs as chair today just to keep the programme running smoothly for you all, and I'm going to take the first half of the session, and then David's going to pick up after we've had our presentations and chaired the discussion half of the session. So for now my first job is to just give you a little bit of background and context to start us all off. So first of all, just to reiterate something that I think has probably already been mentioned in the chat, but the aim of the RLUK space programme is to develop a forum where RLUK members can engage in open dialogue and share their knowledge and experience around spatial redesign and capital bills. As part of the RLUK strategy, the programme aims to hold three events annually and develop resources on themes of interest to RLUK members. This event is actually the third event and the last event of the 2022 series, but recordings from previous events can be viewed on the RLUK website if you want to catch up and have missed any. So today's event is going to involve three presentations that will showcase how research libraries are designing and reinventing their buildings and spaces with the aim of becoming more inclusive places where people from various backgrounds can enjoy their work and explore and learn together. OK, so without further ado, I'll start by introducing our first presentation. So the first presentation we have today is from Kirsty Lingstad and David Brown from the University of York. Kirsty is the director of library archives and learning services at the University of York and David Brown is the academic liaison librarian at the University of York. Kirsty leads on the development of services across a range of different areas with a focus on ensuring that these respond to user needs across the board. David co-managed the LibInspo competition, which first inspired the topic of conversation today, which is the family study room that's been developed at the University of York and that's going to be the feature of our presentation. So without further ado, I'll hand over to you, Kirsty, and you can get going. Thanks very much, Katie. Yes, so developing a family study room. So if we kick off with the first slide, this is really a room that's designed for students with children and they can study in there while supervising their children. So it's just to be really clear. It is supervised at all times by the parents or the guardians and carers that are coming to use the room. And I just thought I'd give a little bit of background around about the university strategy and why this is such an important development for us. So if I can go on to the next slide, please. So 2030 strategy very much positions us as the university for public good. And that means that we're very much looking to encourage more students from diverse backgrounds, which we're anticipating will really change the student population that will be at York in the future. And therefore initiatives such as the family study room really enable us to respond and cater for that as well. Next slide, please. So within the strategy, there are particular areas that really give us a focus around about it. And from the university strategy, we're looking very much to provide education that empowers, but within library archives and learning services, the piece that we're supporting is delivering engaging collaborative and learning experiences. And again, it's around about empowering all our learners, but also very much about putting our learners be they undergrad post grad. And again, by learners, we quite often think also about the sort of staff and the wider public because we're all learning all the time and putting them at the heart of all those sort of services that we're providing. Next slide, please. And again, this idea of creating a community without limits, a really sort of diverse community. The University of York from its very inception had internationalism at the very heart of its ethos when it was set up in the 1960s. And again, that's something that we continue to have at the heart of it, along with that sort of sense of belonging creating a sense of community university. And so, again, I've just sort of highlighted what we in library archives and learning services are very much focusing on and feel we can deliver to this is that inclusive, but also inspirational environment that we create through the facilities that we run and enable people to connect, but also enable them to take on board that learning. So these are all underpinning factors which make things like the family study room are really important development and mean that we're going to look at a range of different audiences over the next few years and develop more specialized spaces to support them. But if we can go to the next slide, I'm sure you're all eager to see what the family study room looks like. So here you go. And at this point, I'm going to hand over to David, who really led through and took the development to its completion. Thanks. Thank you very much, Kirsty. So Kirsty's asked me to pick up here with the wonderful job of showing you some photos of the family study room for the trade off for that nice job, as I also get to tell you about some of the challenges that we went through as well. So I'll do my best to give a rosy picture, but also some of the realities of how we got to this point as well. So this is a view of the family study room as you enter the space, which gives a nice kind of contrast of the two halves of the room really. You can see it over towards the back there. That's the boring bit. That's the study part of the room that we have. We have four desks set up there, two with PCs, two just study desks. So those are where the students will work. And you can see we've set up the room so that those spaces overlook the lovely play area here. And this is a space that we've designed with mixed aid range in mind. So it's really for any child. The university doesn't have a set definition of that, but we determined that to be anyone from a newborn right through to primary school age. So probably under the 12s was our target audience for this. Because of that mixed aid range, we had to be mindful of what we purchased in terms of toys and other games and equipment in the room. We used a specialist supplier to nurseries for the furniture in the space, which looks really really nice. And we've got a mixture of things, books and toys, all of which we tested with a choke tester to make sure that there were no small parts. So I'll just run you through a few photos of the space to give you a real sense of what it looks like. And it's really nice to be at this point where I can now show you some of the interesting things that we were able to do. So this is an alternative view of the play space to give you a better sense of how that all works together. So we've got a couple of different sized tables and chairs for the different mix of kids in there. We've got a comfy seating area in the corner there, which is sort of reading nook and various bits of furniture for the storage of the toys and games that we purchased. We were deliberately cautious in what we purchased for the space. I'll talk a little bit more about why later on, but as you can imagine, there are lots of considerations for a space like this. And we didn't want to purchase a lot of things that we would then have to take away later if they didn't prove to be workable. But we also wanted to leave room for students to suggest things to us. So we have a reasonably minimal starting point, but which we can add on later through user feedback as well. So to give another view, this is the reading nook. I know I want one of those toadstalls at home as well, but alas it doesn't quite go with the rest of my home decor. But you never know, you can make it work. But it gives a sense of the space there, which is great. This shot is shamelessly set up. It's my wife and our two-year-old son who we volunteered to come and test the room for us. And he had a lovely time. So that was the first kind of seal of approval that we had for the space really, which was great to see it being used. Actually since then we've run inductions with the students. Some of them have brought their kids along, which has been great, and the kids haven't wanted to leave. So that to me says everything you need to about how that space works really. It's beloved by the children, which is kind of what we were going for. And another shot here, which really is the kind of ethos of the room, a child playing happily while their parent is able to get some work done in the background there. So that kind of gives a nice sense of what we are aiming to achieve really with this space. So I'll say a little bit more about why we introduced the room. Kirsty's given an introduction to the university strategy, which really gave us the background and the context where we knew that this was something that could be achieved within the university. The first kind of impetus, the catalyst for this came from our Libinspo competition, which is an innovation competition that we've run twice previously. We are running it again this academic year. And essentially that invites students to submit their great ideas for the library. We have a competitive process, which results in around six students coming to pitch their idea. And the winner is kind of crowned the library innovator of that year. And then we commit at least to exploring that idea, if not making it a reality if we can do. So the family study room was the winning idea of the 2020 competition. Sadly, of course, the world changed quite dramatically very soon after that competition culminated. So we weren't able to act on the idea as quickly as we would have liked to. But we have the opportunity to revisit that ahead of this academic year. So that was great to be able to go back to that piece of work. And actually when we started our work in earnest looking at the feasibility of the space, it really shone a light on the pressures, the challenges faced by this group of students. Students with children is the term that we use at the University of York. You may otherwise know them as student parents, another term used for that group. And the research that we did, of course, you know, we librarians, we did a literature review on this, really highlighted a lot of the time pressures that these students have, but also the sense of a fractured identity that they have to almost carve out different parts of their study time and their lives in order to be mum or dad one moment, then a student, then maybe an employee and they've got a job somewhere else as well. The introduction of a family study room allows them a chance not to have to carve out the identity in quite the same way that they can be both a student and a parent at the same time. They don't have to make a choice essentially about what they'll do. And it gives them a sense of belonging to the university. It makes our services available to this group in a way that maybe they weren't before. We've never actively excluded children from the library. We don't have a policy that says they're not welcome. But that's quite a far and away difference from very visibly showing that they are welcome. And that's what something like the family study room allowed us to do. When we started this project, we worked with students with children and colleagues in our student hub to get their feedback. I wanted to share with you a couple of the quotes that the students gave us early on in that process. And so I will read them because I think that they give us a really nice sense of why we did this. So this was one quote from a student. I got so excited and looking forward to using the room with my son. Whenever we pass by the library, he points to the library and says, look, your school is there mum. Sometimes I left him home and went to study and I needed to explain where I'm going. And I don't want to give a negative impression on him about studying that reminds him it's something causing separating his mum from him. The family study room can help me to introduce him to the library as a nice place where we can spend time together as well. It will definitely support my well-being. A couple of other short quotes, it would allow me to study in the library, which I currently can't do. So even though we wouldn't have discouraged that student to come at all, this space enables them to do it in a different way. And finally, it would make me much more likely for me to be able to finish my course, which is a really fundamental difficulty for these students. They do find it more difficult to find time to study retention is a problem for this group. And those early quotes really gave us the kind of impetus to carry on. I'll talk in a moment about some of the challenges that we faced in this project. It's not always been straightforward, but actually having that as our backdrop helped us to push through some of those challenges because we knew that it was going to be really valuable for the students who used that space. We did try to involve users in our planning wherever possible. You can imagine that there was a very broad group of stakeholders with an interest in this project. So we tried to involve them all as much as possible to shape our approach and how we worked the project. That, of course, included students with children, our own staff, who had obviously interest in how we would develop the policies, the procedures around the space. And we worked with a lot of different departments within the university. There was the student hub within the student services team. They have a dedicated member of staff who works with students with children. We also worked, of course, with security and with the health and safety departments across the university. So a huge range of people. I don't think I've ever worked on a project with such a large list of stakeholders to consider. At the start of the process, we asked students and children to complete a short survey for us. So that was trying to understand about their needs, what they might want from a space like this. And we also invited students to join our user advisory group. So that was a group of interested students and others who would be able to provide us with more detailed feedback about our proposals. So, for example, they helped us when we were initially writing the terms and conditions for using the space, but also with testing our induction process as well. So that was really invaluable just to make sure that we were pitching things in the right way to that audience. I've mentioned a couple of them already. One of the challenges of this space is rules, rules and more rules. There really is no getting around it. We had to have a lot of rules in place for using the family study room, as you can imagine. That was a real key part of our safeguarding procedures for the space. So to name just a few of those rules, students have to initially register for the room. So we have a Google form that they complete to tell us that they are a student with children. We don't ask for proof beyond that. We take it as read really that they would only want to use that space when they have a child. So they would get in touch with us through that Google form. We contact them to arrange an induction session. That's a mandatory part of the process where we invite them to attend roughly a 30 minute induction. We show them the space, we talk them through the important health and safety considerations, expectations around behaviour in the space, all those kind of different things. And it's an opportunity for them to ask us questions, of course, as well. If they're happy to, they're wanting to proceed, we ask them to sign a copy of our terms and conditions. You can see the terms and conditions on the family study room web page if you would like to do that. They're fully available there for anyone to see. Students are expected to book a seat at the moment before they come or when they arrive, they can book a seat at that point as well. And we ask them to sign in and out as well, which is another important aspect of our safeguarding process. So we know who actually is there and we have a way to contact them in an emergency if we need to. Now, all of that is as you would expect in many ways. We need to have these rules in place in order to ensure that the room is safe and secure for the students and their children who are using it. But, of course, that is slightly at odds with the needs of this group. They're a time or group as was evidenced in our literature review. So it's a challenge in some ways where we're asking a group who already have to jump through lots of other hoops in their lives to go through more of those. So it's a tension in some ways between those two things. I would say so far users do seem happy that the rules are there for a purpose. One of the challenges we have seen is pushing back on those rules. You're asking, well, you've allowed this. Can we allow something similar as well? So, for example, at the moment we don't allow partners in the room so the student can come with their child. But at the moment we don't allow guests or external people outside the university to use the space. That's at least during our review period. So it's been helpful for us to have a review period built into the process because it allows us that checking point to really revisit those policies. So we're monitoring the policies. We're monitoring the feedback from our users in particular. And we will, as part of our review closure, be looking to reduce whatever bureaucracy red tape we can do to make the process as streamlined as possible for our users. You will not be surprised at my next slide. I'm sure many of you who have tried to do such a space will have come across similar issues. We had a complex group of stakeholders on this project and that inevitably meant some quite challenging conversations along the way in that process. It will be no surprise to anyone to hear that one of those challenging conversations was with our colleagues in our health and safety department at the university. When we look back on those conversations, they're probably inevitable. Quite understandably they were raising issues around the potential risks involved in the room, lots of red flags around the processes that we needed. And that ultimately was why we've had things like the review period, booking and signing in and out were all processes that essentially were a byproduct of the conversations we had with health and safety. I think one of the challenges that we faced and on reflection of what we might have done differently was the point at which we involved our health and safety colleagues in the conversation. We undertook quite a lot of feasibility work before we invited them to take part in the project. I think they felt that maybe the horse had bolted. We'd done too much work before we involved them. But from our point of view, of course, we wanted to ensure that this was something we could actually do before we started talking to other colleagues in the university. So there's perhaps a difficulty there around expectations. They I think would have perhaps expected to be involved at the earlier stage of the process, but we wanted to have got to a certain point before we did that. I think ultimately it helped us that we had the backing of senior colleagues within the university. And as Kirsty's outline, we also had the university strategy behind us as well. If you want to see a little bit more of the feasibility work that we did, I've linked here the brochure that we created. We shared that with lots of our different stakeholders and that includes links to the literature review that we conducted as well. As well as the family study room, we realized quite early on that that wasn't going to work for everybody. In fact, students told us as much in the feedback that we received from our students for children. Many of them absolutely loved the idea, but others it just wasn't right for them. Their child would not work well in that situation or neither would they. So as well as the room, we decided to introduce a range of measures to help this group. So that includes a book retrieval service where we'll get books from the open shelves for them. We don't have that service. Otherwise they have longer return periods, longer loads on laptops. So all of those adjusted services hopefully allow that group of users to engage with the library in a way that they haven't been able to previously, even where they're not able to use the room that we have created for them from there. So I'll briefly just mention the impact on where I'm running on time. So we are roughly halfway through our six month pilot. We've conducted inductions for 23 students so far. So modest usage on the room, but we do expect that to grow fairly gradually, particularly with word of mouth over time. We haven't really got much formal feedback from students yet. We will be doing that as part of the closure for the review period. But anecdotally, students are very happy with the space. They speak very highly of feeling valued by the institution of being noticed, of being able to use the library more effectively than they were previously. And that's really encouraging for us because that's really why we did this project in the first place and why it's been worth working through some of the challenges that we've seen. So I'll close my presentation there. I'll be happy to take questions later in the Q&A. Thank you very much for listening. Many thanks, David and Kirsty. That was an absolutely fascinating presentation and one that I know is prompting quite a lot of questions that will no doubt come back to you later. But for now, we'll move on to our second presentation. So the next presentation is from Phil Cheesman, who's the Associate Director for Academic Services in the Library at Lancaster University. Phil's areas of responsibility include teaching, engagement, library special collections and archives. And he took a leading role in the planning and development of the library extension and in the development of the library vision. And he's going to talk to us today about the work that's taking place at Lancaster in relation to their new extension, which was launched in April 2021 and how that's intersected with the equality, diversity and inclusion elements of the library strategy. So over to you, Phil. Thanks very much. Can I just shake if you can hear me okay? Yep, good. Just share my screen. Can you confirm for me that you can see that okay? Yeah, we can see that Phil, thank you. Brilliant. Okay, so thank you very much. So I'm going to talk to you about our library, the most recent extension that we opened in 2021. But really just focus in on how that's enabled us to realise some of the work we've been doing in our vision around EDI. So just moving on. Okay. So as I said, what I'd like to do is to share a little bit about our vision for the library space, first of all. And then to show you how that space has helped us to realise some of those aspects of our vision around EDI. So the space itself, you're looking at part of the extension here. You can see that it's an open study area. Notable features are the very large lampshades, which are as big as they look here. And also the living wall in the background. But behind it, you can see the dark curtains, which lead into some new spaces that are more flexible. And I'm going to share some of how we've been using those spaces. And very much our vision for the space was that it should promote the work we do around partnership and collaboration. So the work we did in preparation for the extension took place almost five years ago now. With some UX work to look at how the building was being used, what our students wanted from it and other library users, how they preferred to work. And it was clear that certainly we needed more space and we needed a higher quality space that met a variety of different needs. But also that we needed some different kinds of spaces. So we needed space where we could have dedicated support for students that didn't exist in the library at that time. But also space to connect with our research communities and to support ambitions for reaching out to the wider community. So the extension opened in 2021. It provided us with a range of new spaces in addition to around 450 additional study spaces. Predominally on the ground floor, there are a series of rooms that include the Digital Studio, which is a bit of a workshop area. Two research labs that are focused for collaborative work and you're looking at one of them here. You can see that they are fairly flexible spaces and adjacent to them is an exhibition and event space that again is very flexible. And you can just see at the side here a partition wall that can be open and closed to allow us to reconfigure the space. And that's really important in terms of this being a prime location within the library and needing to be flexible, but also to have a clear identity. On B floor, we have an area called supported learning, which is the focus for our faculty library and learning development teams and work they do in the library when we're not out here working in the faculties. But we've also reviewed some of the other areas of the library and how we use those and being more creative in the ways in which we're using them. So moving on to think about the library's role in EDI, as we were developing our library vision, we had a lot of conversations with students and staff right across the university, as well as amongst our own library teams to try and pull out what was the role for the library and we were really challenged by some of the comments that came back that really saw us as leaders in this area and identified the opportunities and challenged us to make sure that we saw this as a core part of what we do. So our library vision at its heart is pretty clear. Well, first of all, it says we'll place the library at the heart of what we do. We'll place the heart at the heart of the university's community and then it has these three words, we'll connect, we'll innovate and we'll include. And they really underpin all we do and we keep returning to them again and again. And you'll see that they're represented in five themes that are illustrated at the bottom of the slide here and central to those five themes is equality, diversity and inclusivity. And it's that that I'll focus on now and what I'm going to do is to share some of how the building space has enabled that kind of activity. So our equality diversity and inclusivity theme includes a commitment that will represent all the diverse communities that make up our university that will provide an inclusive and supportive and safe environment where everyone belongs, but also where they can all contribute to our distinctiveness. For us, it's a richer, more lively, more inclusive and effective space when it has a wider range of contributions. So we think we've got a lovely library. People tell us it's lovely. But something that we've got to say is that we have a wider range of contributions. So we think we've got a lovely library. People tell us it's lovely. But sometimes there's a subtext there. Is it a library that's for me? And that may be because they see barriers. It can be an intimidating space for the new students as well as for the public. They see a lot of library users studying and very engaged in their work and wonder what the library has to offer them. And certainly our professional services staff have also said it's a great academic space, but we're not quite sure it's for us. So those are some of the things we've been trying to challenge over the last year to 18 months. As we explore what EDI means for us as a library service and how the library building can contribute to breaking down some of those barriers, helping people to feel that the library represents them, but also using it for new opportunities to engage. I'm going to show you some examples. A real smattering of things that we've done over the past year and a half and how we're about to inform the ways we're thinking about EDI. So in common with many of you for a long time now, we've celebrated diversity through a variety of events. And we started very much, I guess, within our comfort zone by having book displays and library guides, and other ways of showcasing our collections to coincide with Black History Month or LGBT plus month, other annual events like that. And we very much continue to do that, and it is very much welcomed by our library users. So that, I guess, hasn't been impacted by the space so much. We've always been able to do that, but it has become more prominent in terms of being very visible at the entrance to the library. And we've had numerous comments from people saying the library seems much more the kind of place that represents me because of the very open and visible ways in which we acknowledge the diversity of our community of users. But we've started to explore other ways in which we can be more active in this area. So that began with things like reading groups when we were mostly online, progressed to author events and film screenings and panel discussions in the library. And some of the spaces we have now enable us to do that whilst study can continue on for other library users. So the events that we ran very much as one off or ad hoc events have gradually developed into a programme of activities so that we now have a coordinated programme of events that recognise and celebrate diversity. And all of those events now are very much running partnership with others. So that might be running, working in partnership with student groups, with local community groups, all with others, with academic staff as well, to ensure that we use every opportunity to bring people together and to learn from one another. And it has presented us with some nice challenges to have and that we get a lot of interest in using library space. And so for this year we've started to introduce an event proposal form that enables us to get a good sense of what people's expectations are for using the space. And for us to get an idea of whether it aligns with the kinds of activities that we feel the library has a role in promoting. So that's been a useful way of practically managing expectations for the space and helping to promote this kind of activity. A more recent example just to give you an illustration of how things have moved on for us over the past year or so. So when we celebrated Pride Month in 2021, as I said, we had book displays and online resources and a range of things and those continued. In this past year, it was an opportunity to work with not only university, LGBTQ plus groups, but also those in the city as well. And to bring them together with our university community and have a much richer programme of activity. You can just see here the wall of appreciation, which I don't know how many post-it notes are there at their number. And one of the events that we held in our event space, which was a storytelling event for children of university members. So events throughout the year have coalesced around two key periods for us, and those were our lively festivals. So the first of these was part of our opening of this space. And both of them focus very much on building communities on well-being, but this year in particular on the quality diversity and inclusion. It's a theme that does bring people together and it does enable us to reach out to white communities beyond the university. And in terms of being inclusive, one of the things that we're very much trying to do wherever possible is to ensure that these events are hybrid or have potential for people to join or to view recordings afterwards. And we were staggered to see that one of these events as part of the festivals had over 67,000 views. And it just showed us actually what might seem like a small event to us had a reach far beyond our expectations. So working with in partnership with groups has been key to, I think, the success of some of the events we've had and certainly be a really rich experience for us. Just three quick examples. Lancaster Black History Group is a grassroots group based in Lancaster that has worked with schools and colleges and with the university over the last couple of years. To understand the context of Lancaster's historic role in transatlantic slavery and through that to provide educational experiences and opportunities for all of us to learn about how Black History impacts us still today. And how we learn from those past experiences. And this work with this group has been fantastic in terms of opportunities for students on campus, but also bringing new people into the library. So we hosted a conference with the group. They used our special collections to undertake some of the research that underpin the project work. It was a really good opportunity to understand how a library could intersect with work around the EDI at all stages throughout a piece of work. A second more recent example from earlier that this term was some work we've done as part of our cybersecurity outreach. And this involved using our library space to host an event for around 70 year nine school girls from six schools across the region. Using some of the kit that we have in our digital studio to really fun hands on set of activities to explore areas like virtual reality, robotics, etc. And this is the first of several that we're planning for the coming year as part of a partnership with the School of Computing and Communication. So a third example, one that is very much more immediate in the event just earlier this week is the work we've been doing with the city refugee and asylum seeker community groups. It's, it's again, a real eye opener for us in terms of understanding not only that the challenges that refugee and asylum seeker community space, but that these groups face in terms of very little funding to support the fantastic work that they do. So some of the things that we are working with them on. We introduced a community card last year that allow provides free access to a library for anyone that wishes to join and member outside of the university wishes to join. But but of course challenge for this particular group is just getting to the to the university which is three and a half miles south of the city. So just working out challenges around transport, but also what can we offer them in particular as a group and so we're working with this, this group of people to develop community collections. As part of the outreach work that we do partnering up with the University of Cumbria to see how we can support both access to the university in the library, but also what ways of working within and with these communities. So I'm conscious of time so I'm going to run quickly through a couple of slides now, just to say exhibitions. We've been more creative in our approach to exhibitions since we opened this space is just an example where our university cleaning staff were creating works to show as part of an exhibition that services the fantastic work. They've always done for us, but in particular, the often inward throughout the period of the pandemic, and this is showcased now within the library as part of an exhibition and now permanent display. Exhibitions involved partnering with researchers have brought new dimensions to spaces in the libraries. You can see the stairwell area and the entrance where the marketplace and I exhibition explored the perceptions of disability and the experiences of disabled people in the commercial sector. And listening with your ear to the wall exhibition that is an audio exhibition that showcases isolation often as a result of long term illness. These exhibitions, we've had, I think, seven or eight this time, so it's really become a food focus for us. Just a couple of final slides. I haven't mentioned much about research. Of course, open research and open resources is very much part of our EBI agenda and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our digital collections platform. And there has been some value that the library space is provided for that by enabling us to showcase exhibitions that bring the research outputs from these collections to like in a new exciting way. So the work that we've done in the building has been a real opportunity for our staff to be involved and has been, as I've said a couple of times, a real learning opportunity for us and it does feel very much like we're learning and developing together. And the connections that the space have provided, or the opportunities that the space has provided to connect with new groups has really benefited us and has been the basis for the majority of our staff development activity over the past couple of years. But it's also benefited our students, and I've not said too much about students, but they are absolutely at the centre of this. So whether it's through events that we've offered, like the Mending Station event where students came to learn basic mending skills or performance by students as part of our festival and induction events, or working in partnership with them in our supported learning area and creating resources. The students have been right at the centre of this activity and I've been talking for another 20 minutes about what it is that they've provided. Just today, as I sit in the building downstairs, we had a student society at the entrance talking about entrepreneurship and activity in the local community. We have an exhibition around providing as part of our disability history month celebrations and recognition in the foyer. It's, of course, it's as well AIDS Day and there's a talk this evening in our exhibition, an event space that students are leaving on. And I'll shortly be joining an event where a bunch of student reps will be working with us as we look at areas around academic integrity and developing support for students in that domain, very much working in partnership with them there. So that's been a whirlwind and I think I've possibly just exceeded my time so I'm going to come to a close there and thank you for your time and I'll just stop sharing my screen. Thank you so much Phil, that was a really inspiring presentation, lots of things for us to think about and no doubt you will see plenty of questions on that when we move into our discussion session. But for now we're going to move on to our third and final presentation and this is from Oliver Ierson from the University of Birmingham. Oliver has worked at the University of Birmingham for over 15 years, fulfilling various roles related to teaching and learning space design and support. His current role is his head of learning space development based within library services and that involves managing the ongoing development of centrally managed teaching and study spaces across campus. So Oliver's going to talk to us today about the new main library building and he's going to give us an accessibility focused tour of that space. I'm going to move on to discuss how the principles of inclusion are applied to various other student facing spaces across campus. So over to you Oliver, thank you. Thanks Katie. Yeah so a little caveat while I'm getting set up. I was only informed that I was presenting at this a couple of days ago. So this is a thrown together tour for you, whistle stop tour, which may well not run to the full 20 minutes, but that's fine because we've run over a bit and there are plenty of questions for when I've finished as well. So hopefully this will work out nicely. So yeah, as Katie mentioned on the head of learning space development, you may notice that there's no mention of library in that jobs title. That's because until a few years ago, I wasn't part of the library at all, and I did just focus on the management of teaching spaces and study spaces on campus. But due to various quirks of the sort of university bureaucracy, our department was merged with library services a few years ago. But actually in that time we've realised how many synergies there are between those two things. And that sort of broad picture of study spaces across the campus is something that I'm going to come back to towards the end of the presentation. So just to start off, I mean we're talking about accessibility within the library building accessibility I think is almost becoming a sort of outmoded term and I think inclusion inclusivity is probably a better term for what we're talking about. But what do we mean by accessibility because it's traditionally thought of as provisions made to benefit physically disabled. But increasingly that definition is being expanded to mean a service that meets the needs of all users irrespective of their personal circumstances. And that's embodied quite nicely by this little quote that I handily pulled from our very own university website, whoever wrote this has done a grand job. But so that's, as a university, we're striving to make the campus as accessible as possible for all users. In practice, this means removing existing barriers and designing out potential barriers that might prevent students, staff and visitors having fair and equal access to learning resources, buildings and equipment. I think that's a really nice way of putting it because there's now ambiguity there. There's no specific sort of concessions made to whatever group it is. It's just saying it needs to be as accessible as it possibly can be for everybody who's going to be using it. And as a building, the main library is a great place to sort of look at all those features that can sort of be put in place for accessibility. The main library was built, well, it was opened in 2016, took about three years to build, I think, so it's a relatively new building. And it's very much at the heart of the university experience. I mean, as Phil mentioned, the library is at the heart of the university. I literally is and that picture there you can see what we call the green heart, which is a green space right in the centre of campus. And the library overlooks that. And it's a place where all students are going to spend some time at some point during their university journey. And so it really embodies that sort of idea of inclusivity. So, yeah, I'm going to give you a little tour of the main library, sort of focusing on aspects of it, which are specifically catering for accessibility issues. And then I'm going to broaden it out and look at some other spaces around campus, which sort of pick up on some of those features as well. And to see that, because it's such a new building, a lot of the accessible features were designed into the building from the outset. So there's certain parts of the building makeup, which were designed to be more inclusive, much more so than older buildings on campus. We've got a real sort of mixture of different styles of architecture from different periods on this campus from the central sort of university builders, built at the sort of end of the 19th and start of the 20th century through to a large portion which were built in the 60s. And when you compare, though, particularly those 60s buildings to the more modern builders, you can really see a massive gulf in the way that accessibility was treated. Some of those older buildings are full of very narrow corridors, narrow doors, tiny lifts, really difficult to find your way around, particularly if you're physically disabled. So a couple of features here we have fully automated front doors. That's the main front door to the library building. Nice wide doors, nice wide spaces when you get inside. Really nice big lifts with braille on the panels. There's four of these lifts. They all feature verbal announcements on all floors for people who may be visually impaired. There's also visual firearms alerts for hearing impaired. That's to allow the building. We have things such as power assisted, height adjustable desks throughout the study spaces. That's something sort of put in a standard and a put everywhere. There's not just sort of areas where there's accessible desks, you know, they're included wherever possible within the sort of standard furniture. And as I'll come on to a bit later. We're able to sort of reconfigure those spaces and move those height adjustable desks around quite easily because of the design of the building. Here we've got a dedicated space for students who might require specialist software and hardware. So that's a bookable space, which anybody needs to use those services can book via the front desk. That we have quite a few of these bookable private study spaces. Maybe that students have issues with studying in open spaces that may have special requirements, which may require a more private space. So that's got a standalone booking system, as you can see on the door, there's a little lock on there and you have to have it booked before you can actually use the space. We have various fully accessible changing areas that as you can see again, this is something that's because it was designed into the building from the very outset. It's really sort of top quality example of this kind of feature. You've got a really big nice large accessible space for disabled change and etc. We've actually got a hoist mechanism here for this table. That sort of is combined with toilet facilities and shower facilities throughout the building and all follow that sort of lead that all agenda neutral with toilet facilities in the building. And there's various sort of disabled sort of features on each floor of the building as well. So as I mentioned, one of the key things that we sort of took into consideration when designing the library was future proofing it. So not only making it tick all the boxes accessibility wise for how we see that now. But also looking forward to how things are going to change and recognize that we don't know what those changes will be but making it as easy as possible in the future to adapt the space to make it better as things change in the future. So, as you can see from this slide and the next one, we've got the library study areas are very large open plan spaces minimal structural walls. And that allows us to split up the spaces in different ways as we see fit. This space actually has changed quite a lot since COVID beforehand. We had a lot more of these sofas with sort of high backs all along this area. But student feedback has sort of told us that that's less what they're into in terms of the study library study space. So more concerned with having enough spaces to cater for everybody wants to use the library, which is why I brought in sort of more of these individual study desks. And you see this is another room adjacent to that one again, big open plan space. We can create divisions within the space using the furniture and using these little portable screens. But what this also illustrates this exciting photo on the left, which is a floor on it. It may not look much, but actually the whole floor is a sort of floating floor mechanism with power bars that run underneath it all the way through the building. Which means that pretty much any way you can stick one of these gromits is pretty easy to do. You just cut a hole in the floor tile and you can add a power socket pretty much any way you want, which means that the whole lot of the space of these study spaces is really reconfigurable. So this space in particular, I mean, has actually recently included a temporary office setup over COVID for one of the international student teams, which we set up in the far corner of the room. We're able to do that again because we could put a load of extra power in power and network facilities for them. Just the right of where I took this photo at the moment is a shop front for the university in house printing team. Again, they've just put up some temporary partitions around the area that they're using and have turned that into a fully functional shop area where people can come and pick up the dissertations, get things printed, etc. So it's a really good example of how these spaces can be changed around to meet the evolving needs of the student community. Moving on from things that were designed into the building, I've got a few examples of things that have changed since the building was open in response to some of those emerging situations. Cost of living is a big topic at the moment, and so we've made various sort of changes to help students who may be struggling in that respect. So we've got long and short-term laptop loans for people who may not be able to afford the technology they need for their course. We have microwave and hot water facilities for people to, so it's more affordable for people to bring their own food in while they're studying. And that's something was, as again, I'll mention later on that we're sort of expanding into other spaces, not just the library. Very similar to actually what the previous presentation we've started a dedicated well-being zone, which is just a space for students to sort of take some time out of studying just relax a bit. So, obviously, we've got more soft furnishings, we've got plans, so it's a nice relaxed area, a bit away from the sort of hubbub of the main library spaces. And we have invested in this sort of large collection of well-being sort of focused texts, and that ranges from mental health awareness sort of stuff through to cookbooks, that sort of thing. So a really nice collection, which we've added. We've also done things such as avoiding student fines wherever possible, we just have a policy of obviously like many libraries do of finding people for late returns, but that's sort of been pushed right back so we can avoid finding people wherever possible. And we also offer free interlibrary loans and free scanning facilities, that sort of thing, and sort of recognition that students may not have quite as much disposable income as they may have done in the past. So as I mentioned at the start, I mean, there's a crossover, particularly within my role between various different university spaces, but I think that students probably don't recognise the differences between spaces as much as those spaces do, so here we've got sort of an example of library space on the left, some non-library study space, and then also teaching space. Again, I mean students won't recognise the difference between library study space and other study space, they'd expect it to be, it's university study space to them, and they'd expect to see the same sort of facilities in both of those types of spaces. The same with teaching space, and actually we actively encourage students to use, take the teaching space as study space when the rooms aren't booked for teaching. As standard now, all of our teaching spaces have a digital screen just by the door, which shows the timetable for that day, so that any sort of one or two hour slot where the room isn't used for teaching, we encourage students to go in and use it as an extra study space. So the sort of principles for accessibility that I've mentioned in terms of the library also apply to all these other spaces, just to sort of make an inclusive campus rather than just standalone inclusive buildings. I'll just give you a few examples of those sorts of spaces and what we kind of do to cater for it. So this is actually a relatively recently adapted space in the main Aston Webb building, which is the Big Red Brick building at the heart of the University of Birmingham, which you may well be familiar with. The same to use it on most news reports about universities in general, Aston Webb shows up in the background somewhere. So this is on the lower ground floor level, used to just be offices, but it's been opened out. And as you can see, it's a similar principle to the library spaces and they've taken out as many of those sort of internal walls as they can to make it open and accessible as possible. And we try and provide a range of different spaces because we're in recognition of the fact that people all study in different ways they will have different requirements for study space. So on the right, you can see this is actually a sort of private area just at the back of this main room, which is a silent study space. We also have a small computer room here. There's a more relaxed area just over here with sofas and then a sort of group work area on the left here. Another really good example of this sort of broad range of spaces is this is a room called the Mason Lounge in the Arts Building. The idea behind this was to sort of create a home from home for students. And that's really something that is, again, something to think about in terms of accessibility is that a lot of students may have needs and requirements which they don't necessarily disclose to the university. It might not be something that I think is that series, but may affect how they study or what they're able to do in terms of coming to campus and study. So, for example, I mean, students may not have the greatest home set up and may not have an appropriate place at home to study, or even to just relax and, you know, take half an hour for themselves. So this part of this space is sort of made up to look like a living room. It's a more social sort of space, obviously the kitchen dining room sort of style table there for actual studying, but sofas and sort of coffee tables as well. It's actually a cafe area at the back here.  And then next to the cafe, you've got a more sort of kitchen dining kind of area, which has more of a cafe kind of vibe. All those sorts of things, so as I say, a recognition that people study in different ways, and that you may not know what limitations and sort of circumstances people are in. And so you've just got to do your best to kind of design a space that ticks as many boxes as you possibly can for as many different people. And once teaching rooms, as I said, I mean, the bulk of my job is actually the sort of major refurbishment of teaching rooms across campus. And so there's various things which we now fit as standard to those teaching rooms. So on the left we have a height adjustable lectern. So it's not just students obviously that we're talking about in terms of accessibility. There's lecturers who may also benefit from that. Height adjustable lectern to make it usable by most people possible. And just as in the library, height adjustable desks are now fitted as standard in all teaching rooms. Particularly in flat floor room, we try and put those not at the front, not at the back. That's generally where accessible furniture tends to get shoved. So people with accessibility issues always find themselves in the same spots. We try and mix that up a bit. And again, because of the ease with which we can reconfigure these spaces, that can actually be put in different places depending on the needs of the users. Another one that I wasn't aware of until I started designing classrooms, but having a high contrast teaching wall. So rather than having a white wall with white whiteboards on it and white projection screens, which can potentially make it really hard for people with visual impairments to see what's happening. If you put a darker colour on the teaching wall, it really improves that for a lot of people who have those issues. So that, again, is something we do as standard now. And like a lot of these changes, it actually benefits everyone. It just makes it a more attractive space. It looks like more thought has gone into it. We care about the environment that students are in. Nothing wrong with adding a splash of colour to otherwise fairly drug business like space. And I'm just going to finish off with another word about reconfiguration and future proofing. This is quite an interesting example, because this space, I don't actually have a picture of the first iteration of it. But in its previous life, and I'm sure there's been various things before that, but this was actually the furniture showroom for our furniture supplier. They used this to have an example of all the bits and bobs of furniture that they could potentially show us at the university. That was until the beginning of 2020. So in the pandemic, we had a real shortage of teaching spaces due to various factors, social distancing, various other spaces being used for other things. And so we needed to create a lot of extra teaching spaces, a really short notice. So the picture on the left is how it's spent the last couple of years as an ad hoc teaching space. And then within the last couple of weeks, I've actually just been involved in reconfiguring this space as a study space because, again, study spaces are in massive demand at the moment. So we've been able to just move all that furniture out, repurpose that elsewhere on campus, and we've fitted it out with more sort of designated study spaces. It's just a really good example of how we don't really know how space is going to be used in the future. And so when we're building new buildings, it's great to keep that in mind just so that you can, you've got that freedom somewhere along the line of making it work better. I haven't got to say at the moment, I've got my contact details, but also my manager's contact details. He's more library focused than I am. And so if you have new library specific queries, I'm sure he'd be delighted to answer. But if you have any more general queries about anything I've spoken about today, please feel free to get in touch or ask via the Q&A, which we're going to tackle now, I believe. Switch my microphone on. Oliver, thank you so much for that session. Thank you to all of our speakers this afternoon. I think it's wonderful to see the innovation that's going on across the sector, the responsiveness that there is in research libraries and academic libraries across the country to the changing needs of our users, of our students, academic staff, reaching out to the communities that we're part of as well. I think it's been really nice to see such diverse examples of the ways in which people are actually tackling that in different locations across the UK at the moment. Oliver, would you like to pop your camera back on for a moment? Because I'm probably going to pick up with you first of all, if that's okay on a couple of questions that have actually come in around this. One of the themes that's coming through for a couple of our sessions is around noise levels. Still, it can be quite a challenging issue for us still in libraries, the expectations around noise. And someone has asked if, Patricia has asked if there were any issues around that in the way you've designed the spaces and managing noise levels in those open areas. Yeah, sure. That's definitely something that was taken into consideration. The way that we tackled it in the main library building, certainly, is that it was designed so that the noise levels decrease as you go further up the building. So there was a recognition, the ground floor where everybody's come in and out is just going to be noisier because there's people doing things as the front desk, you need to be able to speak. And so the way we furnished it reflected that expectation, and that's why we had a lot of the more social furniture. We had some of the booths and sofas and stuff originally down there and more of the group study kind of work zones. And again, as you move up the building, the furniture kind of dictates what we expect people to, how we expect people to behave in those spaces. The third floor particularly is pretty much a silent study space. We do have a few banners that say quiet study up there. But students so far seem to respect that and they kind of understand that that's how it's going to work. Similarly in Masonland actually, which was one of the slides that I showed you, the sort of different zones. It's a similar principle even though that's all on one level. It gets quieter as you move away from those front doors. So you've got the cafe section at the front where next to the main doors, the sort of living room section, which is semi-partitioned off the bookshelves and then a quiet study area at the back. So again, it's the kind of furniture and the semi-permanent partitions which dictate that kind of behaviour and hopefully manage the noise. That's the thing. David and Kirsty, I'm going to come to you on noise as well at this point because perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of people asking how you deal with noise, whether the room that you've created, the family room that you've created is soundproofed. I think those might be parents who are asking that question somehow. And just how you deal with that issue in that area. It's a very good question. The room isn't soundproofed. So that was part of our thought process when we were deciding which room to use. We had a few considerations which really drove that decision making. It needed to be a room which was relatively close to the help desk reception point so that users went too far from support when and if they needed it. It needed to be somewhere with level access. We didn't want people to be going through the building with push chairs unnecessarily, that kind of thing. So it needed to be close by. And ideally, it also needed to be somewhere exactly where it wouldn't have that kind of impact on sound for other users. So slightly counterintuitively, it has ended up on the ground floor of what is otherwise a silent part of our building. But it doesn't join any other areas that particularly are silent. I also reconducted a noise assessment. So we borrowed some equipment from our Estates Department to measure the noise bleed into other adjoining areas. And we were satisfied that it wasn't too much of an issue. It's absolutely right. It's a space that will have children in it. The line that I give when I'm doing the inductions for our students for children is that we understand a certain amount of noise is going to happen. It's never going to be a silent area, but that it is a study area. So they need to be mindful of course of other students working in that space. And if their child needs to go out for a little bit and come back in and they're able to be a bit quieter again, that's kind of what we asked them to do. So it's in some ways a self-policed space. We're asking students to be mindful of that and to moderate the use of the space accordingly. David, do you have limits on how many people are allowed in there at one time? We do. So we have, as I mentioned, a booking policy at the moment. Students will need to book either ahead of time or when they arrive. And we've set that to be for students. So the capacity is driven by the adults in the space rather than the children. We don't have a set limit of children in the space, but we've worked to an idea of it's likely that a student wouldn't bring more than two children with them because that's basic. You're not going to get a lot of studying done if you try to do that, but that's not a hard and fast rule. Obviously, you may just bring one child, you may bring more. So it's the adult capacity that's driven that. And really, we have no basis for that other than what we thought would be workable because we have no measure really for how the space would be used. We felt that four was a sensible amount of spaces for the size of the room that we have. Interesting. And it is purely for the use of students. Is it what we've had a couple of questions as to whether staff were allowed to use that as well? It is. And this decision is largely driven by a policy at the university around staff being children to the workplace, which is that they're not allowed to. That is quite an old policy. It predates the pandemic and, of course, predates all of the changes to university policies around remote working, hybrid working. So it's something that we would like to take up with the wider university to see if that policy needs to be updated. But at the moment we have said it is only for students with children to use the space rather than staff or for externals as well. Where we're really seeing queries about that is from students who have members of staff as partners at the university or more outside. So they're asking, well, could it, would it be possible for us all to come and use the space together? So that's the particular use case that we would like to look at. We have also had queries for example around would it be okay to use that space for a supervision meeting? So for a research postgraduate who wanted to meet their supervisor somewhere but had to have their child with them. So we're looking at the feasibility of those specific instances. There is a little bit of attention, of course, if we open the space up to staff, it may well be that it's always used by staff. And then the students who were the primary driver for that space wouldn't be able to book a seat to use it. So there is an issue there around the sort of openness of the space, I think. Interesting. Thank you, David. Phil, I'm going to come on to you with a related question to this, I suppose, which came through around academic staff using your library for teaching as well. Is that something that is allowed and permitted or again, are you principally a student facing service? Yeah, no, it's a really interesting question because there is a lot of pressure on campus for teaching space and also meeting space as well. And we have had conversations with people around where collaboration and meetings meet and what the difference is there. We do want the space to be well used but be purposefully used as well. So the short answer is no, we don't allow teaching, but there's a small button there. So, for example, when that teaching is in partnership with library staff, when it's using some of our, for example, maybe some of our special collections or other library resources that make it worthwhile using those spaces, then we would make an exception. What we've done is to introduce a sort of booking form where we ask two key questions. How does the event that you're proposing support our library vision? Does it, how does it align with what we see as the purpose of the library? And secondly, how we partner with the library, we don't want to just be offering space. We want to understand what role we might play alongside others in relation to the events we hold. So that's what we're using at the moment to try to manage expectations for using the space. Yeah, interesting. Some challenges I think always really for us around those slightly blurry areas aren't there in terms of space being used as well. It was interesting to see a comment from one of our colleagues in India in the chat saying that they actually quite often struggle to find spaces within their library because of the demands that they're actually getting. Is that something, do you find that you have capacity for most of your students or their times when you're operating very close to that full capacity, Phil? I guess it's always been a busy library and we increased our individual study space by probably around a third with the most recent extension. There are points in the term where the building can feel fairly full. We do have an account, although we don't have gates for our library, we do have a camera that counts bodies in and out so that we get real time numbers on the number of people in the building at any one time. It never exceeds the capacity, official capacity of the building, but it does get well up into the sort of 80-85% mark for that. We've created some of the spaces that we've created as flexible spaces so that we do have some capacity to rearrange space if we need to to increase the amount of study space. I was particularly struck by your session and also Oliver, the emphasis on flexibility in spaces now. I think it's a key thing, isn't it, for libraries moving forward to have that capacity to actually adapt to the changing demands that we're actually seeing from users? Absolutely. We were building this latest extension during the pandemic when suddenly the demands on the library and the use of it completely changed. We opened it when we weren't all fully back on campus so you really can't anticipate how the building might be used at any point in time from month to month in a year but certainly not from year to year. So I think flexibility is essential in that respect. David, can I come back to you or to Kirsty either on the question of space still and where did the space actually come from for the family room? Did you have to actually give something up in order to provide that space? David, on you go. Yes and no. So as I mentioned, we had a choice to make about which space we would use and that was somewhat limited actually in terms of the choices that were available to fit the criteria that I mentioned earlier. The space that we landed on was formally a postgraduate only study room. So the question I think asked did it have an impact on shelf space, not on shelf space but to an extent on study space. What we decided to do was to move that study space. So we earmarked a room elsewhere in the library that had up to that point been a socially distanced study space. We had two of those. We decided as part of our measures coming out of our sort of COVID changes that we didn't need to. So we decided to keep one of those spaces for social distance study space and to turn the other one into a new postgraduate space. So we consulted with users. There wasn't a huge amount of controversy about that. I think they were happy to have a new space. And if anything, the new space perhaps is better. It's got a nicer view over campus. It has a close proximity to the bookstock. So it's quite a good space still for our postgraduate students. So we've retained the space that's specific for them, but we're able to turn the family study room into a new space as well. I suppose what we lost slightly was that kind of more general study space that's open to everyone. And so it's around about making those choices as always. Thank you both. And a question again from one of my colleagues at Southampton, something that's very high on our agenda at the moment. Your pictures looked beautifully clean and pristine. How do you manage to keep the space clean? Do you manage to keep the space clean? Yes, all taken before it opens to users. So that's lovely pristine images there. At the moment, it's not been a huge challenge, but of course it's not been open very long. We've seen modest usage to date. So there's not been a huge amount of challenge with that. I think it will be over time that we see that cleanliness being tested a little bit more. It's part of what we do in the inductions with the students. So we do set an expectation that they will be keeping the room as clean entirely as possible. Clearly that's not always going to happen, but we do try to set that expectation for them. We provide as regular a clean of that space as possible. Although obviously there are challenges there with the capacity of the cleaning of facilities staff from the university. And we're also undertaking to do a deep clean of the space on a regular basis, but that will require an external company. So one of my colleagues who's on the call is undertaking to arrange a contract for that, but that of course is an added cost and added admin burden on the space. So at the moment, we've not really seen any problems, but I think we've yet to test it fully in that regard. Really lovely Phil, to see your recognition of the importance of cleaners in spaces. It's probably something we don't talk about very much, but actually just the people, the teams that actually underpin our ability to manage these spaces sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're open 24 seven during term time and have long opening hours in the holiday periods as well. So some of our staff have regular contact with cleaning staff, but for the majority of staff and for a large portion of our users, they are the hidden workforce that absolutely creates or maintains a fantastic building in the condition that everyone enjoys. But they're also that point of contact that people when offering, the library can be fairly quiet as well. So they provide a personal point of contact there that I know is really welcomed. So it's really nice to have, I think there are 80 clean staff that turned up for this workshop over there. Unfortunately, not all 80 could be involved, but they all felt that it helped to make them much more visible and it was really appreciated. Really, I think a really nice idea behind that. We're coming up towards time, I can see. We've had, and thank you to everyone for the numerous questions that we've had. I'm going to pick up on one that's just come up in the chat actually, addressed to all of you and it's really around involving students in that, whether you've actually made any changes to your original plan or your vision for the spaces in response to student feedback once those spaces have been open. Is there anyone who wants to pick up for that? I mean, I've kind of touched on it during the presentation, but originally we had a lot more of the soft furnishing areas in the main library. To answer another question previously as well, our demand for this library is huge. We regularly get close to capacity and it's actually bigger than the previous main library was, but we often get feedback that says, why have you made it smaller? Why have you reduced the spaces? We haven't reduced the spaces. I think because it's such a popular building, it's regularly full now. There's massive demand on all study spaces across campus. As part of that feedback, we have increased the number of individual study spaces and moved out some of those more social areas, which feedback has said they're just not interested. Particularly in the library, I think those spaces are important in other study spaces, but there's a certain expectation for a library to be a certain way. We certainly have changed things.


The fact that we can launch this casebook during the heads of NCB, Interpol's heads of NCB conference, is vitally important because we want to engage with our NCBs, we want to share the message with our Interpol partners. The program relies on awareness, it relies on capacity building and this is one of the many, many different facets that will allow us to do that. We're hoping that it can be used as a reference document and by that I mean for our Interpol partners, for our police partners, for the private sector, this book is available for free for them to use during the course of their discussions or lobbying efforts or discussions with politicians or police. When people look at our crime area, if they want to know more about our crime area, if they want to know more about how our crime interlinks with other areas of criminality, this book will act as an endorsement by Interpol where we're saying, look, this is what we know, this is our knowledge of this, which we want to share with our partners.


Hey, what's going on guys, welcome back to another video. So in this one, I want to give you, in my opinion, the reason why 99% of people who try drop shipping fail and fail miserably, probably don't even make a single sale. And in my opinion, that number one thing is trust. If your customer does not trust your business, you will not get the sale. They will leave your site and they will try and buy your product elsewhere. Back when I first started in 2016, it used to be a whole of a lot easier because there was less people advertising on Facebook meaning you could reach people for less cost. And because it was less competitive, it meant that there was less people selling those same products as you. So back then I was able to sell products for 10 pounds and be able to make it work because you could achieve purchases pretty consistently for like three or four pounds. If I could achieve those same Facebook results that I was achieving six years ago now, I would be a multi, multi, multi millionaire because ad costs are so much more expensive. Now I don't want to put you off, I don't want you to think in, we'll sod that then, I'm not trying drop shipping because it doesn't work. That couldn't be further from the truth. You just have to adapt. You have to change what you're doing. And basically the first thing you have to do is sell more expensive products. But anyway, without going off on too much of a tangent, the reason why trust is so important is because people on Facebook now are familiar with drop shipping stores. They know what a scam Shopify store looks like because most stores use the same template. And because drop shipping is such an easy business to get started with, I'm not saying it's easy to make money with, it's just easy to get started with. You can have a business up and running in less than a couple of days without spending much more than sort of 50 pounds. And unfortunately this does attract the worst type of people who will pump and dump stores. They'll try and sell the products as much as possible, probably only fulfill half their orders to then disappear off the map. So consumers have become a lot more savvy. They have their defenses up and unless you can break down those defenses and get them to trust your brand new business that is advertising and interrupted their day on social media, then you're not gonna win their trust and you're not gonna win the purchase. So in this video, I'm gonna show you three or four, maybe five things, my favorite things that you can do very quickly and very cheaply to earn your audience's trust. And trust me, if you do these two things, it will change your business overnight. So when it comes to trust then, number one, your customers want the trust that they will actually receive the product. You need to be able to prove to them that they will get their product. And number two, to win the purchase, your customer has to trust that the product will be good quality. So how do they do this? We can do this with the following things. The first thing you can do is social proof and the most important thing within social proof, social proof includes loads and loads of different things. However, the two most important things, in my opinion, are comments. So this is comments on your posts, comments on your ads and also engagements. And to illustrate why this is so powerful, let's take a look at this ad from a company called Doggy Kings. So it goes without saying it's pretty clear this is a proven winning product. This company's been advertising it since October, 2022. We're now in February 2023. So what, four months, 2.6,000 reactions, 3,000 comments and 400 shares. And just look at the comments from people posting pictures of their dog in their product. So best dog coat I have ever bought. I have two of these for my doggies, great quality. Just received our Pooches coat, good quality and fits lovely. Got mine yesterday. This is the perfect jacket my wee Maltese loves his. Ours came today. I've just received two coats from my boys and I must say they are brilliant. There is no doubt in anybody's mind, this is a legitimate company that's fulfilling their orders. So you might be thinking, this is a proven product, people are buying it. I'm gonna try and sell the same product, build a business around it for then it to only fall flat on its face. And the reason being is because these guys have social proof. So they have these engagements and they have these comments. So how do we get them? Number one, what we need is the link to our Facebook ad. So to do this, when you're editing your ad, go to the share button and then click on Facebook desktop feed. That will take you to the ad on your desktop feed. In the top right corner, click the three dots and then click copy link. That is the link that you should be sending out to all of your friends and family that have tried the product and get them to leave a review and a picture on your ad. That way when you're running the ad and all those hundreds and thousands of people that see the ad, we'll see those reviews of people who have tried and tested the product. So that takes care of those comments and as more and more people buy your product and receive it, keep sending that link to them. Email it to them the week after they receive their product or the day they receive their product and say, hey, for 20% off, do you mind leaving a photo review on this post for us? So that takes care of comments. How do we get up to 1,000 engagements? Unless you're famous or know 1,000 loyal friends that are gonna do it for you, then unfortunately you're gonna have to pay for it. So come into your ads manager, go to create new campaign and this is the one you want. You wanna create an engagement campaign. When setting this up though, it's important that you don't try and be too specific, go worldwide and basically Facebook is gonna go out there and find the people who are most likely to hit that like button on your ad for the cheapest cost. And from my experience, you look in between sort of 20 or 30 pounds per 1,000 likes so you can build them up very quickly and very cheaply. The second thing you can do is have a track your order page. There is two main benefits to this. Number one is it will significantly reduce the amount of customer service queries that you get. Being a drop shipper, your order's taking a week to arrive. The number one question, the number one query from your customers will be where is my order? Having to track your order page allows people to take care and answer their own questions without having to spend the time writing an email to them. The way it helps us build trust though is if we have a track your order page that looks something like this, it shows to our customers that we are legit and we are fulfilling our orders because if we weren't, why would we have a track your order page where somebody can come and actually track their order? It's one of those little things. It won't make a night and day difference to your business but it'll definitely have a positive impact. To create a track your order page like this is very simple to do. My recommended app would be 17 track. It's free up to 200 orders per month. After that, it's only $10 a month and in my opinion, worth every single penny. The third thing you can do is have delivery estimates on your Shopify product pages. So for example, if we have a look at this example, this is what I'm talking about. So just under the price of the product, the person, the customer can see exactly when they're gonna receive it if they place the order today. The reason why this helps build trust is because it shows the customer when they expect to receive it. And again, if we wasn't a legitimate company, we weren't shipping out our orders then why do we have this information on our website? It's just one of those little things which is gonna help a customer feel more comfortable with when they're gonna receive that order. What it will also do is it will reduce the amount of customer service queries because they'll know to wait five days or one week or two weeks, whatever your delivery time is. And it will also stop the bad feedback coming back to you through Facebook which will harm and negatively impact your results. To create a timer like we just saw, my recommended app would be Delivery Timer Order Timeline. Definitely get this on your store because what it will also do is that if you've got a crappy supplier and your product's gonna take three weeks, then you'll probably be too embarrassed to put that on your product pages.  You need to find a better supplier so you can proudly put on your product pages arrives in such and such a day or such and such a days. And lastly, the fourth thing you can do is piggyback off of big name brands. If you have big name logos on your website that people are already familiar with, you can piggyback off the reputation that they have. And my recommendation for the UK would be Clana. It's free to use. It's an application which takes one to two weeks on average, but then once you get approved, you can have it on your website so everybody sees that you can have it right on that product page where somebody's gonna spot it. Another benefit to this as well is if you're selling those expensive products or as we go into or come into this recession and less and less people have money to spend on products especially if they're sort of like over a hundred pounds giving people the option to split it over three months interest-free makes it a lot more affordable. And the reason I recommend Clana then is because they're one of the biggest here in the UK. If we check out some of the other shops that are using them, so Deliveroo, Deliveroo is obviously massive. So when people go into Deliveroo and see Clana on there and then come onto your website and see Clana on yours gives them that sense of kind of familiarity and again, just that little bit of trust. Calvin Klein, obviously a massive global company uses Clana, obviously Gymshark too now a global company uses Clana. So as we can see, it's a household trusted name. So by having this on your website it's gonna help build that trust and piggyback off that trust that Clana has. And so with that being said the guys today are the four things that you can do to your business which will improve it overnight. Make sure you take action on these things and then more importantly come back and let me know of the impact that they've had on your business. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to comment, like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.


What's going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I want to discuss a few things which have popped up while I've been in my bed Dreaming of a better destiny to now most of this info comes from a reliable source in fact budget themselves The main man there for me who is one of the few I still have faith in his name is Christopher Barrett He is the game director for destiny to so over the past few days We have seen him tweet out a few things. So let's start over this DMG04 who is a part of the destiny players support team tweeted this with Cosmo back in office You'll see me much more often in the bungee.net forums hitting feedback and other friends as often as I can Keep it up zero replied with this You looking to bring collectible items like dead ghosts back to destiny Barrett replied with yes Barrett then tweeted at this quote in his yes reply to be clear We are adding more collectibles and hidden secrets to future expansions Sounds interesting. But what does this mean? Well? Let's look at destiny one if you didn't play or you've been lost in the nothingness of destiny 2 D1 offered many things to collect in the form of dead ghosts each having his own lore hidden behind it There were many of these things scattered all over the game via strikes, right? Planets social spaces absolutely everywhere They were great to collect. They were great to grind for they really were now things as such returning would be welcomed on my behalf And it would add to the depth this game really needs But I'm not sure these ghosts are what he means It could be or mean anything but yes giving us reason to play in form of running around Collecting things complete and activities in order to obtain a certain collectible is something the game misses for damn Sure, the game needs more depth and this will add to that uncertain Interestingly, he states hidden secrets added to future expansions. Now this for sure tickles my pickle with expansions for destiny one We saw the likes of the sleeper simulant the outbreak crime the touch of malice the black spindle and many other Secrets which came with expansions these were absolutely great They really were now we knew some of them existed But some just sprung up the black spindle for instance was found I believe by accident and all of a sudden boom it was there a secret exotic within the game This is the sort of thing many many of us enjoy and miss from the first game There was nothing like running around trying to find hidden things Which no one else discovered yet, and I don't even have to be exotics either just loot exclusively to a certain activity It falls into the same category of enjoyment you get from playing something such as strike exclusive loot Secret loot hidden within activities also adds to the each only scratch by playing This is what most of us miss so adding secrets into future expansions can only be a good thing Now moving on a mess of Sean asked this will weapon and arm mods be discussed? But it applies with an image of a black ball saying signs point to yes Now we all know the mod system in this game is well Well, it's not beat around the bush here. It sucks There are a few mods people look for the others are scrapped what we need here is variety Give us reason to truly want to receive mods. Give us reason to search for mods. Give us reason to grind for mods I mean, I have a million ideas of how to make a mod system work But i'm pretty sure you guys do too. Let's just hope they deliver on this aspect of the game Okay, so moving on and tie fighter 17 asks this will Derek or Josh finally inform us on pvp About a game replied with the same image signs point to yes Now for me pvp is in a way worth statement pve pvp for me is just like well I'll play two games get bored and go back to pve I would absolutely love a reason to play pvp I know they mentioned ranked systems private matches etc etc, which is great And this should be expected to be covered in the weekly update which will come out later Discussing all the above points also, but yeah pvp definitely need again more depth to it That replied to a question about rumble where he posted the same image signs point to yes But we knew about this already rumble was obviously coming back And it's good to see the pvp side of the game getting what's needed now as for me I actually like playing pvp. There's just no reason to play at the moment Give us reason to play and people will play is as simple as that now as great as all of these sands I don't mean to end the video on a negative remark. It's super good. These features are being added to the game. It truly is It's what's needed. The game needs more depth. Hopefully they deliver But the point here is the features being added here rumble rank pvp collectibles secrets depth endgame and so forth Really should have been a part of the base game I mean, it's great. They've seen what's missing and what we want and they plan to deliver on that But in reality It shouldn't be in its current state to start with said features should be already in the game And with that in mind people if the game was fine at this point and we weren't missing features as such Imagine what a major update to the game right now would have brought to the game Imagine what we would be getting at this point people just imagine and that not guys Thanks for stopping by as always and I do appreciate that support If you enjoyed the video leaving a like really does help me out If you're new around here and enjoy daily destiny videos, be sure to subscribe If you never want to miss a video where I upload hit that bell button next to that subscribe button to receive Email notifications of when I do upload, but thanks as always for stopping by people and hopefully I will see you on that next one Always in the wrong Knowing where we stay


Aid trucks entered Gaza from Egypt at the Rafah border crossing on November 24, as Israel and Hamas started a ceasefire, the first pause in a 48-day old war began at 7 a.m., involving a comprehensive ceasefire in north and south Gaza, the release of 13 Israeli women and child hostages by the militants later in the day, an aid to flow into the devastated Palestinian enclave. Egypt has said 130,000 liters of diesel and four trucks of gas will be delivered daily to Gaza during the truce, and that. 200 trucks of aid would also enter Gaza daily.


Hello and welcome to CMC Markets and a quick look at commodities on Wednesday the 8th of February. There are two particular markets I'm particularly interested in in this little brief update. First and foremost is crude oil prices. We've seen them come off quite sharply in the past couple of days. Obviously, one of the catalysts for the decline yesterday was that huge build in US API inventories, 14.2 million barrels as opposed to an expected two and a half million barrels. And we've seen a big, big decline in oil prices over the course of the past two days. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that we've necessarily seen the top, but what it does mean is that I think the potential for further oil price gains above the highs that we've seen thus far this year is likely to remain fairly limited because it would appear that the ramped up output from US Shell producers, and that's certainly been reflected in recent RIG account data, does appear to be filling the gap that's being left by OPEC output cuts. So I think the key levels to watch out for on Brent crude are at the 50-day moving average, which at the moment we're sort of flirting with on the Brent contract and the key support from the lows that we saw in January and about $53 a barrel. And just because we've seen two days of very sharp declines doesn't necessarily mean we have the momentum to push through that key support area there because we saw a significant decline in the early part of January, didn't break that support, and I think that really remains a very, very key line in the sand with respect to the future direction of Brent crude prices. What is significant I think is WTI because I certainly think in terms of output cuts that's probably where we could see a significant amount of mileage because we've seen a much bigger reaction on WTI, not surprising because of obviously the API data last night. If that number is borne out by cushing inventory data later today then we could well see these lows around about $50 a barrel come under a significant pressure and we have closed below the 50-day moving average. So I think that's quite significant momentum is starting to turn on much less positive crude oil longs are still very elevated levels and as such I think the risk at the moment now does appear to be towards the downside and the likelihood of further gains towards $60 a barrel does appear to have diminished. So on copper prices looking at some very key levels here, the 200-week moving average, copper prices are heading higher again on the basis of some strikes which are due to start on Thursday at Chili's biggest copper mine, BHP Billiton has announced that work will stop on that particular day and that does appear to be prompting a push higher in copper prices towards the 200-week moving average and the previous peaks that we've seen in November of last year and early January. So this is the key level on copper prices around about $273 if we do break higher then really we're looking at levels last seen in the early part of 2015. So those are the key levels on copper and Brent crude prices. Thanks very much for listening. It's Michael Houston talking to you from CMC Markets.


Lab on Wheels is a bus rich refitted as an interactive classroom and tech lab that allows students of all ages from primary to secondary school to explore the possibilities of technology. Singapore's Infocom Media Development Authority started the program in 2014 as part of its broader effort to prepare citizens for the digital skills needed to achieve its smart nation vision. Due to soaring demand from schools, they have recently expanded the program which has proven to be quite popular with the children. Shyam takes robotics as his extracurricular activity and loves it. For Jessica, it's a first. Robotics is very fun and you keep on learning new things and new stuff for the robot to do and it's pretty cute when you see the robot move and the robot accomplish all its movements. I wish we had more of these programs because it's really fun and exciting. I learned how to program robots and on second thoughts now maybe I'm thinking about joining robotics. The goal is to ignite a passion in tech among the young students they're engaging in hands-on activities. Students are introduced to the basics of modern technology such as robotics, coding and 3D printing. Today they will learn how to control a tiny robot, the Osobot, that changes colour as it moves. The favourite part is mostly the interactivity and in this time it's not just with their friends but with their robots themselves and to find a robot responding according to how they have programmed it I think they find tremendous joy in their learning and at the same time the motivational level in learning has increased tremendously too. The program supports the government's vision to create and nurture a culture of experimentation and innovation. This is especially important for Singapore's smart nation vision. I think there's a very fundamental capability or mindset that's actually much needed in the future workforce regardless of whether you are in the ICT sector or actually a banker, a lawyer, an accountant. Hopefully one day they find as many of these skill sets and many of the mindset they picked up through some of these interactions with technology can be applied in very different domains. So there's I think a fundamental belief that we have making sure that our young and next generation will be relevant in a digital economy. The Lab on Wheels program first started with a single bus in November 2014 and soon expanded to four buses in May 2016. The program has already reached over 50,000 students and aims to reach 80% of primary schools by 2020. I sure do want to work in technology as I want to program stuff like program cars, that's my favourite dream. I think in this digital time and age because of the motivational level that has been heightened through ICT in the classroom and school grounds, they have gone on to pursue ICT in the higher education level and every time when they come back to visit us they have so much to share about how ICT has actually impacted in their learning journey. Given that 95% of jobs already have a digital component investing in technology skills takes on great economic importance in Singapore but also worldwide. It can help change the world by making people not too stressed out maybe like we have a mini companion somewhere to like go get me a pizza and while you stay at home and then the robot will go get you one. Yeah, so I think technology is convenient in that way. And it can help people in our lifetimes. Though they both believe that technology can be used at the service of humanity so we can live better lives, Jessica has an idea of what the perfect robot would be. A robot that can do all the homework for me. And who knows, she might be the one who built it.