Hello everyone, and welcome. I'm Brenda Haug, and I'll be facilitating today's session, TechSavvy Staff, Better Service for Library Users. We're glad you're here with us. Before we get started with the content, I'll tell you about the technology we're using today. All audio lines are muted except for the presenters, but please use that chat at any time and use that to ask questions, use it to share resources, share ideas. Use the chat at any time. A little bit of troubleshooting advice, if something happens and your screen locks up or something fluky happens with your screen, usually the quickest way to fix that is just to close out and then go back to that email you received with registration information and come back into the room. And usually that will fix any issues that you're having. Most of you are hearing your audio through your computer, but if you did phone in, same thing, if you lose that phone connection most of the time if you just dial into the number again that will take care of things. This session today is being recorded and a link to the recording will be available on the TechSoup website. And there are other past presentations there too. Later today we'll send out an email and in that email we'll include the slides that are part of this presentation. We'll include a link to the recording. And then also any websites or resources that are mentioned today will include a link to those too. So don't worry about scrambling to write down website addresses. We'll send those out in a follow-up message. And if you're on Twitter tweeting about this, the hashtag is just TechSoup. So with that let's dive into our content. Again today we're talking about TechSavvy staff, Better Service for Library Users. We're going to have a couple of special guest presenters today. We have Penny Talbert here. And Penny is Director of the Effort of Public Library in Pennsylvania. And she is passionate about transliteracy. And that's a term that we'll be discussing during today's session. And presenting with her is Stephanie Zimmerman who is Training and Development Coordinator for the Library System of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. And she is passionate about emerging technologies. So this is a great match with Penny's interest in transliteracy and Stephanie's interest in emerging technologies. And that will be the basis of their presentation today. A couple of things on our agenda. I'm going to quickly talk about TechSoup, TechSuper Libraries, and the Edge benchmarks. This webinar that we're doing today is part of a series of webinars that we're doing around the Edge benchmarks. And I'll talk more about what those are. We have time set aside at the end for questions and answers, but again feel free to use the chat to ask those questions at any time. And we'll be tracking them and then we'll ask questions throughout. So let's go ahead and get started with talking about TechSoup. TechSoup is a 501C3 nonprofit organization. And as you can see on the second bullet in that slide, one of the big things TechSoup does is distribute technology donations. And those include donations from partners like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Symantec, and more. And libraries qualify for many of them. So in today's follow-up message we'll include a link so you can check that out too if that's something that you're not familiar with. And then TechSoup for Libraries is a special section of TechSoup that is focused on the needs of libraries. And it includes info on the Tech Donation Program, some spotlight articles that feature Tech success stories from libraries around the country, blog posts related to libraries and technology, and more. So we'll include a link to that in the follow-up message too. I mentioned that today's session is one of a series of webinars focused on the EDGE benchmarks. And these benchmarks are being developed by the EDGE Initiative which is a coalition of organizations working together to develop public access technology benchmarks for public libraries. It includes the Public Library Association, Web Junction, TechSoup, several state libraries, and more organizations. And the benchmarks we're focusing on today is this one. Libraries have sufficient staff with technology expertise to help patrons achieve their goals. And that's what today's session on TechSabby staff is all about, is achieving that benchmark. So again, we have two special guests with us today, Penny Talbert and Stephanie Zimmerman. And Penny and Stephanie, I'll let you take over from this point and welcome everyone. Well hello, and welcome. I see some very familiar names in the participants. So hi everybody. This is Penny speaking. And I wanted to just tell you a little bit about what we're doing at my library as far as technology competencies go. And we are in our second, we just finished our second round of testing. So let's get started if I can get there we go. First of all, the rationale for this is really in order to provide excellent service to your patrons. All of your library staff must have a skill set to assist patrons. And that's just not the folks working the desk. It's everybody because if, I mean I'm sure that all of you understand this, if you're walking to the bathroom somebody may stop you and ask you a question and you have to be able to answer those questions. In order for libraries to remain relevant they must be the technological hub of your community. And I think that is very important because if you are recognized for that the funding will follow. And as we talked about transliteracy, transliteracy for public libraries means you are relevant.  And those things are very important and as we've moved along with these competencies that's what we've really found. And I will tell you, I can't tell you for sure, but we have seen a doubling of our donations in the past year. Oddly enough the same amount of time that we've been doing competency training. So whether or not there's a relation I can't tell you for sure, but I think that there probably is. Okay, the poll, Brenda, are you doing this? Sure, yes. So people should be seeing it now just asking about are you familiar with this term transliteracy? So if you weigh in there and we'll give people a few minutes to do that and see how familiar people are with that term. And this is Stephanie Zimmerman from Library System Lancaster County. And I just wanted to interject here if I could that if you're not familiar with that term, Bobby Newman has a wonderful website. The link will be in the follow-up after this webinar to their website that she did with Bustie Hamilton and some other people that has great information on it and a great little slide share presentation that's really quick that can really help you understand what transliteracy is. And also when we go back to the LibGuides you'll see there's a video on transliteracy that you can share with your staff to try to help them understand what it is and why it's important. Okay, well it looks like most everyone has weighed in and a lot of people who are not familiar with that term, some who are somewhat and then a few who are very familiar. So good ones for you to be introducing to us. Thank you. Well the fact of the matter is that you all know what transliteracy is. You just don't know what the word, you've never heard the word. Yikes. There we go. So transliteracy defining it today is great, but in two weeks it'll probably have a different definition or at least a more in-depth definition because it's constantly changing. When I started the transliteracy training with our staff it was one thing and now we're more than a year through it and so many more things have been added. And that's why doing staff competencies, you just can't do it one time and be done with it and say, oh everybody knows what they're doing now because it changes as you add new services. What it is not, it is not Web 2.0 which I think is almost an antiquated term at this point, but really the concept is mapping meaning across different media. So you're offering an opportunity to give different, and it's not just, it's learning styles. So not only are you creating this environment of learning, but you're also presenting it in different ways to increase understanding for, in this case, your patrons. So we're going to be talking a lot about lib guides. So let's go to this poll and see if anyone's going to know what I'm talking about. So are you familiar with lib guides? I don't know if Penny's going to share this, but she got trained by our state if I remember correctly and brought that to our area and other areas across Pennsylvania and it is a phenomenal tool. So if you don't know about it, you probably will want to check it out after she shows you the beauty of it today. What along with, she'll be discussing other tools also, but we thank you Penny for bringing it here. And just as kind of a selling point here for Commonwealth Libraries in Pennsylvania, if you are located in Pennsylvania, I am still doing the training for that. I do it for free. So if your library system or your library is interested in offering lib guides, you can always contact me and with the training you get a free year subscription for your library. So there's a thought if you think this is really cool, it's an opportunity for you to get to try it out. And it is really not that expensive of an option when you see what it does. So it looks like we have a lot of folks who haven't heard of it. And that's okay. I'm going to go here. This is the URL for our particular lib guide on competencies. And this is the launch pad for all of our staff and what they do. And we'll go back and look at this in a little bit, but I want to talk to you about if you want to start a competency program how you're going to do this, because it's just not, oh here's a website, let's go. There's a lot of prep work involved and you have to follow it through. So the first thing, and as librarians I'm sure we love creating plans, you have to really create a plan and you have to have buy-in. Most importantly, you have to have buy-in from your board because it is a time-intensive program if you really want to do it right. And you have to come up with what is going to be the result if my staff cannot successfully complete the competency training. And it's a hard question to ask because are you going to say like in our case we give competency testing once a year and if they don't achieve a certain level, an 80% or an 85% or whatever, they are no longer employed with the library. And while that seems pretty harsh, do you really want to have somebody serving your patrons that doesn't know how to use technology? And so it's a conversation you have to have with your board because you may have to make tough decisions. Competencies are a part of our strategic plan. If you really want to do it, it has to be part of your strategic plan because it is something that you develop and you keep going with it. It's not something that you say for the next six months we're going to be doing competencies and then we're done. Because as we know there's constantly new technologies being introduced and libraries are the place where people are coming to learn how to use them. It should also be a part of every job description in your library. So even if it's someone who doesn't work the circulation desk, they should know how to complete the competencies and how to do these things. We are not asking them to figure out how to network a building. It is things that you need to use. I'm not going to say every day, but probably every other week these things will come up at your library and people have to know how to use them. Now I do want to throw in here right now that if you have questions, feel free to ask them. And somebody out there is recording them and will let me know. And I will answer them as we go through if you do have questions that are relevant now.  Because this is content intensive and you really have to again make sure that you're accommodating all different kinds of learning styles. Because if you have somebody who just cannot just sit and read full text, you have to have some alternatives for them if you really want them to learn. Your job as putting together these competencies is really to teach people. And you have to make it as easy as possible because you're probably going to have a little problem initially with staff buy-in. And if it's difficult for them to do, it's going to be real difficult for you to put it through. So make sure that whatever you choose is adaptable because you're going to have changes. And some of them are going to be technological and some of them are going to be ones that are just a product of these services you might be offering. So make sure that you have the correct delivery vehicle. In our case, we really loved LiveGuides. But there are other ones out there. There are Wikis. There's LiveBlinders. There's all kinds of delivery methods out there that don't require you to be perfect at HTML or anything like that. And because you are doing technical competencies, please, please, please do not hand out a paper manual. It makes absolutely no sense. Sorry, I had to say please. Yeah, I mean absolutely. And Stephanie, please just jump in whenever you have anything that you want to add to this. Stephanie has kind of been my cheerleader as I developed this program. And I run everything by her. And she gets the exam before anybody else to make sure that I'm being completely fair. And I would recommend that you have somebody like that that is really technologically savvy because we all make mistakes. What you don't want to do is make a mistake that would affect the employment of any of your staff. So creating the competencies. This is one of the things that I literally sat in the front of the desk and just listened to what patrons needed. More importantly, what the staff couldn't answer. And that's the first step. One of the things that I discovered initially which absolutely horrified me was that there were some folks on staff that did not know how to send an email attachment. And patrons were coming up from the public computers asking for help. And the people behind the desk couldn't help them. So you have to start basic and look at what are people asking. And then talk to your stakeholders. Find out from the folks in your community what do they need beyond the basics. So if your business community is saying that they really want to have the use of business databases and you don't have people and staff that know how to use it, how are you going to promote that service? I mean you can't very well say, well we have this great database but you're going to have to figure it out on your own. That's not service. And it's certainly not exceptional service. And that's really what you're going for is exceptional service. Can I just introduce one thing there on the last slide too, as Penny has the advantage of being in a library and seeing it live. I'm in our system office where I help the 14 member libraries in our area. So I have time to take in all these websites and I'm bookmarking things over the years. So if you need any help developing competencies, I'm putting a link in the chat right now of different competency sites. I can't say enough about the Web Junction site of competency index for the library field. It's great if you're starting from scratch place to start. And you can hone in on the technological competencies to start with if you need to. And then you can branch out into leadership if you can go crazy with these things. So there's so much that's already been done. Don't start it from scratch. No, absolutely not. And Penny is right there in the live environment. So I've learned so much from her LibGuide and all that they deal with there to help me in the training that I provide. So there you go. And please know if you decide you want to do this with your staff and you decide you want to do it through LibGuides, I will give you permission to literally copy my entire LibGuide onto your account and then you can make changes to it. So it'll save you a lot of time. And that's what's been beautiful here in our library system is that Penny is sharing this with anyone at this point. But she started just internally here with the other libraries in our system and it was just so seamless. They took it and made it their own. And I was available also to help them if they needed help using the LibGuides too. So it's just been great to not reinvent the wheels. We don't have time for that. It's very true. Why would you bother when I've already done it? So in year one, and you really need a timeline for this if you're going to cover all your bases. The first thing I did was introduce the ideas, the idea of competencies and make the argument for why it's important. And so I went first to the board. We then included it in the strategic plan, staff manuals, job descriptions and then introduced it to the staff. I am telling you upfront, when you introduce this to the staff, they will panic because it's new and it's a change. And when you use the word requirement, it scares everyone. Expect that. Just expect it. And when they hear and everybody can do whatever they want from this, but we were taking such a stance on it. When they hear that if you do not pass this exam, you no longer have a job. It's scary. But after they were done with the exams and the first year everyone passed, they were like, oh, that wasn't so bad and I learned so much. But the initial introduction was very scary. The next thing we did was a competency skills pre-survey because I didn't want to offer training and things they already knew, but I didn't want to make any assumptions that they knew things I thought they did. I needed to really find out where they were. And if this is something that you are interested in doing, you are welcome to use mine. I can turn it over to you. I just saw a question about how large my library is. I serve 30,000 people. I would say that's a pretty small library actually. We have about 27 people and staff, but that also includes passport agents. So we have three passport agents that don't actually work in the library. So medium-sized library. The next step was 23 things. And I created my own version of 23 things that were specific to the resources that our library provided. They are also on the LibGuide, Steal them, it's fine. Then we plan an in-service day. And before the in-service we did a pre-in-service survey so that we would again cover the things they needed but not go over things that they already knew. And that was pretty extensive. After the survey was done, the trainers all got together and looked at what we needed to teach. So for instance, Stephanie did Windows 8. And did you want to make a comment about that Stephanie and what the experience was like as you went through that in-service day? I think the whole thing that was so great about this is they were panicked. I go out and do trainings too. And I would hear things like, I can't believe we have to do this and I'm nervous. But Penny and her management staff made everything available to them that they needed to get to the skill level they needed to get to. So it wasn't just, here's what you need to know. Now go figure it all out. And I'm sure she's going to show all this so I won't talk too much about that. But then they had a day, a full day where they got hands-on and person-to-person experience also with different breakout sessions. So if they weren't real good self-learners then they had a day they could take it all in that way too if doing the online modules weren't quite cutting it. So it was great to be there and have an entire staff that knew what was on the line. But it was a wonderful experience. It's one of my favorite experiences I've had here on the job is just having all these people, they're very attentive. Their jobs are on the line and it's not do or die here. But they knew the seriousness of it and they were all on board. And I think that's what this whole process did is it wasn't a scare tactic. It was, hey, I have resources. I can learn this. I have people here that are going to help me. So if they were willing to do what needed to be done, it wasn't a hard deal to get there. So to be a part of that was great. The day was wonderful. And I showed them the latest and greatest in Windows 7 and some things about searching in our O-Pack. And then Penny and her crew had all these other breakout sessions and then they had things particular just to their library. I'll tell you what, those people can answer the questions when people come in the door like I've never seen. It's just very, very well done. I am the cheerleader. Sorry, I'm going to keep doing it. So then, Brenda, would this be a good point for a couple of questions we've received? Absolutely. Okay. Some questions about if this applies to all staff levels, our pages, or the shelvers are they tested to? And then also a question about volunteers. And if you use volunteers in the library, do they need to pass the test? Okay. We do not use volunteers behind the desk. So they would not have to pass the competencies. However, I have worked with some libraries now that do different competencies for different departments. And I am now in the process of developing competencies for our program, our public program team. They do, they take the competency exam for the desk, but they will also have additional competencies for their jobs. So it can really be broken out. Stephanie and I are working with a library right now that is very departmentalized. And they are doing competencies for kind of each department. So it's up to you. I mean this isn't, this is just what worked for us, but you can do what you feel is necessary. I just had a library contact me about kind of a training program and live guides for shelvers. And that's something that you can do. So it's your library, it's your program, you do what you want to do. Is there another question that you had, Barbara? Let's see. There was a question about a union environment. And Stephanie Zimmerman weighed in and said, you are not in a union environment. So someone wondering if, if you know of any libraries who have done this, having the minimum score, that kind of thing, if you know of anyone who has done this in a union environment. I do not. And probably the reason I don't is because we don't have a lot of, we don't have very many union libraries around here. So maybe if anyone has experience with that, if you could share with us in the chat, then that will, maybe if you have a resource or if you have any experience with that, go ahead and share in the chat. Okay, well I'll turn it back over to you and we'll just keep tracking questions as they come in. Thanks everyone for asking such a great question. After the in-service, we did a post-survey to make sure that the training was effective. In our case, it was very effective. When I looked at the pre-surveys, I was just like, oh my word, half these people think Amazon is a search engine. And the post-survey proved that we had done what we needed to do with that in-service. And it was a lot of planning, but again, I have all that stuff done. I have all the PowerPoints. I have everything. So if this is something you're considering for your library, again, don't reinvent the wheel. Feel free to contact me and I can share a folder with you in Dropbox with all of that stuff. The next thing that we did as a group was an online book discussion about working with patrons and customer service. And each week we read a chapter and then there was an online question that everybody answered. And just so you know, all of this was tracked and employees were required to do these things. However, they were also paid for their time. So it was part of their job to go through this. After all of these things, then came the competency exam. And we did a demonstrative exam and a written exam. So the demonstrative exam, like we sat down with them one-on-one and you know, connect the wireless to, or connect the computer to the wireless network. You know, tasks in Word and Excel and PowerPoint. Things that patrons using the public computers would come up and ask. Nothing terribly difficult, but things that they would need to know. How to download e-audiobooks, how to download e-books. All of those things were included in the first competency exam. And because it was new and because I understood that there was a lot of nervousness and anxiety involved with it, anything over an 80% was appropriate for me and would be passing for the first year. And like I said, everyone passed. So that was like, whew, finally, kind of the success at the end. We've realized that we had really given them the training that they needed. Okay, so year two, that's where we are now. We developed an employee learning and growth program. So I don't know how it is in other states, but in Pennsylvania there's a minimum number of continuing education credits that some library staff have to take. For us, if they're under 20 hours, they don't have to take any. But what we did was we increased the CEA requirements. And in some cases we doubled or tripled them. We added additional competencies where new services were being added and we also went to a more advanced level on some of the programs that we were offering. And then we just, last week, we did the second round of competency exams and we upped the score to 85%. Now that's where it will stay because I'm not expecting anyone to be perfect. But that's kind of where, this is where we just finished. And I do have the employee learning and growth program on the LibGuide, so you know, steal it, I don't care. Okay, questions? Let's see, how many questions are on the exam or how long on average does it take someone to complete the exam? Okay, the demonstrative part of the exam was 30 questions. And some of those were like two or three parters, so you know, go to the place where you would download e-audio books. Is this book available? If so, download it, those kinds of things. And we also included in those demonstrative exams our other delivery devices, so the Kindle Fire, the Kindle, and iPod, because people are coming in and saying, how do I download the app for your audio books? Staff has to be able to do that. So those kinds of things were involved in the demonstrative one. And then the written exam was just a combination of everything. Stephanie, you saw the written exams. Do you have any comments on those? I did cover everything someone at a front desk would need. And again, she's willing to share this with everybody. That's what's so great. I found that the skill levels, what you were observing is exactly right on from what I've seen over the years out in the libraries. And I didn't think it was over the top, anything that shouldn't be known, but I knew when I read through it, knowing some of the skill levels, I was like, wow, if they didn't do their work, if they didn't learn these things, it's going to be tough. But again, she gave them all the resources they needed. And I think one of the other questions that I had seen come through there was, how did you handle those different skill levels? And the day of the in-service, Penny spoke with me. She said, here's some people who could use a little more hand-holding, but could use a little more help. And I just assume you probably did that internally too besides that one day that I was there. That's the attention they needed. Penny, another question was about new employees. This is such an ongoing thing. How do you bring someone up to speed when you have a new employee? We have a policy and a timeline in place. When a new employee is hired, they have, and again, happy to share this with anyone, they get a schedule. So they actually go through exactly what our staff went through. We went through it together, but new people that are coming in go through the same steps. They are at a benefit because they have everybody else that they can ask who's already gone through it. But they follow the same steps to get them up to where they need to be. I saw a question from Sheila on here about, you know, technology doesn't always work smoothly. She has a difficult time coming up with written instructions that will work in every environment. My advice is stop trying to make written instructions. Give them the voice to play with. Have it available like a tech petting zoo. If you don't have funding to be able to do something like that, someone on your staff has a toy that they can come in during lunch someday. And if they are willing, at least demo it in their own hands if they don't want anyone else to touch it, just some way to get them exposed to the technology, they got to be able to play. I mean that's where I'm moving now is I don't want to give people these step-by-step point-and-click instructions on how to do things anymore because I can't. Technology is going too fast. You can't do that anymore. But instead I'm trying to find ways to teach people how to play and that's what Penny's Lib Guide is all about. Here's the info. Here's some sites to go check out. Here's some videos to watch. We've got this device here. Check it out. Take it home. Play with it, that kind of thing. There's no way to provide them every little detail they are going to need anymore. It's got to be I'm ready to play. I know I can't break it. Let's just try and learn this. So I don't know if that helps at all, but it's the only way I can see the future going with all this mobile technology. I can barely breathe. I know everyone on this call, everyone listening on this webinar agrees. It's hard to catch your breath right now, but it's so exciting at the same time. One of the other things that we always do is when we introduce a new service or a new technology, for instance, when we introduce the regular Kindles, we purchase them and kept them for three months, and staff was encouraged to take them home and play with them and become familiar with them. When we introduced the Kindle Fires, same thing. We bought them, we loaded them, and we didn't even tell anyone we had them until every staff member had an opportunity to check them out for an extended period of time. We just started offering Roku's for circulation, and we have Roku's in the building for six months, and people took them home. If they didn't know how to use them and they couldn't get them to work, a manager would go to their house and help them figure it out. So they really have to, you can't expect them to just know everything. You have to give them the opportunity to learn and play. Same thing with, even though we don't circulate iPods, although we will be next year, we have one so that they have the experience to get hands-on so that when someone comes up and says, how do I download the one-click app, the staff can go, oh, okay, here's how you do it, and actually show them how to do it. But I agree, written instructions are horrible, horrible, horrible idea when it comes to this new technology because everybody has a different way of doing it, and as long as they get to the end result, doesn't really matter how they get the app downloaded. They just need to get it downloaded. Okay, and by the way, if you are interested in doing this, I am more than happy to share the exams with you, but I do not post them anywhere because if you use them, your staff will know the answers, but I am happy to share them. Okay, taking competencies on the road, after you put them together, share them. If you are in a library system, offer them up. If you have a LibGuide subscription again, you are welcome to use mine. I have set them up for a couple of libraries now, and it is literally less than an hour for you to just grab mine and change them. And please don't be intimidated you are offering this service not only for employees, but also for management because we still need to keep up as well. So I take the confidence even though I wrote it. Go ahead Stephanie. Stephanie, she is not exaggerating on the one hour, and really it is that easy to just, I used parts of her LibGuide in a couple of public presentations I have done now where I just pull their pages. I am like, why would I recreate this page? I just pull it right in there, and it is just wonderful. Okay, we will move on here. These are my observed outcomes. I get way fewer customer complaints. The staff is definitely more confident about their abilities, and when we offer new staff or new service, they are actually excited about it because they know they are going to get the training. The library really has become the technological hub within our community. We work with the Chamber of Commerce. We offer technological programs for business owners. Just recently our local municipality sent all of their managers to the library, and we did like a 22-week training program on Windows, the new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And if you don't think that that makes a difference, when you go ask for money, think again. That municipality increased my appropriation for next year by 25%. So that does make a difference. And again, donations have increased, have doubled during our funds drive this year. Again, can't say what is actually attributed to, but it seems a little bit too much of a coincidence. I will firmly say it's definitely why, just because. I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that people come in now and they can get their questions answered, and they talk. They tell people, and eventually it gets to somebody who is in charge of our funding. So that's my outcomes. Yours may be different. I have our email addresses here. Now I just want to quickly take you to the LibGuide. And I'm going to share this. Here we go. Everybody see that? It's loading. Yep, it's kind of still coming. So there's a leg on our end, but it should be appearing for everyone. This is the LibGuide that Penny has been talking about throughout. So it may be still appearing on your end. It has appeared on mine now. Okay, basically what a LibGuide is, it's kind of a wiki on steroids, if that means anything. You need to have no HTML training. It is really a WYSIWYG kind of thing. And when staff logs on, this is what they see. The video that you see on the right is a really great explanation. Minute and a half, the staff understands it. Thank you for putting that link up, Stephanie. If you go to the link, this actually takes you to our competencies. And this is an amazing resource. And I would love to say that I created this all by myself, but it didn't. I have a really great technology manager at the library that has worked very hard on getting all of this information together. And as you can see, there are different ways of presenting the same information so that no matter what your learning style is, you can find what you need. And this goes with the competencies. So our competencies involve all of these things. And this is kind of the meat and potatoes training part. If I go back to this competency page, here are my 23 things that they went through. And if you look at it, you'll see that there are comments on some of them. Now, halfway through this, I actually switched from the state lib guide to my own account. So you won't see all of the comments in the first couple of weeks that the staff made. But this is a great way to put together all of those wonderful promotional materials that your vendors give you and you never really know what to do with them. So there's a video on how to use TumbleBooks. This year or in 2013, one of the things that we'll be adding for all of these services are the apps so that the staff is very familiar with how the apps work as more and more people are moving to mobile applications instead of doing these things on their computer. And each week, staff had assignments that you can see here on the right-hand side. And they answered these things. Now, this is required again. We kept very careful track of making sure that everybody did what they were supposed to do, when they were supposed to do it. And if they didn't, they heard from me. And I would just follow them around and nag them until they did it. That's really important because you want the staff to be in the same week so that it becomes part of the lunchroom discussion. And they learn together. Now, I will tell you that several years ago, I did a 23 things with the staff and the community. And I believe it was like 80-some community members and all the staff were doing it week by week together. And that was also a great way of creating dialogue in the community about technology. And as an incentive, we gave away a Kindle for the staff in a drawing, anybody who completed it got their name in, and the same for the public. So that was a really great way to kind of introduce these technology things that we were doing to the public. And it really started that dialogue. Patrons would come in. They knew the people at the desk were doing them as well. And there would be discussions about this week's thing. That's a great idea to involve the community. That's a neat spin. Well, that way they know that they can come to us. So it doesn't always have to be library things. You know, Google Docs, if you're going to use these things internally, it's great to have the staff learn them together. And some of these things that I just assumed that people knew about, online book clubs, nobody in my library even knew we offered them. So it was a good way. Go ahead. I just want to interject. I mean, when you were talking about the comments, I think that is the heart and soul of the approach that Ephrata took on this competency. It wasn't, here's a nice little website with a lot of nice little information for all of you, and you're going to have a test in five months, whatever, three or four months, and we'll just see how you do. It was, here are the questions for this week. I need the answers. And when she didn't get the answers, she followed up, which I mean, that was nice of her to do. I mean, if you want your job, it's that accountability feature, not a hard lined approach, but just, I just think that commenting and keeping track, and yes, she has a medium-sized library, a very large library. It's going to take a team of people to do this, but I think that's why it was so successful, because no one was dropped off the charts and at the end was just like, wow, I didn't have time, and I didn't realize that there was no surprises. I think that is key in the fact that there were no surprises in her building as far as I could tell as an outsider. Yeah, everybody knew what was expected of them, and I did see a question earlier about whether or not the staff was paid for this, and the answer is yes. Salary people and full-time staff were told that they could use their time at work to learn to whatever they needed to do. Part-time people were paid for the time that they spent either in the building or outside of the building working on these things, and I think that that was really important because we were making an investment in making sure that we offered exceptional service. Here's the book discussion, and it's called Diffusing the Angry Patron, and each chapter with the questions that the question of the week, and they're actually kind of interesting because we all work in different places, but we all pretty much have the same patrons. So it was a good way for them to kind of learn that everybody has the same problems and how you deal with them because if you offer great technology competencies but you're crappy at customer service, the competencies aren't really helping you very much. So we did tie in a customer service component to this as well. We have websites for references that we use, resources, and then here is our Employee Learning and Growth Program, and it shows you that the CEUs that we're requiring of everyone, again, they get paid for this. So if they get their free CEUs, they'll get paid for three hours. Full-time and salaried staff, again, are supposed to do it on library time. And we also subscribed to Universal Class, and staff was encouraged to take those classes. And some of them actually took the classes together so they could do the homework together and things like that. So again, just to remind everyone, this is Brenda. This LibGuide that Penny is demonstrating now, that's just available on the web. So that has all of this information. Someone said that they'd like to learn from this on their own, and I think that's a great idea. If you also have a LibGuide account, Penny has said you can take this and just put it in your LibGuide account too. But if you don't subscribe to LibGuide, you'll still have access to it, and there are other ways that you could share this type of information too. And then Penny has also offered to share some of the stuff that's not included. So like the quizzes, she mentioned that those aren't included because you don't want, that doesn't make it much of a quiz if it's out there. So those things she is willing to share, and we'll keep sharing her email address too. So I just wanted to clarify for that. I saw what is the cost of LibGuide. I saw that question. It depends on your population. My cost is about $600 a year, completely worth it. And let me just quickly show you why. I'm going to go to my library's website. We actually use these for the public. And basically they are digital pathfinders. So for instance, we have a LibGuide on local history where anybody who is interested, it's almost like a reference librarian is just sitting there and giving you all this information. And you can link it to your catalog so that you can highlight certain books. I do LibGuides on summer reading, any grants that we get. We had the Building Common Ground grants that we just recently finished. And that's right here with all the events and everything that people needed to know about this grant. So LibGuide is not just an internal program. You can use it. I'm seeing Penny here says for subscription charge for a small library, it's a couple of hundred dollars. It's really not that much for what you're getting. Okay, we'll include a link to the LibGuide site too so people can check in with them. I think they are pretty relevant. Right, the company that has it is SpringShare. So I'm going to open for questions now quickly. Let's see, questions about buy-in. So even after all of this, do you still have employees that pass the buck or do they try more often? So do they try to pass the, as often happens in libraries, they pass the questions on to the person they consider more tech savvy? Do you still see that happening a lot? No. We don't do it. If they pass the question on, they must stay and learn the answer. Okay. Let's see, what is the makeup of your training staff? We have five managers. Our technology manager is 19 years old. That's been helpful. She really is amazing. I've never met another 19-year-old like her. Yes, she started out as a volunteer when she was 14. She's the one who really helps me create the sites. My assistant director, my technology manager, my operations manager, and my reference librarian make up the people who do the training and the exams. Okay. Let's see, other questions. You talked a little bit about the 23 things and that the public, your community did that at the same time. Do you have other public tech training on your lip guides too? We are starting to use them as a supplement. So if we have a computer class, it will have a complimentary lip guide for people to refer back to. And if it's a multi-week class, we'll put homework on there as well. Lip guides allows you to do much more than what you're seeing here. You can do polls and discussion forums and all kinds of things. So yeah, we are really integrating it into our entire training program for the public as well. And let me tell you, it's so advanced that some libraries are actually using this as their website. So it's very flexible. Another question is about getting buy-in.  But what about a library where, for example, someone mentioned they did 23 things in 2009 and they didn't get buy-in from administration. How can they reintroduce it and get more buy-in from an administration? You need to be able to tell them exactly what realistic outcomes you're going to see from this. That would be my big suggestion. You can also do secret shoppers, which is something that we did. And the feedback that you will get from secret shoppers will probably be enough to convince them. Good. Well, this time has flown by. Again, we're going to send out a message later today that has the recording from today's session. It will have links to all of these different things. It will have all of that. And I think that will help people a lot too. I think that librarians are great at sharing with each other this kind of information. And Penny, your LibGuide is just an awesome resource for so many of us. So thank you so much to both of you for taking the time to be here and talk to us about this. It's been really useful, really great. And again, both Penny and Stephanie have provided their address here and have welcomed follow-up questions too. There are a couple of TechSoup resources that I'll mention that people might find interesting relevant for this topic too. There's Atomic Training and Easy Learning. It might be useful things. They include online courses on technology-related topics. And our next webinar might actually be interesting to this group too. I'll be one of the facilitators, and then Stephanie Girding who's been helping us out. And many of you know her for all the work she's done on Tech Training. Our next webinar is next week, and it's better together. And it's all about this type of sharing that's happening. So today Penny shared with us a lot of what she's done. But next week we're going to talk about lots of places that are sharing. There's just so much out there. And as Penny said, there's no need to reinvent the wheel when there's already so much good stuff out there. So next week we'll be all about that, about sharing resources. And with that I think we're about ready to wrap up for today. Again, thank you so much to Stephanie, and thank you so much to Penny too for being here, and for sharing with us about this great work that you're doing there in Pennsylvania. So thank you everyone for your participation and questions too. And we'll connect with you again after the webinar with that follow-up email. So thanks everyone. Have a great day. Thanks. Thank you.


You're also probably going to have some... Yeah, I'm going to make it more fast. So, no, it's not going to be like that. So, I would... No, I have done it all, I've done it literally. The first few minutes it gets better. It's fine, I think that's not important, but I was just wondering. So that we are a bit more... Hello, hello, welcome, welcome back, welcome back. Okay, so, welcome everybody. Good afternoon. It's a great pleasure to see all the young faces here, coming from so many different countries, so welcome. This is perhaps your first... This is your first major event at ICTP that you're attending. I'm also very happy that this is a... After two years, you know, it's nice that you are... We are able to really see each other in person, unlike the last two years. You can also live a more normal life, you know, take a stroll by the seaside, which was not the case last two years. So, welcome. And it's, I think, a nice introduction for you to be present to this spirit of the Salam Award ceremony, to really get a feeling for the spirit of the center. I'm pleased to have Ahmed Salam here, the son of our founding director, Abdul Salam, who will formally introduce the 2022 award winners and the winners themselves. So, we have three of them here. Let me very quickly introduce them. I think Ahmed will say more about them. So, sincere welcome to Professor Malik Maza, whose career has been intertwined with that of ICTP for decades. You know, given the conversions of his own vision for fostering research and inling isolation of scientists in Africa, which is the same mission as ICTP, especially through the creation of NanoafNet, which is the pan-African voice in the area of nanoscience and nanotechnology, which is recognized worldwide. And now, as I was discussing with him yesterday, the next step is going to be accent, and ICTP is looking forward to collaboration on that front. Then, the next person, awardee is Madame Kancheta Mosca, whose history with ICTP also spans almost the entire life of the center itself. And the diploma program's numbers, you know, last year we celebrated and some thousand students had graduated in the last 30 years. I mean, they speak for themselves. But it was Kancheta, who through the early days in 1991, until her retirement in 2002, she provided the support, you know, both actual secretarial support, but also moral support to the students to endure this one year of very intense study and cultural change. And you will understand what I mean. Sometimes it can be difficult, especially in the beginning months. So, and finally, warm welcome to Professor Adnan Shehab Eldin, whose relationship with ICTP also date back to 1976, after he met Abdul Salam in Kuwait. And at that time, he was the vice president of Kuwait University and director general of Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, which is one of the most important research centers in the Gulf world. Since then, he has been very supportive of ICTP activities. Even when he left Kuwait for positions in UNESCO, IEA and OPEC in Vienna, very steadfast support when he was the director general of KFAS. And I really cannot think of better ambassadors for the mission of ICTP than these people who are here in very different parts of the world in very different roles. And so, it's a very pleasure for me to welcome you to this wonderful ceremony. And it's actually a special occasion because I want to now sincerely thank Adnan for being the first one. This was one of the little surprises I had promised to the staff meeting. He's going to be the first one, and I think it's very appropriate that he's the first one to contribute to the International Science Endowment Fund that I mentioned before to the staff, which is our effort to increase our resources. And his contribution will allow ICTP to apply for grants, primarily for the support of students. So, thank you, Adnan. So, it's for all of you here for the students. And the creation of such a fund together with this contribution, this is our, really, we have been in the last two years, we have been really working hard on this. This is the cornerstone of our new effort to raise funds from more broadly than our institutional donors so far. And I really want to personally thank Adnan for his support. On another note, I'm also very pleased. I mean, today we will have another little surprise for the diploma students which I will come to later, which is once again related to the diploma program. For now, I will congratulate the three winners and I give the floor to Ahmed. You can go there. The name for the most gracious ever merciful. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it is a great pleasure to be with you again after the gap imposed by COVID. And it's always very emotional for me to stand here because this is where my father stood all those years ago and I have been visiting here now. As I said to my son, Kasim, who's with me on this trip, I first visited ICTP 57 years ago, which puts a pretty interesting age on me. I was a very little boy then, but it's 57 years I've been coming here and that probably puts me almost unique in the category of visitors to ICTP. And I have many, many memories of being here, many memories of being with my father and those very first days in the Piazza Oberdam, the centre-triest, sitting in his office with him, playing on the blackboard while he did his work and I used to rub out his work and did my drawings on the blackboard, which he was not very pleased with, but he forgave me then. So it's an honour to represent the whole family, my sisters who cannot be here and my brother as well, and to represent the whole Salam family. And it's a very important time for us because it's a generational commitment that we have to ICTP. I won't take up too much of your time with some of the war stories of ICTP, but the thing that I wanted to talk about was essentially the essence of ICTP and the centre was not created nor did it come about because of a scientific need. It came about because of a humanitarian need and that need was recognised by my father. As many of you know, the Salam in Arabic means a servant of peace and that name was not a name just given to him in an ordinary fashion. Again, as some of you will have seen in the film, you'll know I've told the story that his father, before he was born, my grandfather, before my father was born, had a dream and in that dream he was given a son and he was told in that dream to call the son of the Salam. So we believe that God gave him his name and that's a very important sign. And as you know, my father lived up to that name and for us, ICTP remains his greatest legacy. This legacy came about from an extreme and as Nigel Calder, when he stood here in 1997 and gave a talk about my father, he talked about his cosmic anger and that anger was an anger and a passion to address the inequality between the developing world and the developed world and the arrogance of the developing world believing that they could repress the developed world and people like you, just by accident of their birth who were deprived of opportunities in their own countries and that was his driving passion. He, my father himself, was of course deeply affected by the predicament of whether to leave his family back in 1952-1953 or leave his country or leave physics and it was at a very heavy heart that he chose to leave his family and leave his country. And if you can remember, some of you will be aware of the fact that in those days the only form of communication was good old snail mail. You wrote a letter and it took three weeks to get to the person and you waited three weeks for the reply to come. Nobody had telephones in those days in Pakistan. There was no question of direct dialing. If somebody, I remember when my father used to book a call he had phoned the operator, book a call and my grandfather didn't have a telephone. He didn't have the money to have a telephone. So the message would go to the neighbour who had the telephone to say we're going to phone tomorrow. Can you please come and make sure that my grandfather comes and sits in your house and waits all day for that phone to ring? And that was how they used to communicate. So you can imagine the impact that had on my father not having any communication with his family at all for weeks on end. And that was a huge wrench for him. And in his mind he vowed that no one else should ever have to face that decision. And he also knew that for any country to grow economically and be independent economically it needed to have access to science and technology and it needed access to science and technology in its own home territory where people could benefit from the education that they received and take it back to their own countries and give that education further to the citizens of their own countries. And that essentially was the essence of ICTP for people not to be part of the brain drain leaving their countries for the developed countries where the opportunities were much brighter and much greater. That's as I said with how ICTP was born and father fought incredible prejudice and ignorance at the highest levels in order to make this dream a reality. And I saw firsthand how hard he worked how hard he fought and how he overcame the doubters by his intellect and his charm.  His dreams have come true and it's wonderful to see the results of all his hard work. And it wasn't just at the beginning that he fought so hard. Throughout his life he had to work hard to keep the lights on, literally keep the lights on. And at this stage I must pay full tribute to UNESCO, the IEA for their support but above all else for the generosity of the Italian government who as Atheish will know have gone out of their way over many years to support ICTP and have taken a great pride in ICTP and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Now while father was working so hard to keep the centre's lights on, literally he was also doing his own work and he was running the centre and typically he would say his day was divided into three parts. One for his visitors and students one third for his science and third to run the centre. That would have broken many a lesser man but somehow he made it happen and he gave all the visitors and the students his time, his support and his commitment. And yet through all this he never forgot his humble roots and never forgot to make time for everybody who needed it and he sacrificed himself, his life, his family and ultimately his health for the sake of his students and the ICTP. And it exists that we the Salam family remember as a spirit of Salam and it is this spirit that we wish to keep alive the spirit of selflessness of sacrifice, of commitment and a genuine love for humanity. The spirit of Salam award is an award given by the family to a person who has worked tirelessly and without limits in the spirit of the Salam well beyond their job specification. Someone who's gone beyond their defined role and gone out of their way to guide, help, mentor or just be there for members of ICTP family. And we passionately believe it is critical and essential to keep the spirit of Salam alive and to remind everyone that this is the essence of ICTP and it was a quality of other Salam. It's what differentiated ICTP then it differentiates it now and it's what makes it unique even in this day and age. I'm absolutely delighted that we have such incredible recipients today and honoured to have them with us today. I just wanted to say the award is open to all and we want to recognise the scientific staff the administrative staff the maintenance staff every single person is eligible for this award because that's where my father treated everybody. He didn't have any hierarchy between people everybody was just as important to him and if anyone has touched your lives and helped you please nominate them put their names down and nominate them for award for next year we really want to make this as inclusive as an award and a recognition as possible. I'll end with a few thoughts from one of father's collaborators a student and a deep friend of his Professor Riaz Adline who wrote in his recently published autobiography he suggested Salam's work and life summarised in two words curiosity and compassion Viktor Weizkov said compassion without curiosity is ineffective and curiosity without compassion is inhuman curiosity led Salam to seek unity in the various phenomena of nature but it was his compassion which led him to seek unity in mankind and to work for the benefit of mankind and this was a crowning achievement for Salam's work and the creation of the ICTP and its development is testament to other Salam Ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for your time and I'll go on to the great pleasure of introducing of the Salam's personal vision and his relationship and if I start with Malik who as Atisha just said he has gone well beyond his own work specification to put it in a very crude sense and out of his way to go beyond the sense of duty and work with the ICTP office of external activities and played a crucial role in helping science not only in Africa but also in other Islamic countries and in Pakistan as well which is always very close to my father's heart we're deeply in gratitude Malik and we absolutely recognise and honour the work that he's done in father's memory perhaps Conchetta has done more in her own way by being as a mentor and a support which is what father spent so much time doing and maybe Conchetta you subconsciously picked up the vibes from my father and that gave you the ability to support the young students and help them which is a critical part of what they do as Satish said it's a very intense course and the fact that you've been able to hold their hands, guide them through it has been wonderful thank you so much from all of us Adnan is the exception because of course he's not a member of ICTP staff but his incredible commitment to my father and the man who stood up in the face of a great deal of opposition and constantly supported and worked for my father made us feel that he had to be recognised and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude and even more so now with the teacher's recent announcement thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all three of you for your help and support thank you very much I believe Professor Naan if you'd like to step up and I'll take my apologies we're starting with you first Program director Professor Dabholkar sorry Professor Salam dinner, junior and senior colleagues first of all I wish to express my gratitude to the ICTP family and to my two senior colleagues here present with us I'm really thrilled to be in this Kingdom here of the ICTP for us in Africa it is the mecca of science it is the Vatican of science it is Jerusalem of science whenever we come here to ICTP and we go back we are fully fully under and we know that we have enough resources to be able to come with the sound impact so far in Africa so I wish to share with you some slides colleagues just to show you how the compass of Ustad Abdul Salam was used by us from Africa and in the south in general to trigger more or less and pursue on his footsteps next please I wish to single out some of the initiatives that I was involved in either initiating or implementing with a number of colleagues from the family of the ICTP here the Condas and Meta the international relations office and others I would like to single one the first one is the LAM network that Prof. Ahmed Wa-Gay and Prof. Paul Bouabatsua from Ghana and Senegal respectively have initiated and implemented and it was in the early times of late Galena Denardo his soul stays in peace the other one the LAM network was created during the era of Ustad Abdul Salam himself but after that it has created a huge boost of lasers and optics photonics in the African continent and then after the African Union in that time NEPAD has came with the possibility to widen this LAM network and to give it more resources and so on and therefore there was a creation of the African laser center which is based indeed in South Africa supported by the South African government at a certain extent but driven by African fellows who have been mainly from the ICTP photonics and optics labs here the other one that I would like just to mention the idea was more or less took place somehow from the condos and Meta division and that is the African material research society which was created in Pretoria but supported by the NSF in the U.S. that was in the 1999 then in 2005 I was a student here and I was coming and that the ICTP has opened its doors for us and I came here and let Gallino de Nardo may his soul he assisted us as well as with the photonic community that is Johnny Amela and the International Office of course have allowed us to initiate here and to launch in 2005 in Adriatico the nano science African network which became extremely very dynamic and we were emulating and copying the model of the ICTP somehow or more or less the diploma program that my left angel has initiated with the late Abdul Salam and 2006 of course again the ICTP was the source of initiating the African physical society the IFPS that was in Dakar in 2006 and again with the condos and Meta and Ralph and Johnny Amela and other colleagues we came with initiating the African network for solar energy that was the idea was born here the ICTP of course and it was launched in Linz in Austria and in 2013 in that time I must admit we have had the support very robust support letter and moral commitment from the ICTP and the UNESCO requested us to apply and to be awarded the soul UNESCO nano South and that was created in 2013 and of course among others I'm just singling out some there is assessment there is quite a large cohort of initiatives in Africa and running extremely very well very smoothly and effectively next please and this culminated of course colleagues by the creation of the ICTP Africa in East Africa the AFAR which is how can I say the moon of the ICTP in Africa as the one in Brazil we do understand that how can I say the sun and the moon both of them do shine but one is the source of light the other one does reflect it we do understand our mother institution is ICTP and in Trieste and ICTP is in East Africa in Rwanda for which the patron is the Honorable President Kagame as a patron and as a moral guarantee showing that in effect policy makers now in the African continent are convinced about the science and the technology I would like just to mention that and if you allow me to do so the first revelation to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi was read on the on the name of his almighty and that was read the commandment where the table of commandment was written therefore Moses has to read also and so on and so on so it's extremely important the education is the cornerstone of any belief and so on and therefore we continue in that regard next please I wish to share with you some hard fact as we saw as we say as St. Thomas comes St. Thomas on a caucus convo as St. Thomas and only what we see here we have duplicated at a little at the nanoscale of course at our level and not at the level of the mother institution ICTP but we have duplicated having somehow and emulated what Honorable Madame Mosca has initiated with Ustad Salam created something equivalent of at the post-graduate level and we have fellows from Burkina Faso, Uganda Cameroon South Africa and so on and so on a number of African countries and but we have not neglected those who are in a difficult situation those who are in a war zones, Yemen and Ethiopia and other parts of the world and in particular here in Libya for example the gentleman and his wife next please as again the nanoathlete has allowed us more or less to embark in this program that Honorable Mosca has more or less initiated with Ustad Salam, late Ustad Salam sorry here so we within the UNESCO chair we increased more or less the number and in particular the gender aspect I was just telling some of the colleagues is that the first believer in Islam was Khadija the wife of the wife of Rasul Sallallahu ala Muhammad I do firmly believe that likely the Islam would not have such a dimension all over the word if the first believer was not a lady and I also go that route and say that there would be no Christianity if there were no married a virgin if there was no married a marriage there would be no no Christianity so the role of women in this society and therefore we embark in gender equity next please and that is really a must for us it's a must for us humanity for since historical dates have neglected the half of humanity we cannot do that we have to embark in I can say boosting the education and bringing our sisters and our mothers within the same path as we have had the chance to do next please next please so we embarked in a co-diploma we embarked in a co-diploma and I can say as you can see fellows from Hong Kong countries they do indeed embark with us and they end by getting an anglophone diploma some of them they get two double diplomas because they go back home where I can say have a massive somehow a large amount of databases and results they go back where they can also work on other subjects and so on next please next next please just a typical example junior senior and junior colleagues just to give you an idea when you publish you are cited if you if the research work that you are doing is of an interest such colleagues from China from Russia from wherever they are they will write your work that means they have read it and they have been interested by it and as you can see colleagues before we were at some turns 20 per year citations once we embarked in 2005 with the nano Fnet and the chair which were for which the ICTP was emulated somehow or copied somehow duplicated at a small level as you can see the application there was a rise of an exponential type of rise of that and we always look how much we are doing in 2022 we are at around 3700 thank you next please again colleagues I would just give back to Caesar which belongs to Caesar and to Cleopatra which belongs to Cleopatra is that yes indeed we are extremely concerned to the UNESCO and to the spirit of Abdul Salam late Abdul Salam and in that regard the Trieste system has played a major role in that regard in particular the the ICTP Abdul Salam ICTP center and colleagues I would like just to share with you this today we have we inherit we inherit in different ways we have two generations of late Abdul Salam we are very well aware that the DNA is inherited 50% from our mothers and 50% of our fathers we have the living DNA of late Abdul Salam with us today and but we have there is another inheritance type approach that is the spirit and that spirit of Abdul Salam is with us it's not DNA but it is and it's entangled with the natural DNA and may his spirit stays forever in effect we from the African perspective again Abdul Salam Legacy and Abdul Salam center and his vision is somehow the equivalent of the North Star or the Southern Cross stars that we use as a compass to guide ourselves and we will ensure that his legacy will stay forever Shukran Jazeera now we call on concerto please as you can see I'm very nervous I'm not used to speaking in front of large audiences but I'm honored to accept this spirit of Salam award and thank the Salam family the director of the center and the awards committee for bestowing it upon me and I still feel all I did was my job as best I could I greatly admired Professor Salam and always remember the sense of mission he instilled in all of us who were fortunate enough to work under him working at the center was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life especially when I was secretary of the diploma program and met such deserving young people many scientists thought the program wouldn't work but I remembered that Professor Salam had had an ICTP degree program in his heart already in the 1970s and I was confident that if all of us Professors Yulu and Ranj Bardaimi who were the acting heads of the program the coordinators the lecturers and the ICTP staff did our best to make it work it would many scientists I think everybody for their collaboration because it was the combined effort and commitment that made the program become one of the most successful here at the center without everyone's input it would never have been this good I loved working for the students getting to know them on a personal basis throughout their good and bad times I know how difficult it is to live in a foreign country with a different climate nor its language and customs studying under lectures who had new ways of teaching and such a diverse group of students as classmates in fact during their time in the program some told me that they had never slept even one night away from their own home others had never seen snow or had never seen women dressed in a certain type of attire some had never met a person of a different culture thus began the shared lunch hours and afterward coffee meetings with the students outings or parties to mark special occasions including whenever the coordinators and lecturers so they would be together on a more informal basis the students brought a youthfulness to the center and despite some difficulties they all made it through I'm sure that you new students will also succeed in doing so I enjoyed every minute of the diploma program sharing the students joys and woes their fears and satisfactions learning from as well as helping them they became the other children I didn't have because I have only one and with many of the students warm, friendly and lasting relationships were formed I remember each of the past students for some personal characteristics they had or for some particular event that happened during their stay from time to time I'm still in touch with a good number of them and have met, so to speak their new families wives, husbands and children as they form many have won prestigious awards, honors and grants many have their own laboratory or research group still others are now in important positions all tell me they are doing their best to help young students advance whether in their home country or from their adopted country much like Professor Salam himself did so thanks go to them as well for the success of this program I close by sending them all my most affectionate regards wishing all of you including Patricia and Sandra who worked so hard to look after the students the best in the future and again thanking those who were so kind as to grant me the award the honor and recognition are appreciated and will be cherished thank you so much and last but by no means least Professor Naan it would be a great pleasure good evening and thank you very much Dr. Ahmed thank you very much Dr. Ateesh for your kind words and distinguished guests members of the faculty students fellows all of you I extend to you my sincerest greetings tonight in accepting this award that is very dear to my heart I want to thank the family of Dr. Salam for bestowing on me this honor with my co-recipient and Ateesh for his really doing such a great job thank you all it is a privilege for me to be among select awardees not only this year to all of those years because the award recognizes the dedication of the Salam had for humanitarian passion vision for the development and advancement of science and technology and innovation in the developing countries and that to me is very dear that's what I have devoted my career and there is a reason why I devoted my career because I was one of the many lucky scientists that were touched by Dr. Salam in person as we say not virtually and I have been influenced by his guidance and inspired by his vision and dedication you know my first encounter with Professor Salam was in the 70s before I came to ICTP in Kuwait he used to come to Kuwait especially after 73 to advocate to urge the region to use its wealth to build centers of excellence to re-store Ummatul Alam that's the words that he used and we maintained our relationship we interacted through not just the 70s but the 80s and 90s until God rested him from the endeavors that he committed himself to do and you know Professor Salam recognized something very important that I believe in and he taught me that that science development flourishes with diversity and openness open system diverse system survive I was recently in a conference in Italy in Lake Como a guy from Toyota on electric vehicle cells chose to talk about biodiversity is the reason we are all here because that maintained resilience in the evolution of human being against extension the dinosaurs 70% of living things disappeared with that big extension but because there was diversity immense diversity survived and we are better than anything applies throughout he considered science to be the ultimate endeavor of the human mind and the spirit and he stressed its fundamental role in the advancement of the societies and civilization so basic science is really an important thing for the mind and the spirit and it drives development drives technology and that's very important basically was very passionate dedicated to the revival of scientific leadership in the Muslim country and in the developing world at large and he stressed often that what we need is to promote the development of science culture in the society science culture during his multiple visits in the 70s and later on Professor Salam devoted special attention to advocate for the establishment of science centers centers of excellence he talked to the leaderships of these countries directly the ME is the prime minister the minister of education in Kuwait in the Gulf states when he was speaking in meetings in conferences he never get tired even though he may have spoken 100 times and no result he continued until some result happened I have no doubt that because of what is urging advocacy many of the current centers of excellence in the Gulf in the Middle East are to some extent they owe to his advocacy including for example the Kuwait foundation for the advancement of science which was established soon after he visited Kuwait first few years and it's a unique combination between private and public funded by the private sector but patronized by the Amir of Kuwait as being the chairman of the board and was established in 1976 after few of his visits so the foundation of course as I said it's a very unique in that sense I do recall of course my first visit to the center in 1976 and I was here in August 1976 with I was vice rector of Kuwait university as was mentioned earlier but I was accompanying the president of the university Dr. Hassan to sign an agreement to formalize the cooperation that was already taking place between Kuwait university and the center which allowed young scientists from all over the world working at Kuwait university to come and spend few weeks few months at the center so we formalized that in an agreement for five years and then later on it was taken up by KFAS in 1981 Dr. Adnal Akil came here and signed it with Professor Salam and since then that agreement continued to be renewed by other colleagues and I was very privileged myself to have the opportunity to continue to provide that support of KFAS and I'm confident that this will be maintained because it's in the interest of Kuwait and it's the interest of the region and Kuwait will not survive if the region does not survive and it's the interest of the region because the region will not survive if the world does not survive so I am confident that this partnership will continue in one way or another because it had expanded in scope that allowed Salam's lectureship post-docs, fellowships diploma students and so on and I really was very privileged to have played a part in it small part I think my predecessor Dr. Adnan Dr. Alishchamplan played a bigger part in making it happen at that time my job was easier is to maintain it and strengthen it so I'm sure that others who will come after us will also provide that kind of support because it's the interest as I said of Kuwait and the leadership of Kuwait has thrived itself proud throughout its history before oil on helping others and we continued that tradition after oil we are proud to help in a small way in a big way wherever it happens that's the tradition of the Kuwait society 1981 I was privileged to interview myself Professor Salam during the visit he had soon after Kefas signed an agreement with ICTP in Kuwait TB in English and rather than talk about it if you allow me I will show two video clips from that if I could have the first clip Walter Professor Salam would you tell us about your work in physics for which you have been awarded the most distinguished scientific prize in the world first I would like to say that I'm very honored to be in Kuwait I think Kuwait with its traditions of stability freedom democracy is really an ideal type of city-state which could rival Athens in the past so far as Arab and Islamic countries are concerned it is a great pleasure of course for me to be in a brother Muslim country the next trip to where the end I think the message spoken powerfully with dedication and science what happened can we play it again perseverance dedication to science to pure science and to applied science because I think they go hand in hand I think not only you are a great scientist but you are a great human being and we would like to thank you for this opportunity to be with us here in Kuwait and we wish that we would have an opportunity and occasion to see you in the future if you have anything else that you would like to tell us please do so once again iterate what I said before that Kuwait has a very great future and I hope that it becomes the center of that Umatul Elmphil Islam which we have talked about so salamu alaykum to you and to your listeners thank you very much I would ask Walter to show quickly a few pictures that depict the relationship between KFAS Kuwait and Dr. Salam and the center the first one is the signing of the agreement let's go back that's the signing of the agreement between KFAS the next one is in a TWAAS conference right after the invasion and the liberation of Kuwait 1992 I believe first major international conference that the Sheikh Jabir the emir of Kuwait with Abdul Salam sitting right next to him went to Kuwait right after the liberation of Kuwait and he went and Kuwait embraced the third world academy of science meeting in Kuwait the first thing we did after liberation of Kuwait is to embrace the international scientific community in the third world as a sort of say thank you but also to say welcome to Kuwait we would like to continue our collaboration these are you know powerful words that he uttered and when I listen to his explanation in the rest of the video which I cannot show you it's long in simple terms an exciting new frontiers of physics is being explained that was Abdul Salam he could do the science in simple way but he could be a very strong advocate of how science should be organized in the society I believe that he also recognize something which I mentioned earlier that we in Kuwait we pride ourselves is to help each other that's the spirit, humanitarian spirit and that's what he embodied throughout his life and I think that I said earlier this is what Kuwait pride itself in being open whether it is the Syrian refugees whether it is Sudan, whether it is in science whether it is in disasters before oil and after oil Kuwait society was always like that and it will remain like this this is why I'm very happy to assist the ICTP leadership Professor Atish in particular in developing and establishing various modalities for supporting including setting up a fund and what's important regardless whether it is an international fund or a program or an activity what's important is that we all get involved in it the grassroots is much more important in my view than one donor so I would urge all of the faculty all of the alumni, all of the students today or in the future to make a contribution I have a rule thousand by a thousand gives you one million we have one thousand alumni make one thousand euro you get a million and if you can do that with a matching from a big donor that million becomes ten millions and that's really what I've been working with Atish and Kareen and others here to try to make this thing happen as a reality I'm committed to support in all of your efforts to make it happen and in conclusion because if this happens then I think we have kept the torch of salam spirit shining brilliantly as it should always it was uttered before me and it's when it shines brilliantly what does it do it becomes a beacon for you the students to guide you in your endeavors so that you become a torch for others and so on I think I once again would like to thank the salam family the leadership of ICTP for the honor that you have bestowed on me in my core recipients which I wish to congratulate them and I wish to reiterate that I dedicate the recognition of this award to my family to my friends to the leadership of my country and to the citizens because when we make contribution it is not the leadership only that makes the contribution it's the whole country that makes that contribution willingly thank you all keep the inspiration and the spirit of salam alive and being always a shining bright beacon so thank you Ahmad and congratulations once more to the recipients today it was really wonderful to hear I mean it's always and you know you have seen it yourself now it's really wonderful to see the real impact and how ICTP has touched the scientific lives as well as the personal lives of so many people around the world and it's not it's a legacy that we all respect and honor and it gives us additional strength to really make ICTP shine even brighter in the future and I would like to thank the salam family as well as recipients here and also the kind words of Ahmad to help us in our endeavors to you know go bigger and this is the ambition that we should all have so I also have another small I had announced in the staff meeting that there is another surprise that is waiting for us so I hope we will be joined shortly by professors Monica and Kaiser Shafi from Delaware are they? Hi Kaiser, hello Monica welcome as you can I hope you can see the audience here it's a collection of all the new students who have come here the faculty all the staff members and the salam ok, Ahmad is sitting in the corner and the recipients of the salam the spirit of the salam award so I'm very happy to it's my pleasure to introduce both of them Kaiser and Monica Shafi are I'm friends and supporters of ICTP so in 2022 their support through the International Science Fund which I mentioned allowed the creation of the Kaiser and Monica Shafi prize this prize will be awarded to the best diploma student of the year to recognize and encourage the next generation of young scientists so ICTP on behalf of ICTP I would like to thank them both for this initiative it's only a beginning they like Abnam they are really very committed and they are helping us to spread the world around and really reach out to a bigger and broader community of ICTP's well wishers so thank you very much for the initiative and commitment to ICTP and its mission let me say just quickly a few words about Kaiser by way of introduction I have met him personally a number of times and it's a pleasure to have him here on this special occasion he is a Pakistani American theoretical physicist and inaugural Barthol Research Institute Professor of Physics at the University of Delaware he studied physics at Imperial College and that should ring a bell for you because Salam as you know was at Imperial before he came here he received his B.S.U. honors and Ph.D. and his advisor was in fact Abdul Salam the late Professor Abdul Salam and he subsequently joined him at the International Center for Theoretical Physics and from the early 1980s until 1997 he co-organized many several weeks long summer schools at ICTP and as you know many of them are really very high profile international schools in the field Kaiser has done pioneering research in areas ranging from grand unification to Kaluzak line theories and inflationary cosmology and supersymmetric theories so welcome Professor Shafi and I would like to now introduce you to Professor Monika Shafi she is Ilya Sahuja Professor Emerita of German Literature at the University of Delaware where she also was the chair of Women and Gender Studies she is the author of several books on German and Austrian literature numerous publications on contemporary German literature so before giving the floor to to Professors Monika and Kaiser Shafi I request the diploma co-ordinators who are present here to introduce themselves just so that even though you are not able to be here in person you will get a sense of some of the colleagues who are working on this so we'll start with high energy physics Kaiser this is close to your closer to your heart I would say Professor Paolo criminally Paolo I've met here in 2019 nice to meet you actually I'm not the coordinator of the high energy diploma but Giovanni Villadoro cannot be here today so but I am currently the head of the high energy program so nice to see you again then we move to the condensed matter section and statistical physics Misha Kiselev Hello I'm Mikhail Kiselev I'm coordinator of the post graded program in condensed metaphysics and the whole post graded program unit at ACTP so I welcome all students to ACTP and I give a microphone to my colleague Ricardo Yes Professor Ricardo Farnetti who is the Earth and Science Earth System Physics section Yes my name is Ricardo Farnetti and I'm the coordinator of the Earth System Physics Diploma Program nice to meet you in mathematics Professor Stefano Lozato Hello good afternoon my name is Stefano Lozato I'm also standing in for the coordinator Professor Gaccia but I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to thank you for your kind interest I was also for 10 years at Imperial College actually before coming here and I'm also the coordinator of a very similar program to the Diploma Program in Lahore, Pakistan so it's a very great pleasure to meet you Okay and finally this is our newest section in Quantitative Life Sciences Professor Matteo Marcilli Hello I'm Matteo Marcilli very pleased to to meet you I'm yes the coordinator of the Diploma Program with these great students here and thank you very much for your interest and support Okay so now I give the floor to you Manik and Kaiser Thank you very much Can you hear me? I can hear you I'm not sure about the audience No we can hear you No you can hear Well thank you very much for this opportunity Atish It has been a pleasure really to listen to the distinguished speakers of the bodies of this Spirit of Salam award I mean this center is a very special place in our hearts for Monika too because sort of as young students like I see the diploma students who have just joined we learned at ICTP how to grow up as a scientist really quite frankly So I heard Ahmed Salam's speech I don't know whether he remembers it we heard him in 2016 right at that 90th anniversary for Salam that was held in Singapore was a scientific meeting with a lot of distinguished speakers actually So I have briefly to summarize briefly I have connections to Abdul Salam of course being my PhD advisor and then after completing my training I came to ICTP for a year actually and eventually it was decided that after Salam got his Nobel Prize at CERN at the time that I'll come back to Trieste and be the staff member there but due to family reasons we decided to move to the US but it is no exaggeration to state that ICTP has been a very important place for me throughout my entire career actually it's an institution that I feel very loyal to like we heard from others too and that I wish to succeed and grow in every way possible So some of you have just arrived at the ICTP you should look at the history read about it and it's also documented in the photos on display as you enter the reception area of ICTP I was last there about three years ago before Covid came So very special place for me and it's a place where actually I've enjoyed and that's where I met Conchata also in case she remembers us and in fact you make lifelong partnerships friendships in fact when you come to ICTP I have collaborators now especially one or two of them with whom I have collaborated for the last almost 50 years or so So starting in the early 80s I was spending basically every summer at the ICTP co-directing the summer schools in high energy physics and cosmology with Professor of the Salam with Yogeshpati Antonio Masiero who is at the university in Padua and many others one or two alas have passed away but these were very good schools since we started with phenomenology and then string theory came along and so then it became a very extensive school and many of the well highly acclaimed theoretical physicists and string theorists actually around the globe came to ICTP to attend the summer school then I can assure you there are many of them we have the best speakers and Abdul Salam philosophy was look these people are coming from around the globe make sure you get the best people who know the subject and who can teach well and that was the goal for many years I stopped going there primarily because Professor Salam passed away that was my intimate connection but I kept my connection with ICTP at some level and this is where I also met in the early 1990s as we heard the diploma program was starting at ICTP and I used to see them because Monica and I were the young children, two young children we would stay in the Adriatico and that's where we would meet at lunch, at dinner sometimes even for coffee breaks you know some of the students so even though a couple of students in fact did my did their degree with me PhD degree and then finally at ICTP diploma course I have met many more mostly in high-energy physics and cosmology but also in condensed metaphysics and some in mathematics just because I've been to different countries and so on and who came and introduced themselves to me so what was special about these diploma students was not only their level of preparation, solid foundation in depth knowledge but also their enthusiasm and motivation their energy qualities that are critical actually for a successful career but this I think I cannot imagine any other place in fact which can offer a better preparation for a PhD program in these sciences I'm thinking of the top place you can look at the graduate programs for preparing for a PhD and I think ICTP is ranked amongst the top if not right at the top so given my decades long association with the ICTP having worked at the ICTP in different roles and feelings as excited about this mission as I did when I first came there a long time ago it was a logical step for me and Monica to endow some kind of an award and now prize in this case for the diploma I'm sure the administration at ICTP will tell you more about it but discussing this venture with the current ICTP leadership we decided it would be best to open it to all fields that would be what Abdu Salam would have wanted I think not restrict oneself to any particular area so not just restrict to high energy physics, cosmology or condensement just open it to all the fields and motivate as much as possible as possible I'm sure you guys are already well motivated this is one of the best programs you can attend so it's wonderful really to see this group of young scientists successful and enjoyable stay at the ICTP last but not least I would like to acknowledge Monica thank you and my wife Monica who's as you heard from German literature but has always supported this effort of mine in the summers to commit oneself Abdu Salam used to tell me why can't you have a school for three months in the summer now of course we used to have it for several weeks six to eight weeks was not so common but she has been always very supportive while we directed the schools and with a lot of advance planning and organization she managed to get her own work done while we went yesterday so that was also important so good luck and I hope to see you all in person next August during the award ceremony thank you very much again to actually to the ICTP administration especially the director Atish the diploma director Misha Corrine and Sabrina from the development office who have always been very kind to work and I look forward to interacting with them in the future and making more taking more initiatives for the near future thank you very much thank you very much Monica would you like to say add something can you hear me yes can you hear me oh yes we can so greetings actually I hope the technology works I'm on my iPhone here in New York and it's an absolute pleasure and a great honor to be part of this gathering of this meeting even if it's all I wish we could heard this it does bring back many many only second to what Kaiser has said about our long association with the ICTP and as you can imagine Kaiser and I very much work as a team and we were delighted that we were able to create this prize this award and do a little bit from our part to support the mission of the ICTP which is absolutely unique in the world I believe and to honor the legacy of the late professor up to was being such a role model not just for Kaiser as a scientist but for both of us apologize for the dark parking in the background so that's what happens if you work from home so thank you so much for creating this event and also I wish to extend my greetings specially to the incoming students I wish you a most wonderful year of intense research friendships collaborations and I also hope you get to explore Trieste which is really unique city in Italy and the Italian culture so best of luck to all of you from me thank you thank you very much okay so thank you very much all of you for attending I would like to again congratulate the winners of the spirit of the of the salam prize thanks again to Ahmad and the salam family and the Shafi family for the support that they are continuing the mission of ICTP in this manner I think it's really very apt that they are the first to launch this new initiative of the international science fund of ICTP and I really am very grateful and I hope this is a beginning of you know a very important initiative which will help the mission of ICTP so so I would like to normally what we will do now is that we will exit this room and we will go to the terrace for light refreshments I will leave the students here they can interact with the professors Monica and Kaiser Shafi you can ask them questions and then you can join us later on the on the terrace we will keep you some refreshments and so thank you very much again