Whales have captured our imagination for millennia and sometimes that fascination with them manifests in very strange ways. In the 1970s when NASA created the Voyager space missions to send spacecraft on a tour of the solar system and on its way outward, it affixed these golden disks to the side. And on these golden disks were messages meant to someone, something should that entity want to know who sent these spacecraft on their voyage. And what's really interesting is these records contain audio images and greetings in 55 human languages and one non-human language, which is humpback whale song. Now that should be really strange. That's a funny thing. It presumes a lot about what we think whales are saying. But the fact of the matter is we still don't know what whale song actually means. We don't know if that's really a greeting or if it's just a comment about what they ate for lunch. And that's a microcosm of this enigma, this mystery of wanting to know where they came from and where they're going. So when you think about whales you probably have this image in your head. This is a shot of humpback whale in Antarctica, Wilhelmina Bay. This is more typically what you imagine when you think of a whale. Living 99% of its life away from us underwater, they remain inaccessible. So the ways that we want to know about them require tools of investigation that get us there, that extend our senses. 30 seconds after this picture was taken, I took this one from the boat on top of the water where that whale then came to the surface to go look at the observers observing it. And so this is a bit of that connection that we have to this very enigmatic species where we want to know more about it, but we can't actually interrogate it directly. So this is why the questions that scientists ask are some of the best ones for understanding what these animals are all about. Because they're fantastic, because they're amazing, because their traits are so spectacular, Archreosity leads us to ask more and more questions about them. I'm a paleontologist and I work at the Smithsonian which houses the world's largest museum complex on the planet. Some 156 million objects, specimens. And museums are special institutions because they're kind of like the vaults of past worlds. If we want to know what the lost worlds of the past were like, whether it's in geologic history or human history, we need that evidence. And there's no better place to find that evidence to safeguard it, to study it, to take care of it for the future than museums. And so the evidence of the past that I encounter, the bones of long extinct whales, are right there before me. But I want to share a bit more about how we know about that and what that tells us about where they came from and where they're going. The first most amazing fact about whales is that they once lived on land. Some 50 million years ago, they had four legs. They had long, probably furry snouts, nostrils halfway down, not right above their eyes. And over the course of about 10 million years, relatively short period of time, they then start to look somewhat more like the whales that we recognize today, living underwater full time, having a tail fluke, probably doing something that looks pretty fearsome. And we have this image of this evolutionary transformation being somewhat one directional, like it's happening in a linear fashion. But actually, that's not really how evolution works. It's really convenient when we look at it from our perspective as one stage going to another in a long series of successes. But actually, the way Darwin articulated it here, as evolution is a bushy tree, is actually way more accurate. Evolution is a story of failures with very few successes. When I look at the fossil record, I'm mainly looking at the story of failures and the successes. That's where it gets really interesting, because that tells you how things are working today. And so instead of thinking about the evolution of whales as one sort of long succession leading to a successful dominance, this bushy tree of whales, if we went back 50 million years ago, the beach party would look something like this. And all these different forms went extinct, except for the one in the back that begat all the whales that we see today. The most likely unsuccessful one at the time was the one that became adapted to the water full time. So the fossil record tells us about past states that we wouldn't otherwise know. But the fossil record is actually very incomplete. All those artistic reconstructions that I showed you are just that. The actual evidence we can sometimes hold in our hands, bits of bone, shards of teeth, that is the direct evidence of the past. And from that we have to become good detectives, ask good questions. And sometimes we get lucky. And getting lucky is largely a matter of science in a social context. And geopolitics drives a lot of the expeditionary science that I do. This is a picture of fossil field work in the Atacama Desert of Chile a few years ago right along the side of the Pan-American highway. A road construction company expanding the highway to make way for mining equipment to go up and down the Pan-American highway to recover mineral resources that are used by developing countries exposed one, two, three, four and 40 other skeletons of fossil whales all right by the side of the road. And that's fairly unusual for someone like me who's used to dealing with fragmentary remains. So I had a bit of a logistical problem on my hand in terms of scale and time because the company still needed to continue with their work and we still had scientific questions about what's going on. And at the time we decided to do something innovative and we applied 3D scanning techniques to capture a digital facsimile of those records before us. The national patrimony of Chile never left the country. Indeed it still awaits fossil preparation and detailed work to remove the rock from bone. But using digital data we were able to capture context. This is the crime scene of wanting to know what happened here. And as it turns out we think that harmful algal blooms, poisons created by single-celled organisms some several million years ago, likely led to the die-off and the many fossil whale skeletons that we see before us today. But what's great about digital data is that you can then pull it back and it captures a moment in time the way you were in the field that you can then see in the laboratory. And in the safe context of the laboratory you have much more time to examine it in detail and if you have the right kinds of tools you can make a 3D print out of it. And so this is a 3D print of that same image. And it's amazing to me to be able to hold the direct evidence in miniature in my hands but these provide me with tools to communicate it. And so the objects that we have in museums only make sense if we're able to speak for them. One function of the museum is to provide us with scientific answers to create these objects and collections where we can or replicas and facsimiles but also to tell narratives, to tell us stories about how we know what we know about life in the past because we do want to know what's going to go on in the future. A blue whale like this is a very large organism. It's actually larger than any dinosaur that ever lived. 100 feet long, maybe 200 tons in weight. And the amazing fact, the second amazing fact, is that blue whales are the largest whales ever to have lived. So we are literally living in an age of giants. But nearly not so much because in the early 20th century we nearly hunted blue whales to extinction. 99% of the blue whales that were on the planet at the start of the 20th century were gone by the 1960s. They barely escaped extinction from widespread pelagic whaling. And whaling is in the news today because especially in the Asian Pacific region, many countries are either involved in commercial whaling or not and it's becoming a big issue that gets a lot of news media coverage. But I actually think this is a little bit of a red herring because the real issue is not about whaling which only amounts for a small portion of the total whales killed every year. A thousand times more whales are killed each year by ship strike, net entanglement, by-catch. Those are the real issues that are threatening whales today. Not so much whaling which is much more artisanal in scale. While whaling did not render any single species extinct in the 21st century, some whales species did go extinct and here's one example. This is a photo of the Yangtze River Dolphin taken in 1918 by the hunter who first collected the specimen that is now actually at the Smithsonian in our collections. The bones and the rest of the skeleton that belong to this individual represent in large part the totality of what we know for the species. Why? Because it is completely extinct. Large-scale urbanization of the Yangtze River rendered that habitat unusable to this species. And this is a photo of the last individual from 2002. Since that time when this individual died, no more Yangtze River Dolphins have ever been heard or spotted. So this is a tale of extinction in our times. Now, the situation for the Vakita, a small porpoise that lives in the Gulf of California, gives us some reason for hope. There are maybe 12 individuals of this porpoise left on the planet. And they are largely a victim of by-catch from a fishery that is dedicated towards going after a single fish, the Totoaba, whose bladder fetches tens of thousands of dollars on Asian markets. And so it's not directly because we're killing this individual species, but it's by-catch. It's an indirect victim of another industry. And with 12 individuals you're left with not very many options for saving the species. But there are some efforts, and this includes one two years ago, to create ex situ conservation, capture the remaining individuals, put them in sea pens until we can stabilize the external threats to that lineage. This effort didn't go so well and it had to be stopped because one of these individuals actually died out of the capture attempt. But a year later, a calf and a mother were later photographed in the same area. So they're not extinct quite yet. It's a testament to how hard it is to know about extinction in the seas and also the resiliency of many of these lineages, despite human interaction. So what's life like for a whale in the oceans today? They live at the peril and promise of civilization. If you're a large whale, entanglement and fishing lines like this North Atlantic right whale is a major threat along with being struck by a ship, either a cargo ship or cruise ship. And if you're lucky, you might get freed from this entanglement by some curious humans who have the ability to free you from those ropes. This would be a success story many times it's not. And there's reports back from the east coast of the United States of many of these right whales that are showing up dead already this season. So it's still a cause for concern, especially because this species made it through whaling, but it hasn't recovered. So even with the cessation of widespread hunting, there's still serious threats to whales on this planet. Now, why is this interesting for us? I want to make the case that whales tell us a lot about ourselves. Some whales live human lifetimes. They live actually longer than us. This species of whale, the bowhead in the Arctic, may live up to 200 years. So imagine the stories a 200-year-old whale would tell us about our own civilization. A 200-year-old whale alive today would tell us about the rise and fall of many industries, about technological innovations and changes in the ocean. Not to say anything about the rise of pollutants, plastics, you name it, a whale that old has seen it. Now turn that around and imagine a bowhead whale born today. What kind of future Arctic will it see?  We have a lot of stake in that and we have a role to play in that future as well. So when I think about the future of whales, I think that those that are most likely to survive and thrive on planet Earth in the age of humans are going to be the adaptive flexible ones. The ones that have broad geographic ranges, flexible diets, a bit like this humpback whale in Antarctica. In this picture may look very pristine and beautiful, but we know that even in Antarctica, it is not a pristine environment. Our footprint, our impact on ecosystems on this planet is broad. It's going to be persistent. And so they're very much living on our planet. And so we have a big role to play in the future that we share with whales. But I am excited and that's because we are living in the golden age of whale science. This is a photo taken from a drone right above one of those same humpback whales feeding in this incredibly complex behavior called bubble netting, creating a corral around a school of fish that allows it to eat fish basically in a barrel. And we would not otherwise know about this unique behavior if we didn't have this technology. So technological innovations for scientists are giving us tremendous insight into a largely inaccessible world. And think about this last, you know, this goes back to our original slide of the disks. What can we know about whales moving forward from all these different pieces of knowledge that we have today? We are inherently curious species and we want to know more about these enigmas. And it's really, you know, the question of what whale song means is likely a question that scientists can answer in large part because of the tools that they have. So I don't know if we're ever going to know what whales are saying, but certainly scientists are still listening. Thanks.


My name is Bruce Herbert and it's my pleasure to talk to you the CNI community today about supporting university resilience during the pandemic through Vivo the open source research information management system. Today we're going to hear from my colleagues demeris Murray was the director of faculty data systems and analysis at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Robert Miller, who is the chief executive officer of lyricists a nonprofit organization serving universities and other cultural institutions, and myself, and I am director of scholar communications at Texas A&M here in college station Texas. Research information management systems collect and store structured data about faculty research scholarly activities and other information about their careers at universities. They're distinguished by several particular characteristics one is the authority of the data set that they represent on faculty profiles. They collect often collect metrics, such as citations or alt metrics about the faculty research products and publications, and they often have common standards ontologies or data models that define the data that are structured within RIM systems. Vivo is an open source community member supported RIM system that is is supported by lyricists and has several specific core values. One is that it's an open source solution so that it can be customized and given freely away that it's supported by an open community of members and enthusiasts who support the development and use of Vivo around the world. And that the data that is supported in Vivo and collected and organized in Vivo is then shared around the world supporting the knowledge graph of academic research. And so it is a really important thing. Vivo is implemented by institutions and academic organizations around the world in about 60 different, 64 different instances now in 20 different countries, and this forms the overall Vivo community. First, we're going to hear from Damaris Murray, who is director of faculty data systems and analysis on her system scholars at Duke. Damaris. Hi everyone, I'm glad to talk to you today about scholars at Duke. We've had it at Duke for about nine years now and it was really exciting to see how scholars at Duke was able to play a part throughout the institution, particularly throughout the pandemic. So I'll share a little bit about what scholars at Duke is and then I'll talk about specifically how it's come in handy the past year and a half or so. So scholars at Duke is Duke's implementation of Vivo. We use it not only as a research information system but also as an expert finding tool, and it hosts a lot of different visualizations and search functionality that make it useful for several different functions across the university. Scholars at Duke, it contains not only information about Duke faculty but also other community members that are engaged in research and teaching. Next slide. So scholars is very unique in that it houses information about Duke faculty in one place. Before scholars at Duke we didn't have a system where you could similar to a directory you could search throughout the university for what sorts of research and activities were going on and really get a sense of the interdisciplinary work that is happening at Duke. So that's what scholars at Duke. It does. It pulls from many trusted sources around the university and represents scholarship in a consistent way, regardless of whether you're affiliated with a certain school or institute or center. Next slide. So whether you're looking for information about a specific topic or an individual in the Duke community. So scholars has really been a trusted source and a place to find up to date content. As it pulls from systems nightly so we know it's always very up to date and whether you're just trying to manage your scholarly reputation or identify potential collaborators. Scholars at Duke has been the place where people know to go to kind of start that kind of work. Next slide. So our office is in the office of the provost under finance and administration which is a little bit different from other schools that have implemented Vivo. Although we do have very strong ties not only with the library but also research and administration Duke arts and central it. And what we've been able to do is kind of bridge the gap between several, several groups that don't necessarily work together but have data about faculty. This is an example of our FAQ page where we really use scholars at Duke as a place where faculty and others can come and start to ask questions. As they look through profiles they start to ask deeper questions about where is this data coming from, how is it being collected how can I change it. Next slide. So really scholars at Duke has played a large role in kind of creating this grassroots data governance movement at Duke, where we try to involve a lot of people in managing profiles, and that means that there are a lot of people that get to be in these conversations around data governance, who needs to be trained in certain different systems who needs access to the data, you know how to keep data up to date and, and you know ensure that it's quality information we've been really excited to see stars at Duke and through vivo kind of move beyond just you know research and or just profiles and really having these larger conversations about how things get changed and how data gets maintained. Next slide. So just a brief overview of the sorts of information we have a lot of data that we have put into vivo. So we have two universities actually Duke Kunshan University and Duke University that we house and scholars at Duke. And there are tons of schools departments and centers. And like I mentioned, I'm not only faculty but also students and staff that we see having profiles there too. And we've used a lot of the vivo out of the box ontologies to kind of map all of this information but we've also done a lot of custom work. So that, you know, we can make sure we're capturing people's scholarship enough in a much more complete way. Next slide. So now that you've seen a little bit about what scholars at Duke is and what sorts of information are in there I wanted to talk about three areas in which I feel that scholars at Duke has really supported Duke's resiliency throughout the pandemic. I want to talk about the challenges of remote work, some of the financial issues that have come up, and then even conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion, and how a system like this has really, has really helped. Next slide. So first I want to just talk about the challenges of remote work which we're all familiar with. I think something that we came up across a lot is that as people were moving to remote work, you know, the ways in which they found information or found the information they needed to do their jobs, how to change. Not everybody is tech savvy. A lot of people were used to just having conversations or maybe they had files on their desk that they couldn't access anymore. So we found that scholars at Duke was a really good place for people to start to do their work in a different type of way, whether that was to identify groups of people that they needed to contact. There were new research policies that were put in place around Duke, specifically for, you know, who needed to be in the lab at certain times, or, you know, what sorts of research applied to different sorts of policies. And we have found that through Vivo and through putting that information into things like Tableau, people were able to do that work and identify those subgroups of researchers. So by getting a scholar as a Duke profile that automatically meant that you would be searchable in these new Tableau reports that we set up pretty quickly. We could see, you know, who was doing COVID research. People already knew, you know, that they should go and start tagging themselves with, you know, sort of COVID related terms on their profile. So it was pretty smooth, a smooth transition of getting people to use scholars for these new kind of COVID related efforts and tasks that they had. We also found that in terms of communication, people wanted more communication right as they weren't seeing each other every day. And even though activities in the university had slowed down, the challenge was, well, how do we identify what is going on, you know, with events being canceled and everything. So what I'm showing here is actually a Tableau report coming from scholars at Duke that showed all of the news articles and, you know, we allowed people to show what teaching activities teaching innovations that were happening. And that helped power the communications teams around campus to continue to kind of do their daily communications and recognition efforts, even though they weren't actually too many events going on. Next slide. So this is an example of a CV that we put together. Basically just you point and click and this CV is generated in a Word document based off of the information in your scholars at Duke profile. And you'll see it's like very well formatted. This is actually the exact format that is required by Duke School of Medicine for review and promotion and tenure. So even in things like this just simple administrative tasks, we recognize that faculty in particular have so much on their plate during the pandemic and just being able to have these small ways that we were showing that we knew they were doing extra work we wanted to take something off of their plate. We really appreciated that, you know, we know we have all of these data and systems why are we making them enter it again so just small little tasks that we knew could be better could be automated, kind of rolling out tools like that really help support people that we knew were already extremely busy. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about financial challenges throughout the pandemic. There were a lot of resignations reorganizations happening, cost cutting particularly within it groups. We saw a lot of that at Duke, where it groups were shrunk or kind of merged together. And we have always used scholars at Duke to help power local websites. So for example is here where you're where you'll see we make the data available through Drupal through embed code and JSON feeds different ways that it's very easy to reuse this information on local websites. So that really helped. And I think scholars at Duke, we knew vivo and scholars, we're going to last through the pandemic because it was driving and powering really so many of these websites that we're losing staff to support them. So even as redesigns were happening. We just saw more and more websites starting to move towards scholars data. One example of something that happened is we had two centers that merged together. And they needed a new website and it was really, it literally took us maybe five minutes to through the ontology merge those two organizations together and scholars at Duke. And then, you know, we already had these feeds in place they were able to, you know, set up a new website for those two merged groups within a day or so so it was, it was really good to see that efficiency play out. Next slide. And then the last challenge I want to talk about was really with diversity equity and inclusion, where we saw departments and the institution at large, really wanting to make sure they were aware of the types of people that we had the amounts of effort that different groups or individuals were responsible for maybe not getting the recognition for that. Making sure people could represent themselves the way they wanted to in terms of their very interest in terms of their preferred names, their pronouns, all of those things became much more came to the forefront during the pandemic. And I think something like scholars at Duke where people had questions like, how do I update my name and every system at Duke I want to be recognized this way or, you know, now systems are kind of allowing pronouns to be to be added like what are the security implications of things like that. These are all questions that have come up recently. And really those questions often happen and are answered around something like a scholars at Duke profile because that's where people think to go to first. So we've really had a role and being able to, I guess guide people to the right, the right resources around some of the ways in which they want to represent who they are, and what they do and what they personally bring to the university. So with that I'll just say that the future of stars at Duke we see it as very bright. We're really excited about the way it has shown through through a very difficult couple of years in the university setting. We just want to do more to make it, you know, obviously more mobile friendly more accessible and make sure that even more people are aware of what it can do and how it can help them personally and also in their in their departments and different tasks. Thank you. Thank you very much, DeMaris. Now we'll turn to scholars at Texas A&M and talk about how scholars had an important role in supporting faculty during the pandemic to but in a very different way than what DeMaris talked about. Scholars at Texas A&M, as opposed to the way that it's done at Duke is organized and built in the libraries here at Texas A&M. We have four major use cases that we're trying to support through the use of our RIM system. The first is improving faculty digital identity and reputation by making their work more discoverable. That collaborations are supported research collaborations are supported through the ability for researchers to discover other expertise, especially in fields they're not that familiar with. Much like Duke does, Texas A&M also uses our scholars data across campus for other systems. And then finally we are using our scholars at Texas A&M system to support an emerging research intelligence group on campus. That's a collaboration between the library and the vice president of research. Vivo at Texas A&M was started, we started probably 2016, 2017 and one of the first important feedbacks that we got was actually building a very early version of our scholars at Texas A&M system and showing the system to a focus group in the college of medicine. We had several people in the room and some of the people were extremely happy because they were very strong researchers and we were representing research very well and so they saw themselves as being well represented and they just were quite satisfied. We had that one guy in the back and he was angry and what he contributed to the university was he was a lecturer, he was an instructor and so his major contribution was teaching. And when we showed him his profile, of course, it didn't have a lot of research. And he thought it was just one more tool that A&M was going to use to show that he was not doing a good job. Well, what we've what we recognize very early on from that is that the openness of Vivo the ability to customize our rim because it's an open source solution was really important because we had a diverse set of faculty doing diverse things at Texas A&M. It's such a large university. It serves so many different needs that faculty have many different roles and we needed to represent those different roles. And so what the very first thing we did was we started harvesting data out of our institutional repository, which is also served by another open source software package called DeSpace, very common across the world. Another Lyris's product, in fact, and we started harvesting theses and dissertations that were chaired by faculty and so you can see my own profile system and where we are representing the PhD's and dissertations, the theses that I have chaired through my career as a Geoscience faculty member. And in this way, we're helping to represent not only my research, but my educational activities and that and that became very, very popular. And it was not an easy thing to do, mostly because DeSpace really had a folk on it folksonomy type of of metadata system because graduate students were were uploading and entering the metadata about their thesis and dissertation into DeSpace all by themselves. And so, when we first started exploring this, my name was represented eight different ways in DeSpace. And so just having that challenge of identifying all of my theses and dissertations was was difficult and so we had to, we had to quite work on this for a fair bit of time, but we got we solved it and it proved to be quite popular among faculty members. So we we've taken that lesson, and especially during the pandemic we started building other collections in our DeSpace repository. So we have, we of course have a collection around faculty research where faculty are curating and sharing with the world, preprints and research reports and other things related to their research. But we also developed a new collection around teaching materials so that faculty could represent their excellence in the classroom, their role as a teacher scholar, or represent the scholarship of teaching and learning that they may be engaged in. And then finally, finally, most recently, am has been really focused on enhancing student success of all our students, and a big part of that strategy in our student success initiative has been the greater use of open educational resource materials. And so we built a collection to curate TAMU authored OERs that are that were completed by Texas A&M faculty. And so we have that in our open OACES collection. And what we're doing is we're harvesting the metadata out of all of these collections and representing those works as part of the faculty profile. And so we can see faculty as truly the multi-dimensional professionals that they are, serving many different needs that would help support the overall land grant mission of Texas A&M. And so we're harvesting the metadata out of this space. We're passing that through our symplectic elements. Harvester system that we use, that comes from digital science. All of that data goes into a SQL database that is then crosswalked into the the scholars at Texas A&M system. Faculty of course have always control over their profile so they can claim or reject any kind of data that we find for them. Because of course we are representing their reputation and they have to have control over that message. And so what this does then is we're starting to harvest all these other publications. Many of them are non-pure reviewed or the gray literature, the reports or instructional sheets or teaching materials. It's an amazing collection of publications that faculty have found useful to share with the world and pass through and they all go into the publications section of our scholars at Texas A&M profile system. So these are some of the things that I've been sharing through our institutional or publishing through our institutional repository or d-space repository. Many of them are presentations about Vivo because I also serve as chair of the Vivo leadership group. In the pandemic though, what we found was as faculty transitioned to remote work, many of them came to my group and asked for help in publishing in new ways and often publishing things very rapidly. They wanted to publish things in new ways. So what we did is we used our d-space repository as a publishing platform. One of the examples of the kinds of things that were published was a survey that engineering faculty asked of their own students as the engineering faculty transitioned their classes from face-to-face classes to online learning. So they did a very large survey of very large numbers of students and really highlighted with this survey the large number of problems that students were facing, particularly students that were coming from lower socio-economic status where they were challenged by internet connectivity or spaces at home that they could work on. Leading to great challenges in learning. And this survey, which they wanted to get out really, really fast, has really generated an amazing amount of interest for being unpublished and unpure reviewed. So if you can see here we include in our d-space repository many kinds of metrics that faculty can use to track the usage, engagement and citation of their work. We also provide citations and so on. And this has really been quite effective, especially during the pandemic where faculty are trying to reach new communities in new ways. This work then, of course, I got listed as a co-author because they were actually because they were nice, but because I helped them in several ways and it gets represented on my profile as another type of work that we do. And so all the authors had it represented on your page. And so this became really, really important in the community and we saw many, many faculty across all disciplines take advantage of it. Perhaps the faculty member that was really successful, really changed her career was a great example, was a colleague of mine in the Department of Communications. Heidi Campbell is a distinguished professor who studies churches and religious communities. And she came to me right at the beginning of the pandemic. So it was kind of March of 2020 and said she had this idea of writing an edited volume where pastors and ministers and other religious figures and practitioners would write short vignettes about how their church or their religious community was being, was being affected by and how they were responding to the pandemic. And she wanted to publish it quickly. She is a humanities faculty member and she's used to university presses being quite slow in producing published works. And so I talked to her about the use of d-space as a publishing platform, how it would get represented in her scholars profile, and would help aid the discoverability, curation and preservation of her work. And so she pursued it. And it was wildly successful. In fact, she went off and produced 23 other works in the same way and it's told me she's unlikely to ever go back to publishing in a normal manner anymore. This work has went kind of viral on Twitter, has been picked up by newspapers around the world, has generated citations. It is really taken off because it was something where we could publish it quickly, get it out there, it's discoverable because it's a repository, and she was able to share it. So this idea of building an interoperable system between this repository and our scholars at Texas A&M RIM system has proven really powerful for faculty to do new things under extremely trying conditions. And so here she's announcing on Twitter her fifth ebook that she's published. And this was within one year. So it was really quite productive. It was a productive time for her, a time when she actually thought, how am I going to do anything has turned into one of the most productive and rewarding times of her life. I like to exaggerate a little bit, but this of course garnered her books have garnered great attention around the world among religious communities. And in fact, it actually garnered her a interview with the Vatican where they were asking her for advice on how the Catholic Church should respond to the pandemic. So this has been really wonderful. And it was building the system that allowed faculty to work in new ways under trying times has really shown shown it's worth. So it was really pretty neat. So now I'm going to turn it over to Robert Miller, who is the chief executive officer of lyricists is going to talk about Vivo and a little bit more about lyricists. Thanks, Bruce. Good day everybody. Damaris thanks for the show and tell of what's happening at Duke and Bruce the work that stretches from Texas to the Vatican who would imagine that. Yes, there'll be a direct plane flight now from the Vatican back to Texas. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Just like to get to Houston. Hey, Vivo is a very important part of lyricists and I thought what I would try to do in a few minutes is talk a little bit about the community supported software. How it fits within lyricists and how lyricist tries to add value on a program which you can, I hope that the observers of this presentation can see really has a tremendous impact both inside and outside institution. I want to talk a little bit about how we add value to support as an organizational home what that means. In the short version is it's really where the volunteerism that you're hearing from Damaris and the internal people that use the tool in the system and Bruce meet really a full time support staff to help make sure that the trains run on time that the software is updated and lyricists by design tries to outlast the volunteerism where people come enter contribute and then move on in their careers with a program like like Vivo. I'll also share some of the topics that we engage in, you know, outside of Vivo for people that don't know lyricist we trace our roots back to 1936 and 1937 out of the Great Depression. And the brains got together and said, novel idea what if we shared resources how good could we be if we work together and I think you've heard that theme through Damaris and Bruce and the programs they represent. In addition to Vivo we are the organizational home for D space a space C space fedora orchid, even the palace project. It's a reading and content creation solution for public libraries and academic institutions. And the org home concept migrates and stretches depending what a different community requires. We brought Dura space into lyricists in 2019, which we are honored and to be able to work with more are ones and tier 23 and four, an exciting group of non US institutions on programs such as Vivo. So Vivo coming over from the Dura space where fedora and, and D space. This past year we acquired a for profit content services and software company called Bibliolabs. That also gives an organization and a project like Vivo tools and resources that they might not normally bump into every day. Our channels that we go after it with our five divisions. As Bruce talked about leads with academic that's mostly what people associate us with the public libraries, museums, archives, and increasingly the scientific community really has benefited from what lyricists has expanded portfolio can bring to help the mission driven work that we work on the mission driven work of our partners. We have a staff of about 80 we expect to be at about 100 the next couple years or on a growth curve. We have over 1800 institutions that we work with we expect will be over 2500 the next couple of years, we do not depend on grants, but we use grants much like for profit world, a venture capital or raising money in the stock market might allow an institution to go forward. So this model that we have we think really helps an organization like Vivo seek out sources of capital funding and resources as we go forward. Lastly, we've invested over $3 million back into programs that will impact and touch programs like Vivo. These have been in the form of R&D, we call it business renewal or direct grants from programs that an institution wants to take on and explore. Our mission is pretty straightforward. We want to catalyze and enable equitable access to the world's knowledge and cultural heritage. Next slide if you would. Bruce I'm not sure you're a swimmer and I don't know if you are but as part of my triathlon training I swim periodically. So swim lanes are pretty normal for me to go ahead and generate. So working with the lyricist board, working with key academic institutions and channel members. These are the five areas that we focus on. And I think based on the remarks you've heard that Bruce made and demerits made you'll see that Vivo fits quite comfortably in the areas that we're looking at trying to help take our expertise and apply it generously, liberously in a nonprofit fashion with the programs like Vivo. Next slide please. One of the things I think that Vivo has that, to me, signify that it's a program on the move, and it's a move upward. In addition to what Bruce and demerits have talked about. I think what I want to point out as CEO is, Vivo has the support of the community. It has clarivate as a partner, which I think is a novel concept of looking to for profit and nonprofit that intersection and partnerships. And you'll see some of the other names listed below in terms of some of the tombstones, which I think also give credit credence and credibility to a program like Vivo. Are you on your own or who you're working with. Where do you live. Who do you hang out with. And I think as you look at the Vivo community where we hang out. It's pretty cool. Next slide please. I love seeing these names of institutions that I think represent more than just they're involved. I think this is a seed strength it's a capital strength it's an asset strength that a program like Vivo has. When it has the horsepower of organizations like this who can not only sell to set set direction, but can add value on a long term, and be there day in and day out. What about the next tier of users come in and say well geez if Dukes involved and Texas is involved and Browns there. Maybe this is a program that's going to last more than one semester. And I think that's something that's not initially thought the investment that teams and institutions like Duke and Texas put into the into the mix. Next slide if you will. Governance. I know we just go crazy and academia may want to make sure we have all the governance thought out, but it's important and it must be part of the conversation. The fact that Vivo has a user group. I love that visa, Vivo has an interest group which is a little more casual relationship, but at the end of the day, there's a leadership group that steers and has a calm hand, and a nimble hand on a tiller that's constantly being assaulted by the forces inside and outside what every program faces, and a committers group. And this is a struggle I think that all the community supportive programs go with. Should we hire and have a dedicated set of people who can finish the software, or do we depend on the community. The answer is yes, but I think each institution and each program has to turn the dial for what and where they have strengths. I think that's something that Vivo has navigated successfully, and it really has as a forward looking strategy. Next slide. So I think that the community supportive programs take a look at where they coming from. Where are they and what's their plan for the future. Thanks Bruce for putting up there that they partner with Larissa's I actually think that's a strategic advantage, much like the airlines you had other choices. What the community looks to is, we can bring with unfettered access with complete transparency along with context. Can we give advice, can we be that daily support that helps those ideas and visions that come from the community to be realized, I think that's a big difference. Every organization, much like the nation, when you change a president where you change that the political structure has to navigate this and Vivo has done this successfully. So I would shout out and say if you're worried about Vivo, I'm not because they know how to manage change. They know how to engage change to move forward. And of course, we're all getting better in the communities of how do we not delay and like 234 even five years for release. We're competing in a community of people with Facebook's and Amazon's and apples, where releases come out weekly daily monthly and so we have to get better in that area and I think be those make great progress there. I just had to smile and you said pandemic has caused stress.  Next slide if you would please. Where are we today. These things that touch here to see virtual, but I think Vivo navigated the fact and use virtual as a strength going forward. It has not been a liability. So in this case from a DEI a standpoint, I think we've learned things with Vivo that have made Vivo more successful. You'll see the international who's showing up where people are showing up in the conversations that are happening and coming from a German heritage and unable to speak Spanish I was glad to see at least one of the two languages I have represented nicely there. Next, if you will. Where are we going. We know that from a UI standpoint we can't just live off of library driven Boolean code type methods of communication. We have to make it flexible and easy and we have to demand better of ourselves. Vivo sees this and Vivo is incorporating that in the releases they have. Vivo also as understands that perhaps we're the seed groups those initial early adopters created something that was phenomenal, but a tad complex now has something it's effortless to go ahead and use. I think it's a star that Bruce has brought from a leadership standpoint, and colleagues like the merits are endorsing. I think you'll see some really incredible things coming in the future. Next slide. Well at the end of the day sustainability tends to be a popular topic. And we always want to make sure how do we know how to pay for it as we go forward. I break things up into stages at the early stage of the Vivo was at stage zero which I would say is not meaning there's no value. It's a theme and a number of people's eyes and Bruce I forgot the story you sell said about how you put it together originally. And typically it's grants or funders founders that put that initial seed capital together and it's only it's intellectual capital in addition to cash. Stage one kind of the birth stage, we tend to default I found this working very closely with their space the platinum gold silver medal seems to get us to a certain part in the conversation. Right now is somewhere between stage one stage two and stage three and I think that's healthy and you should know this if you're even considering flirting with the idea of working with Vivo. The teenage stage tier two membership I think reflects a democratization of a program where it goes from really being run by a platinum member a gold member and a silver member and with generosity. These institutions give what they think is fair. Ideally we want to work to something where there's value that's clearly measured value that can be assessed and value that can be shown about how dollars are spent. So we spent a lot of time with Vivo thinking about that stage one two and three as we go forward. Next slide if you will. I want to wrap up Bruce and de Maris and hopefully compliment the great start you gave to these presentations and talk about things that go bump in the night. I think we're all faced with radical transformation. I think for us to be successful Vivo and the projects that come across our desk that we invest in, we support or we're considering having a part of our portfolio to serve the patrons in the mission we have better. We need to be thinking about network effects, much like the telephone and Facebook, where service improves as more people use it service improves as more people use it. Can we create a virtuous circle where good follows good. Bruce, I like the email you sent me I'm going to send you something to read about that. You'd like something I say you expand that include de Maris de Maris see something else she creates something for us out of her portfolio. That's the virtuous circles like God I got to join Bruce de Maris and Robert because they have something going here. That's how the success of Vivo is going to go for it's not a million dollar campaign to try and buy our way into people's exposure. When do we build by our partner, and I think Vivo looks at this candidly and bluntly, what do we want to own that's critical what I want to share that we need to. And how can we partner to go forward so clarify I think is a key thing to point out in that discussion. The realities are, I think coming from a for profit nonprofit and mission driven background currently, the cost of developing a channel can be five to 10 times, at least higher than the cost just to write code. One of the most important information I'm seeing in the community programs is we've been so focused on writing the code. We don't recognize the channel that's there. Fortunately, we all are universities were connected with various organizations set channel development we have. So one of the things that Vivo is working on is how to engage and leverage that channel effortlessly seamlessly and frictionlessly as we go forward. We have opportunities at lyricists were looking a lot more about community engagement, but I thought we had that with a program like Vivo, and how do we really leverage community and great engagement. How do we take the content and Bruce that case study you talked about the Vatican, you really didn't care about the technology, they saw the story. It's the content being created, and whether a woman decides a colleague decides she's going to go back to an old or a new process is incidental. It's the content creation that we don't have to pay for but it transforms those that read and use it is critical. As I wrap up it fear it appears to us that we have tools we can use it takes a village. If you want to skim that read that. It's something that we've used it helped lyricists work with Vivo. We did a 10 point assessment Bruce and took a look at Vivo, and out of the 10 recommended things that might or might not help a program I think we were at six. And Bruce I think we go oh my god we only got a six out of 10 failing, you said, holy mackerel we have six. Let the next four we want to go after. So we have tools now we can talk with each other.  So lastly and I think I'm going to say this on behalf of my two colleagues here. Let's be audacious to encourage a belief that we want to create a monopoly, we want to create a nonprofit profit monopoly with software that is so good. No one would ever consider looking at another, another property software or that we want to use. So monopoly is not necessarily bad for good. It's something we can control. So I'd like to challenge all of us on this call as we listen. Let's be audacious. Let's take a program like Vivo, and let's create that monopoly that really creates change on a scale that nobody has seen before. Bruce I'll hand it back to you to Maris. Thanks so much. I thank you everybody for your attention. I love giving talks with Robert and de Maris because they always think so small. But please if you're interested in learning more about Vivo or anything that lyricist is doing reach out to us, and we would love to talk to you. Okay, thank you very much. Take it easy.


You're welcome back. It's still our Nigeria we're talking about on the show today and what is happening or is likely to happen to our economy. Right now we know that there were complaints that the federal government had, through the ways and means, borrowed more than the limit that they were supposed to borrow. And people were saying this thing should be corrected. But instead of that, the Senate has increased the federal government's borrowing from 5% to 15%. So we're going to be talking with an international finance and economic experts here in Lagos State and the person of Mukta Mohamed who will help us make sense out of what is going on and the implication to our economy. Mukta, good morning and welcome to the program. Thank you so much for coming in. Okay, so 5% to 15%. When there was an outcry that the federal government has arbitrarily taken too much money from the Central Bank of Nigeria or through the ways and means, we were expecting that that would be corrected. But instead of it, it has been jacked up to 15%. Is that a good thing for us or a bad thing? Depending on which side you are, if you are in the side of the government and the Senate, is a good thing. If you are in the side of the masses, then it's a bad thing for you. What does that really mean? You have to ask yourself why do they have to do this fire brigade, make sure they pass it into law. But we are not yet sure if the outgoing president signed it before he left office or maybe is the incoming president that we signed that. We are waiting for that. Or from the filler we got the detail because they realize that if they don't do that, their allowances, what they call their exit bonuses and allowances will not get it because the government seems to say they don't have money on their own. So let's hopefully hope that the incoming administration will put an end to that. Okay but what are the implications on the economy? If this continues and they go ahead and sign it into law, if it has not been signed into law already, what is the implication on the economy? Big implication. We are looking from 5% to 15%. And if you remember that Amor is the federal government from CBN about 2.0 something. So by then you adopt that by 10% you realize they are adding more than a trillion into that. And that also will increase our debt profile. That also will flow inflation because the reason why CBN have not been able to tackle inflation is just because there is so much liquidity in the system and this liquidity is driven by the ways. Because some of these borrowing are not spent on productive ventures. They are spent on salary and allowances and so definitely they add to the cost of governance which in turn does not add in terms of productivity. So it's not a good thing for us. We are already overborrowed. We are already running at the budget deficit. We are already running a country that has been 97% of its revenue on debt servicing. So it's not good for us. But again, the good thing is that is the CBN is also an arm of government or is uncle Pasito of government. So what they tend to do, maybe they tend to do pro-noxious notes whereby they just give people notes as this and say you know you may not be able to spend it till after 5 or 10 years. That could just be the only way that government will be able to pay this debt that I collected from CBN. Now about if the present administration fails to sign it or fails to go through with it, what other alternatives are open to this administration to get money to fund whatever thing they want to do? Well, the administration has hit the ground running based on pronouncements. So hopefully we'll begin to see much action with your pronouncements. And so number one, if you are moving for a subsidy, you are getting almost 4 to 5 trillion in that sector alone. That alone is half of the budget deficit that we are suffering already. So definitely we expect them to widen the tax bracket and in terms of widening the tax bracket, we are not saying tax already tax. We are only saying that maybe you need to begin to find creative ways to get money from the informal sector. That again, that's on that way where they can have money. They can also look at the cost of governance and look at the an Australia report and also say look, we have to reduce the cost of governance also. So definitely I think if they do these three things and remember that the moribund, perhaps maybe a handful of governments, especially in terms of the refineries and others, we're hopefully thinking that this administration will do it with them by privatizing them and selling them to private hands. That also brings money to the cover of government. So they see other means of having money without borrowing and also they look at the infrastructure project. What sort of type of infrastructure project do they want to embark upon? And so if they look at this infrastructure project, they could bring the PPP, whereby they give them the build and upgrade for the next 25 years and enjoy tax bracket and also create a private fund. And so there are a lot of ways, creative ways, that this government can have money to run their field of the nation. You mentioned field subsidy. We talked about it earlier with my other guest, but we cannot overemphasize on this. You talked about it being something that will free off some cash for the government to do things in other places and all that. But now that the subsidy has been removed and then we are going to face a partial monopoly in the oil sector where you have a private individual running a refinery and dictating the price of the commodity in our market and all that. Do you think removal of this subsidy, we are going to see the impact on the people soon enough? I think when people say monopoly, monopoly, monopoly, obviously is there any other person that wanted to compete that space that was not given licenses? I remember that licenses were given to pre-mortulary finalists. Some mortulary finalists are working, but most of them are just working in terms of diesel. And why they went to the diesel side is because they realized that the petroleum sector was largely not privatized, they have it deregulated. So they went to the sector that is not deregulated. I mean, the petroleum sector was regulated as per PMS. So most of the mortulary finalists that we have now, they decided to do something on diesel alone because that space is not regulated. So definitely, Dangute took a risk and now the government is saying, look, we are moving subsidy. Not because of Dangute, they are moving subsidy. Remember President Goodloggy Village, you know, that attempted to remove subsidy too. And these correct people in government were the ones that fought against it. Now that they are there, they are seeing what it is like and they want to remove subsidy. So subsidy is not about Dangute, but it's just that it's happening at the time that Dangute took the risk and said, look, I need to build a refinery. And remember that most of these funds that Dangute collected are not only from Nigerian banks also. So, the mortulary finalists are there. So if you say you are not deregulated, you are no more regulating, there are a lot of mortulary finalists who come up. The member again is not doing anything. It's not the PMS in the public. The PMS belongs to the people of Nigeria. So that's not mortulary. And again, when you talk about mortulary, you need to... Government being asking people to come and collect licenses to build refineries. So for me, I don't want to agree with the extent that you are giving one person a mortulary. Remember, again, government are giving money for the tonnour and maintenance of what are called refineries, warrior refineries. So it's the end of the government to mention the refineries are working and they're also becoming competent. So for now, we can't be saying, oh, monopoly, monopoly. We need to look at the bigger picture. Somebody have started it in others. We followed that one in the cement sector. At the point, everybody said Dangute was monopolizing that sector. But today, there's a lot of players in that sector. So that's the way it starts. When we started the telecom space also, it was when people felt that MTN and the economy were monopolizing that sector. Until we had glue and others. And it became a game changer. So it's a process. And I think with Dangute on-stream, what kind of people will come up on-stream? And when you're on-sourced and when you see that sector being determined by market forces, a lot of people will be refineried. Don't be surprised when you begin to see the AIO majors like Shell and Vota and others begin to come up with refineries also. Okay, but in the meantime, before other people are ready to take the risk which Dangute took, now he's about the only one in that sector. Before that time comes, what do you think in your opinion should the government do immediately to make sure that people don't plunge into more suffering than they are already experiencing? Because just these two days, it's enough suffering on the parts of the people because they can't see fuel to buy, they can't see vehicles to take them to places of work and every other place that they need to go. And so many other things have happened within this short space of time. So what are the palliatives you would suggest for the government in the interim? Well, the palliative for the government in the interim is for the formative, in the interim is for the swim interactions. Subsidy will be removed. Subsidy to be shut for subsidy was made to the end of June when it's in the month of May. So there's no reason for the big party or the college party. Most of these finance funds are in now. So I think it's all about regulators. The regulators have their big stakeholders that are trying to take advantage of Nigeria's. And some stakeholders are already in the current status, saying that look, I'm going to revoke your CO4. I think we need to know that it's regulation that is the challenge that we are having presently not basically because of subsidy. Everything in Subsidy has been removed as well. All are great. We still have probation for it in June. NFC have not come up with the time. They are the only ones that are important in the production of the nation. They say they have enough of that quantity for us. They have not put a new price tag on the petroleum price already. So they say a lot of... So what we have seen, I think most of the private independence market are taking advantage of Nigeria. If you realize, the major market as I stated were 185 Naira per liter, especially in Lagos and Abuja. But what we have seen is that the independence market as wolves have also been practicing this for a very long time. And the 174 are 300, 400 and 500. So there is all about regulation. And I think the regulatory authorities should move more and they reduce the suffering of Nigerians. And if you are talking about where finally we will move Subsidy, what are the benefits for us? There is a lot of benefit in the long term. When they shut them, you have to bear the pain. There is a saying that says no pain, no gain. I think that's where we are as a country now. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Mukhtar, for coming through for us. And we do hope that you will have a wonderful day. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Okay. We've been talking with Mukhtar Mohamed, International Finance and Economics Analyst here in Lagos State. And he was trying to help us understand what is happening in the way they see the federal government or the Senate rather has raised the borrowing capacity of the federal government through ways that means from 5% to 15% and other issues related to the economy. We'll take a short break and bring the weather report to you. And then after that, we hope to bring you sports.