And I think it's time to get started. So good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone who is joining us. We're really excited to have you all here. We know some of you wake up early to watch this, and some people stay up late. So we really appreciate all the time that you spend with us. So welcome back to the Water Productivity Masterclass series. We are in week five of six, and today we'll be discussing socioeconomics around water productivity. My name is Lauren Zelinsky. I work for IHE Delft as part of the Water PIP project team. And I'm joined by Abraham Abishek from Mesa Mesa, also part of the project team. And we will be moderating today's webinar. If you are new to the webinar series, if this is your first time, I would like to mention that the webinar series is brought to you by the Water PIP project, which stands for Water Productivity Improvement in Practice. And the goal of this project is to improve water productivity around the agricultural sector. So it's funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And it brings together institutes that focus on water science and water management to achieve this increase in productivity. So the three main organizations that plan and carry out activities are IHE Delft, Institute for Water Education, Baffening and University and Research, and Meitimeta. So you will see many of us kind of in and out of these webinars over the week. We are really excited you're all here. I see some of you have already introduced yourself in the chat, and we're really interested to see who you are. So please put your name, your institute that you work with, and the country that you're from. And it helps us understand who our audience is and how to connect with you better. So today is week five out of six. The first week, we discussed the concepts of water productivity and how to monitor water productivity. Weeks two and three, we looked at using the WAPOR portal to monitor water productivity, including using the portal itself online, but also tools like GIS and Python to do different analyses. Last week, we looked at water productivity around sugarcane production and different challenges and opportunities, particularly in our case studies in Africa. And then today, we are talking about socioeconomic water productivity with our colleagues from Bahamangan. And next week, we will look at monitoring water productivity using Aquacrop, which is another open source software from FAO. If you would like to rewatch today's webinars or look at webinars from previous weeks, including downloading the presentation, you can go to the project website, which is waterpip.un-ihe.org. Or you can go to the waterchannel.tv, and you can find the recordings and presentations there. And we have also joined social media. So if you guys live in the Twitterverse and you would like to follow us, please look up our handle at Waterpip Project on Twitter. And we also started a YouTube channel. So if you are into YouTube and you would like to watch the different videos from these webinars and future webinars that we'll do and other activities, you can subscribe to our channel at the Waterpip Project on YouTube. So the agenda today, we will have two colleagues. We'll start with Yerun Vos, associate professor in the Water Resources Management Group at Bahamangan. And he will talk about economic water productivity, including a short video, where he'll introduce social water productivity, and then he'll go into further detail about case studies from Peru and Colombia. And following him, we'll have Maria Cristobalordu. She is a research assistant in the Water Resources Management Group as well as Bahamangan. And she will discuss a water productivity assessment framework and then a hypothetical application on how to use that framework. And as always, we'll have the question and answer session at the end. So we will not pause in between the different topics. But if you have comments or questions, please put them in the chat box. Abraham and I will be collecting the questions. And then at the end, in the Q&A session, we'll bring the questions back up, and we'll discuss them with our panel. So with that, I think we can start with the presentation from Yerun. Thank you, Lauren. So yeah, hi there, all. Nice to see people from many parts of the world joining. So my name is Yerun Vos. I work with the Water Resources Management Group at Wageningen, and I'm happy to share some of the results of our research on social water productivity. And actually what you will see in the slides is that I use different terms. Sometimes I talk about social water productivity. Sometimes I talk about pro-poor water productivity. And sometimes about socioeconomic. I'll come back to that. If you have any questions, like Lauren said, just put them in the chat. And then I might be able to answer some already during the presentation or otherwise afterwards. So when we talk about water productivity, actually it's good to go and look at the SDG 6.4. So the sustainability development goals have been set up some decades ago actually to think what should we strive for worldwide in 2030, in 10 years from now. And the 6.4 is about water productivity. And actually it quite nicely shows two of the goals we have with that. Because the first indicator is about efficiency. The idea of indicator 6.41 is that we produce food with less water. Or all the way around, with the same amount of water we produce more food. And why would we do that? Because that is related to the indicator 6.42, which says that we should have sufficient fresh water available for the ecosystem, for wetlands, for rivers. And the assumption is, and I think it's very good to understand that, that if we are more efficient or we have a higher water productivity, we will save water. We will conserve water. So we have more water for the environment. And perhaps that's not always true. But we will come back to that. What I want to do now is zoom out. Because water productivity is not only related to SDG 6.4. Actually it's related to much other national water policies and SDGs, like the SDG 1 on poverty, the 2, the second one on zero hunger, and 30 climate action. So water productivity has also to do with things that happen in climate change. It also is about economic growth. And it's very good to remind us that roughly half of the world's population lives on a daily wage less than $2 per day. So that's an enormous amount of people. And the water productivity, and especially social water productivity, is related to that, as we will see. But if we zoom out a little bit more, we see also the social responsibility of the companies and the consumers also related to water productivity. And also inequalities in the world are related to that. And that is actually the core business, let's say, of social water productivity. Because we have to remind us that, on average, the income inequality increased by 11% in developing countries from 1990 to 2010. And more than 75% of the population are living today, societies where income is more than equal distributed than it was in the 1990s. And the target for SED 10 is that, in 10 years time, progressively we will achieve an income growth of the bottom 40% of the population at a rate higher than a national average. So actually making the inequalities less. So this is how you can see that water productivity and social water productivity is related to these other SDGs. Going back then to the core of water productivity, starting with the idea that crop water productivity is the yield divided by the water use. But this yield can be expressed in either kilograms per hectare per year, or US dollars an hectare per year, or kilojewel per hectare per year. And that is important because that has to do with the goal you have when striving for higher water productivity. If we look at economic water productivity, we can say, OK, we concentrate on the US dollars per hectares. You want to see how much economic return is made of a certain amount of water, let's say 1 cubic meter or 1,000 cubic meters. But the question asked with social water productivity is, who benefits from this economic returns? Is this a big investment company? Or is this the workers that work in the field? And then you see the relation with these SDGs that are about reduction of poverty and reduction of inequality. OK, to symbolize how money is divided over different stakeholders, you can look at this pineapple. And we see that a pineapple, for example, might cost two euros in the supermarket in Europe. And then a sumo did a research and found out that only 4% of the money you pay as a consumer goes to the workers. So you might say, OK, buying the pineapple will help consumers or will help workers, but it's only a minor percentage. OK, now we will look at the video which explains this from the point of view of the case study of Peru. In agriculture, water productivity is the amount of value in terms of socioeconomic benefits, services and jobs created per unit volume of water consumed. The different stakeholders involved in agriculture receive different proportions of this value. For example, let's look at this pineapple. It was grown at a plantation in Costa Rica and has been sold at a supermarket somewhere in Europe. Research shows that of the revenue from the sale of this pineapple at the supermarket, 21% will go to the plantation. Within that 21%, 17% will go to the plantation owner and 4% to the worker. Social water productivity is an idea that describes how equitable is the distribution of value generated from agricultural output per unit volume of water used. Social water productivity can be used as a parameter for decision making when it comes to allocating the water available in a river basin or an irrigation scheme. For example, in southwestern Peru, a project was proposed to divert annually nearly 300 million cubic meters of water from the mountains, where it was being used by small subsistence farmers to commercial grapes, asparagus and avocado plantations near the coast. The government initially approved the project on grounds that grapes, asparagus and avocados were high value export crops and would yield much greater returns per unit volume of water. So this would be a more productive use of water. And this was kind of correct. The net income per 1000 cubic meters of water used for asparagus was around $935. About five times the return from subsistence farming of staple crops, such as beans, by small farmers in the highlands. But on closer examination, it was revealed that plantation owners would have pocketed most of those $935. Plantation workers or small farmers in the area would have earned only $75 per 1000 cubic meters of water, which is only half the benefits being drawn by farmers in the highlands. This shows that the social water productivity would have been higher if the water was used for small holder cultivation in the highlands than if it was diverted to plantations on the coast. The discussion around boosting water productivity is invariably a discussion around competing users and trade-offs. This is especially true in arid or semi-arid countries where water is a scarce resource. For example, for a few years now, commercial farms are being developed and are expanding rapidly in the middle of Egypt's desert areas, irrigated by fossil groundwater from the Nubian sandstone aquifer system. These commercial farms are highly water intensive. They take a heavy toll on the non-renewable fossil groundwater reserves. Much like the commercial plantations in coastal Peru, the social water productivity of these desert farms is limited. They focus on export crops like Egyptian olives. However, the center for environment and development for the Arab region and Europe, an intergovernmental organization, recommends that a more socially productive use of this fossil groundwater would be for domestic purposes, such as subsistence farming and use as a strategic reserve for a growing population. This video actually explains quite well the overall idea of the pro-poor water productivity. And the idea is that in the expectation, we would say that what we calculate is the income for the poor people and divided by the water use. This sounds sort of simple, but we'll see when we go into the details of the calculations, we will see it's quite a challenge to make these calculations. But let's go back to the example of the video, but let's dive a little bit deeper. So we have this water flowing in the high and near mountains. Actually, it's diverted because otherwise it could flow to the Amazon basin. It's diverted to go to the Pacific and then be used in the coastal area. The water footprint of a kilogram of grapes, the table grapes is about 680 liters of water. So this project was proposed by the Perugian government to divide towards this water and as explained in the video, that would mean that the water is taken from the high mountains and brought to the coastal area. And like explained in the video, we have 20 times more of net profit for the owners of the land comparing asparagus with the subsistence highland agriculture. But actually in the coastal areas, the land is not a scarce resource, it's the water. We should look at how much net profit is being made from the point of view of water. And then we see still a difference of five times more profit per cubic meter of water compared to the subsistence highland agriculture. However, as explained in the video, going back to the pineapple, it's only $75 that goes to the plantation workers. And of course the 180 US dollars per 1000 cubic meters stays with the subsistence farmers. But now let's go to the details of the calculations that are behind these numbers. These are a lot of numbers and I'll explain some of the important things here. Well, first of all, let's make a connection with the VALPOR program. As the VALPOR program tries to make much better estimates of production and of water use. So what we did in these calculations that you see here, the water consumption in line, in this line, that is just calculated with our product of FALO. This is a rough estimation, but it's not based on actual weather conditions in that area at that time. And it's a rough calculation. Also, the average production here, that's an estimate from literature. That is not a real calculated or real observed production. And actually for all the numbers you see here, it's very good to realize that there are certain margins of uncertainty, for example, the prices, also the inputs and the prices you get for your produce. That depends on market prices. So they can go up and they can go down and they can be different from different places. Also the labor requirement, that is very important because employment, that is actually where you see that the pro or water productivity makes impact. If you have more employment, then the money is distributed over more, let's say relatively poor people. But it's not only the plantation workers, it's also people higher up or down the production chain. So we have people that work in factories making fertilizer. We have also people working in package plants. But it's very difficult to attribute hours or days of work to one product. So in the packing station, for example, you might have different products that are being taxed there. And the caregivers are only one. So in the literature, you can find rough estimations, let's say that for each full-time laborer in the field, you might have 30% more labor generated in the transport and packaging. But that's a rough estimation. So actually, it's very good to take into account that these numbers are estimations. But we see another important thing in this table. Until now and in the video, we have talked about asparagus, which are in this column. Remember the 75 US dollars for a thousand cubic meters of water being consumed. But if you compare now to table grapes, also grown in the Icafeli, 200 US dollars for the workers. I see that means that table grapes generate more impactful for people as compared to the potatoes in the highland. Very different from the asparagus. Why? Basically because of the number of jobs being created much higher in table grapes. And that is because we have this labor of picking the grapes and all sort of manual labor being needed for pruning and selection of the grapes. Also, when we compare, for example, the potatoes with the mace in the highland, we see that just the potatoes, they generate a fair amount of income for the poor people. Whereas we compare it to the mace, it's much less. So actually when we compared the numbers in the video, we compared, let's say, the potatoes with asparagus. If you would have compared the corn with the table grapes, the conclusion would have been very different. So it's very important to be specific about the sort of crops and cultivation systems we are talking about. Okay, let's now go to a second example in the Calcon Valley in Colombia. So this is a production system that is dominated by sugarcane. And in the previous webinar, we have looked into sugarcane and a lot of details about water productivity of sugarcane. And now we can look at a specific case where the social economic water productivity leads to quite some tension. So let's see. So we have sugarcane and that is the crop that you will see most in the Calcon Valley. But we also have organic rice that's being grown by smallholder farmers. And we have cocoa. These are small plots by poor farmers and mixed with other fruits. And actually in this Calcon Valley, there's a struggle for water. It's a struggle about the legitimacy of sugarcane. What you see is that in the last decades, sugarcane has expanded because sugarcane didn't always dominate the Calcon Valley but because of several projects reclaiming land which were wetlands before, now sugarcane has expanded. You can also see that the land and the water and the sugar industry is concentrated in the hands of few families. Those are well-known families and they have become very rich by controlling the land, the water and the sugarcane industry. What you can also see from the political point of view is that there is something like the elite capture of the state that the regional government has several regulations that favor sugarcane production. For example, internal regulations and also in the exception of paying taxes. What is the problem related to water? The main problem is the extraction of ground water to irrigate sugarcane. And this affects wetlands. So this area used to be actually a very big wetland and still there are parts of very important wetlands with high biodiversity but as the ground water table is lowering because of the over extraction or irrigation of sugarcane you will see that the wetlands dry up and the biodiversity goes down. There's also a social struggle over land and water. Actually the indigenous population that lives in the hills surrounding the Calcon Valley they have been in a struggle for decades over control of the land and over the water. And because of climate change we see that there is an increasing need to irrigate also the lands in the hills but also the sugarcane needs more water. And you see that the struggle over land and water intensifies. So now let's look at the pro-poor water productivity for the social economic productivity. In the same manner as we did with the ICA case. So you see that there's this productivity of land per hectare the added value of say the net returns and for sugarcane they are double as compared with rice and the color of the smallholder farmers. So this is important politically because this numbers are used by the regional government to say okay we have to stimulate sugarcane because it produces two times more economic growth or economic benefit. And actually it's true. So you can say okay from the perspective of stimulating economic growth or economic production it makes sense to stimulate sugarcane. If we look now at water productivity so let's say the same added value but now per cubic meter of water being evaporated we see that for sugarcane we had almost one US dollar when the sugar is used for sugar for consumption and almost 50 cents of a US dollar when the sugarcane is used to produce ethanol. And for rice that is a little bit more than 50 cents and for cocoa it's a little bit less. So here I have to say that we actually came across a big challenge because cocoa is not irrigated. So how are we going to calculate or estimate the productivity of water in cocoa? Do we calculate the precipitation be taken up and used evaporated by the crops or do we calculate the marginal returns so the extra returns if we would irrigate the cacao plantations in a dry year? And another thing is that the cacao is grown in mixed fields with other fruits. So it's very difficult to calculate water productivity per hectare. We can calculate it per tree and then make an estimation how the productivity would be if we would have a monoculture of plantation but we don't have it. So we have to make quite some assumptions to make this calculation. It's important to take that into account and when you present the numbers it should also be explained how you calculate them because there's a lot of choices you have to make. Now when we go to the propoor water productivity or socioeconomic water productivity you can see that in a sugarcane only six cents of a dollar per cubic meter go to the workers. And that's even less when the sugarcane is harvested mechanically which is now increasingly being done. Also that point is very important in the discussion because you might say, okay, for my social point of view if you are a politician and you say I want to reduce poverty in this cacao valley I should stimulate manual harvesting of sugarcane. But actually it's a very terrible job to do. It's much better to do it mechanically. So there is this trade-offs which are difficult and should be discussed. Then for rice the same thing so it's 25 cents of a dollar per cubic meter of water which goes to four people working in the rice fields or 20 when the rice is harvested mechanically. And in cacao actually it's the highest. So for a social point of view being a politician that wants to reduce poverty in the cacao valley you should stimulate cacao production as that gives the highest return on cubic meter of water being able to transfer it. But now we have seen two examples where actually the subsistence agriculture is more productive in terms of reducing poverty. However, we've also come across some issues that actually make the whole discussion of local water productivity or socio-economic productivity quite complex. And I think that's very good to highlight that but otherwise we think okay well the conclusion is very clear. We should stimulate small-holder production or peasant production because it has a higher local water productivity whereas actually the situations can be locally very complex. Now some points for discussion to take into account are you have to take into account the ecological effects. For example also including in that the energy being used for pumping of water. So different farming systems and different energy use and also had different effects for example on pollution of water something we call the gray water footprint also and that is not taken into account in this indicators. And we'll see later on that if you make a framework you will use if you make a framework on different aspects of water productivity as Maria will explain later on you have to use different types of indicators. But this goes to this complexity of water management and economic processes in the sense that if you try to capture these indicators in one number then you don't take into account the differences you encounter over time because prices change and inner potential changes and labor input changes. And perhaps with some more precise data from BAPOR we can reduce the uncertainties but still there will be always uncertainties and fluctuations over time. The current point to take into account that's very important when we relate the indicators of SDG 6.4 the first indicator looking at efficiency and the second indicator looking at the water that is used for ecosystem services that we see that actually the return flows might diminish when you increase the productivity. Actually there we have a relation that is not always favorable in the sense that if I increase the efficiency I will have more water for nature. It's not always true because if I have more land or I can intensify the crops with higher irrigation application efficiency so that's also higher water productivity I capture more water and produce more but I also might diminish my return flow. But we can also clear for example from the Colombian case is the cultural values that are not expressed in the numbers in the sense that the indigenous population is in a struggle for water because they attach different values on water on their lands compared to the sugarcane companies and the sugarcane farmers. The social value should also be taken into account but cannot be expressed in the numbers. So if you go to the economic numbers it's also good to look outside agriculture. So agriculture is an important user of water but sometimes the alternatives are using water so the flow for water productivity can be higher or water use outside agriculture. And also there is important to see who actually benefits most. Is it poor people or is it rich investors? And finally if we talk about local water productivity or socio-economic water productivity it's about the distribution of costs and benefits. So remember again the pineapple only 4% of the retail price goes for the consumer price goes to the workers then we have to think if that percentage perhaps can be larger and also what is the actually quality of the jobs that are being created. So many questions adding to the complexity of water productivity here. So with that I want to end for now we'll come back to these discussion points and head over to Maria to explain the water productivity assessment framework. Thanks, thanks Jeroen. Thank you also for the nice presentations. So I'm gonna discuss a bit how we try to assess all these different indicators that Jeroen was mentioning in a more holistic assessment of water productivity. So as we also have seen in the previous webinars water productivity has both technical and social aspects and when we talk about the technical aspects of course we might focus in biophysical water productivity and land productivity which are expressed in biomass and yield in terms of water that is consumed and land cultivated but then the other social indicators that we decided to include in this framework is the concept and the indicator of economic water productivity, food security food self-sufficiency, equity and employment related to also what Jeroen was showing us through his research and environmental sustainability. I think it's also important to note that the national governments are also focusing on these aspects and use them in their policy plans and goals and especially nowadays food self-sufficiency it's increasingly getting more and more attention because of the COVID-19 and then now what we try to do is to compare different development strategies and how these strategies score against all these indicators and set this as a basis for discussion and the main reason that we think that this is a good idea is that we can show trade-offs between different development strategies and not to say which strategy is better but rather to make clear those trade-offs and make conscious and informed decisions that are also make decisions more transparent. So in order to test our framework we decided to focus on the two commonly used agricultural development strategies I think also in the previous webinars as well as now we came across with this vertical and horizontal expansion in agriculture both of these strategies have different aims so the vertical expansion aims at maximizing agricultural production on existing land but this sometimes comes also with more water use on the other side horizontal expansion focuses on expanding the agricultural area so in order to firstly assess how the two indicators, the two technical indicators score between those two development strategies it's nice to refer to the graph here. What we see is that after there is a critical point after which water productivity increases so with more yield water productivity decreases and we assume that this is something that normally happens in vertical expansion as the main focus is to maximize yield for this reason we assume that water productivity in horizontal expansion is higher than water productivity in vertical expansion. In terms of land productivity it makes sense that since more land is cultivated under the horizontal expansion the indicator in the land productivity of vertical expansion scores higher compared to land productivity of horizontal expansion since land productivity in vertical expansion has more crops per unit of land and then we can assess the other indicators, the social indicators and I think it's very important to note that all these indicators in order to assess them it is necessary to know the objectives that are behind these strategies and as Yerun showed these objectives might not necessarily be met in real life so there is also a need to go more in detail on how these strategies are going to are taking place in reality. So in our hypothetical example we assume that the vertical expansion focuses more on food security on producing more food for local consumption while in the horizontal expansion the focus is more on exports of high value crops that are considered to increase economic water productivity and increase the employment opportunities for people and thus also provide more income that can be spent on food and thus increase the food security. So in order to visualize all these trade-offs that I was talking about we use the spider diagram as you can see here that the ultimate goal of it is to make those trade-offs explicit and the scores that we assign to the different indicators as you see in the polygons of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 it's not something that is absolute it's rather a way for us and for policy makers to discuss and reveal these trade-offs for example what does it mean how these two different development strategies differ in terms of biophysical water productivity or environmental sustainability and with this I think I will give the floor again to Jeroen to discuss with the final points. Thank you Maria. So the idea is to have several points for discussion I think we have already presented some of those but just to start the discussion I think it's good to have a sort of recap I think the most important discussion when we want to use this local water productivity is to understand when we can use it it's not that in every case it is useful to make a comparison for example it's not useful to use to compare for example the water productivity of a crop in the Netherlands with potatoes in Peru as water from the Netherlands cannot be transported to Peru economically so it doesn't make sense so you can only compare within a watershed or within what irrigation system where actually some managers or policy makers or farmers can make the decision to allocate water from one crop or one group of people to another group or that in time you can say okay we had sugar cane now we do a technical intervention or social intervention and we get a new situation and we can compare before and after according to the pro-poor socioeconomic water productivity we have to keep that in mind then on the technical side and I think that is interesting to really think how can you calculate the available transpiration that is coming from irrigation and which comes from precipitation because that takes a difference because we cannot change much about the precipitation but we can change our policies and our technology regarding irrigation so actually we are interested in the let's say the marginal returns in productivity of changing something in irrigation and the precipitation is just there that is from a technical point of view not so easy to put in this accreditation when we calculate water productivity and pro-poor water productivity another thing from the social point of view an economic point of view is what labor to include in the value chain because it's not only the workers like I said it's also the people in the packing stations or people working in the factory making fertilizers, transport but actually if you go further away upstream and downstream in the value chain you will encounter more people but their jobs are to a much lesser extent related to that crop production but that's a difficult thing and actually when I did this presentation for people working in the industry that is where they questioned more looks like we lost the video for you to Furnier Roon in the middle of his discussion maybe he can join us in a few minutes I see his name is back on Furnier Roon can you hear us? I can hear you the connection went down I'm sorry for that we can hear you so if you would like to continue your discussion points we're happy to listen sorry for the technical something went wrong with the internet connection I don't know what so let me start this this last point so I presented this framework of proper water productivity with people working in the industry in Peru and what they most questioned was the labor being generated throughout the whole production of value chain I applied 0.3 factor to the amount of people working in the field to represent all the people working in the rest of the value chain that the people in the industry said now that must be much higher we generate much more employment outside the plantations that is something to look into that matters a lot double amount of people would benefit from the production then also of course the social water productivity would double yeah and that's not only the amount of employment being generated it's also the quality of the jobs a lot of the work in the field is quite difficult jobs under harsh conditions like in sugar cane plantations do the harvesting so should we upkeep those jobs because that is good for the proper water productivity so we have to discuss about that and then the last point to discuss is really okay this might be a nice indicator but it's very difficult to get all the data you saw the table of the amount of data you need and a lot of this data is difficult to get and also has a high margin of uncertainty I think that couple of data base can help at least with having more precise data on even for transpiration in real time and also the production but still then on the other data we still also need to be underground and well through interviews with key stakeholders get those data so it's not easy okay I want to thank you for your attention and we are curious to see all your questions I want to solve some questions but yeah let's open the floor for everybody to put their questions in the chat well thank you Yeru and thank you Maria I think those were really nice presentations and you brought us from the beginning as to what is social and economic and socio-economic water productivity to a final methodology for figuring out how to analyze them so I think we had a couple questions in the chat and we will bring those up on the screen and please if you have more questions also put them in the chat we'll add them later on in the question and answer session so the first well I guess it's a statement I think sometimes the concept of water use is misleading when it doesn't mean actual evapotranspiration Yeru and you can comment on that you might be muted so that's a good point yeah so in the calculation to be used an approximation of the actual water evapotranspiration by using apoclub like I said it would be good to have more precise data if that could be generated with apoclub although in some specific cases and therefore it's so important to really go in depth about the case studies what are being applied to the field not used by the crop is lost anyway for example if it drains to a saline aquifer or if it drains directly in the river that runs into the sea in that sense it might be important to actually look at all the water being applied and not only the actual evapotranspiration it really depends on the case it's a very important point to take into account the next question from Simon how do you also consider home consumption or fodder for a livestock for example for the maize example in the highlands calculation yeah so in this case we did not take that into account what we just calculated is the total production of corn or maize in the subsistence system and apply the local market price for that and calculate net income but yes it would be interesting to see if this corn is being used for livestock as fodder then perhaps the added value is higher and also then the water productivity social economic productivity becomes higher that's a very good point yes the next question from Henk is another indicator for water productivity not also the cost of the water supply for instance if the cost of a well reduces by 50% productivity increases right so I would not say it's an indicator for water productivity but it is one of the costs of the inputs so yes indeed when the cost of water is reduced then the economic water productivity increases not by 50% because there are a lot of costs being made not only the water also the fertilizer the land preparation, the harvest the transport a lot of inputs might be applied a lot of costs and usually the cost of water is only a minor part of the total input costs but yes if one of these costs is reduced can be for example the water any other input if you reduce the prices if you reduce the costs and the productivity goes up if your total production stays the same thank you I guess a follow up from Simon thank you for the framework explanation very insightful did I understand correctly that vertical expansion contributes less to water productivity improvement than horizontal expansion I think it's probably I didn't explain it correctly it's not that it does but it's a matter of where we are in the curve so if we have if we are in the vertical expansions that expansion and more water use contributes to more water productivity then of course it can increase water productivity but when we are in the flatter part of the curve then it decreases water productivity and I think this also relates to Ebel's comments I think so it's this trade-off and that's exactly why we need to have more solid understanding of the system that we are talking about in this case that I present the hypothetical example we just assumed that we were in the flatter part of the curve thanks for clarifying that it seems like that diagram is something really interesting and maybe we'll discuss it a little bit more but moving on to our next question from a socio-economic point of view what are the tools that can help in mainstreaming the water productivity within the water within the agricultural water management? Yes mainstreaming I would say it starts from the local political and policy context in the sense that for example in Peru this project to divert water to the coast it was first highly supported by the regional government and the national government because of the argument that the water would be more productive and generate more economic income in the coast but actually the project has not been built has not been executed why? because after the discussion on socio water productivity the people in the highland have more arguments saying that actually yes they use the water for a subsistence agriculture but actually their socio-economic water productivity is higher and that was an important argument for them to go to the regional government and say okay we don't want to add this project because we need the water here it also has to do with new insight from climate change that says that actually policy in Peru is now also to support highland farmers to start irrigation whereas they had rainfed agriculture before so socio-economic point of view can be mainstream in the discussion on policy decisions but I think it's fairly case specific Great thank you for discussing that it seems like this is a concept that's gaining popularity around the world would you say that Yeroen as more as water productivity and the socio-economic factors around it become more of a mainstream topic Yes I think there's not much detailed studies being done on calculations of socio-economic water productivity there's one very good PhD thesis being done in space on ground water use in Spain done by PhD students at that's a university in Madrid that is online and then you can share the link to that I was not involved there I just encountered that looking for other studies and I think that is a very elaborate case study so you might be interested to look into that Great and we can provide that link either through the website or in the chat so that would be really interesting okay next question have you tried using the gender lens when you look at the Maria you want to answer them and I think it's a good question actually again I would say if this is an issue specifically let's say that for example for example in the table grapes in Peru it's mainly women working and in asparagus it's mainly men so actually yeah you can make this distinction and say okay if you want to have a reduction among women then in Peru you should have a policy favoring the production of table grapes whereas if you don't mind then asparagus might be good as well so yes you can apply it not only to gender but it can be also different social groups you can identify profits from who gains employment, who gains income from a certain production system and then calculate how much that is compared to the water input you can do that for gender or you can do that for any other groupings you want to make from the social point of view very nice our next question comes from Frank can you somehow include more indirect costs in some sort of water productivity indicator for example diverting water aggregated agriculture leads to wetlands degradation that causes downstream events of flooding and drought that lead to additional costs for society I think that's a very nice question and that depends on the basic question if you think that you can convert all those issues into economic terms if you can say okay a flooding event has certain costs, a drought has certain costs then you can calculate them in some sort of an indicator to relate them to water productivity but of course flooding and droughts also have immaterial or non-economic effects like on the ecosystem or birds or whatever so it's not that you can always calculate everything in economic terms and then it becomes very difficult to use these sort of indicators I think it is important to look into the issues of water quality, pollution like in the water footprint calculations they come up with the idea of the gray water footprint that somehow quantifies the water quality issue and you could also try to do that with flooding and drought events but it's not easy and I think again it would be case specific and just the follow-up question would that be something that could be captured in those spider diagrams that definitely the framework is open for additions and I think that's also the possibility that you can pretty much easily include different indicators and I think also in the environmental sustainability everyone can define it more specifically and have more focus so that's nice Next question also from Hank regarding Netherlands as an example 100 years ago all farmers had their own wealth water was for domestic use but also for chickens cows and their garden so water for food security does the same logic not also apply for developing countries so should programs not focus on one of the indicators is water security apart from let's say employment in the framework but then you could separate them the other thing is that again I would say this is case specific if it is important that people have access to their own wealth or their own funds for water security reasons then it would not be good to just make calculations on profits and employment because this goes beyond that for food security that is not always related to the money you can make inside your own plot or outside that really depends I mean in Peru people migrate from the mountains to the coastal areas looking for jobs so if they can make money there they can send their children to school so if that is of their interest then they might not be so interested in water security in their home villages but in other situations it might be crucial for first secure water in the home steps of people in their own fields and then look how water could be employed effectively in commercial agriculture I would say actually that is always case specific but very important to take into account I think these questions are really highlighting the importance of doing a case specific study and looking at not only the economic factors around a particular river basin or irrigated area but also the social conditions and it is hard to make blanket statements about these types of things so really important work that you guys are doing and nice frameworks that you developed I think it would be interesting to see more examples as it gets applied further on in this project and other projects that you are working on a question from David in an area where we have more evaporation so in the tropics do you think that actual ETA is the best estimate of water use or should there be other considerations I think this might have been a question for Marluse who is also on our IHE the water pip project team and she maybe you want to bring her as a presenter but in the chat she commented that actual evapotranspiration from remote sensing does provide a lot of spatial information on water use which is not available elsewhere so maybe we can Marluse has joined as a presenter I don't know if she wants to comment on that any further I think it's a very interesting question and like I said in the chat that had the remote sensing ETA does provide a lot of information spatial information on water use what are the considerations one consideration is that in areas where there is a lot of cloud cover the actual ETA values have problems so in his case he's talking about dry areas you probably have a lot of clear skies so the ETA will be the estimate will be very good another consideration also that it also provides a lot of natural evaporation and we shouldn't put that as a loss or something and maybe cut forest because we want to reduce evaporation in natural landscape so we need to keep that into consideration when we're talking about the actual ETA consumption of the landscape thanks for that clarification and I think we have one final question that has been submitted if you have more now it's a time to put them in the chat box from the Peru example social water productivity of asparagus can be improved by boosting the wages of plantation workers through industrial action social political intervention so at SWP an indicator water well that's a good observation a good question yes so if the wages go up then the social water productivity goes up and that is one action the activists could take or trade workers unions and try for which is also happening and also the wages have gone up which influences this social water productivity and actually the wages go up much faster than the prices at the local markets so you see that actually it becomes more attractive to grow and work in these plantations and you see the number of advocators being sold in the supermarkets it's incredible and they are a lot of those are produced in the coastal areas of Peru but actually what we think is the most useful application of this global water productivity is in discussion with policymakers about what policies should they implement regarding water productivity for example what happens if you have a project that stimulates drip irrigation for subsistence agriculture like it's also happening in Peru then you could use indicators to see what is actually happening and who is profiting from that and what will happen with the water flow also for example in the Colombian case where there is subsidies for the sugar cane factories and for sugar cane producers then you can show okay this is legitimized because of the high productivity but that is the high productivity for calculated on basis of land area and not of water use and not especially not the flow for water use so in that case it influences what can influence policymaking and that is I think the most important way to use these indicators okay thank you I actually have a question for Maria I can use my my position as moderator but I would be curious to hear more about how the discussions go for figuring out the relative values in the spider diagram so it said in your presentation you bring people together and you have discussions so maybe what information or data do they use in those discussions and how do they so far we are still at the beginning of this framework but it's true it's more like you understand what people what people think it's most important so far we also don't have precise or concrete research that shows so the idea is that policymakers are discussing and then through these discussions more of their interest and what is important for the particular context or particular groups is what is most important so the scores it's what it matters to who so it's everything is a relative out thing together the best available data and people's knowledge of a particular situation to arrive at those values great thank you I appreciate the clarification I think we have one more question thank you Ababa for the nice question I think that needs further thinking I wouldn't know how to do it I know that well with the discussion on the water footprint worldwide there has been this mapping of connecting water footprint with water scarcity in each region of the world and that is interesting because of course if you in a very wet area have a very large footprint for producing a certain food that doesn't matter water sufficient anyway water scarce situation is much more important to know what your water footprint is so the social water productivity could be linked to that and you would also link it to let's say social indicators I'd say gender indicator or indicator of poverty and then see is there a relation worldwide between social water productivity and poverty for example then you would draw much more to the social side I don't know if it is really relevant in the sense that like I said before it only makes sense to compare social economic productivity within one watershed or within one irrigation system because you cannot transport water from the world it is only a policy issue or management issue within a watershed there you can make the decision whom will get the water what production and that is so then I don't know how you can relate that to water scarcity and compare different river basins if that makes sense would be interesting to do an exercise maybe you want to help the nice opportunity to recruit more people to help you on your project and I think one more question yes so I think also like employment and women employment can be related directly with women empowerment in the spider diagram but I think the diagram is open for also other indicators and if we can find a way to make a more concrete assessment of what what other ways we can assess the women empowerment then of course we can include it in the framework and yeah yes I guess it's also like of course so through policy analysis you can always see what a national government or a particular region wants to address with different interventions what are their goals and then based on these goals discuss how they score so if a particular group wants women empowerment then this is something that can also be added in the framework very nice thank you well I think with that we have answered all the questions either from the panel or in the chat so I would like to thank our presenters today really nice clear informative presentations on the topic and I would like to thank everyone in the chat who engaged with us and introduced themselves and asked questions really encouraging to see how engaged people are in this topic so thank you again to everyone as one final thing I would like to say when you exit the webinar you will be sent to a page for a survey that helps us figure out who our audience is and what you are interested in learning more about so if you have already completed the survey you did your job thank you very much if you are new or have not yet completed it we would really appreciate it if you could do that it helped


Jason Krumpp knows what it's like to win here in Cardiff, how he did enough to live it for a third time. Jarekampel goes off the inside in the red helmet on 15 points. Chris Holder gate two in the blue helmet colour 13 so far. Jason Krumpp off three, he's got 13 to his name. Hans Anderson off the outside in yellow, 10 points. But he'll be delighted with the fact that he's in the final to boost his chances of a top eight finish at the end of the season. What a start from Chris Holder in blue, it's all very tight there with Krumpp. Watch out for Krumpp from the inside, it's all wheel to wheel down the back straight and Holder has both clear. Trump is second, here comes Hans Anderson in yellow, but Hopper is still in the mix for third place. Holder though, and he's taking British Grand Prix, he's under pressure from Krumpp now. It was so beautiful, he mathematically worked that out over half of going into turn one. Didn't lose his composure, look at him now right in the middle of the track, he's leaving the door wide open from experienced boys on the inside of him. This guy's brave, he's carpeting, he's working the race track. To repeat what I said earlier, three weeks ago, Chris Holder, who leads the British Grand Prix final, thought he'd broken his arming torrent, and yet here he is on the verge of a dream victory. But Jason Krumpp's coming back for more, these two have the bit of afters a lot of... But look what it means to Chris Holder. Chris Holder, first time in Cardiff, first final, first win. I think I want a lot of people money today, a lot of people kill up to me saying that, money on us, and I just laugh at it. But to be honest, man, I honestly can't believe that just happened. They're the longest fall laps, and the slowest fall laps I think I've ever done, and I knew they were behind me, and I was just trying not to think too much, just trying to ride my own race, and I'm stoked the way it worked out, it was unbelievable.


First, we would like to thank you for taking your time to listen to our experiences in using the SimplyE app in academic environments. Columbia University and New York University, supported by Lyricists, have begun their journeys with the goal of creating an open reading landscape. So today, you will hear from Robert Cartolano from Columbia University, Nancy Lin from New York University, James English from Lyricists, and of course me, Christine Peterson from Amigos Library Services. Although we will focus on the integration of SimplyE, this is but the first step. As you can see, this will be a practical presentation with Rob and Nancy providing you with details of their two similar but different implementations at Columbia and NYU, and James from Lyricists diving more deeply into the technical details and exposing some of the unforeseen obstacles that arose during this process. But to begin, let me give you a little background. In 2014, the New York Public Library submitted a grant proposal to IMLS that dealt with eBooks. The frustration that patrons were having in dealing with multiple eBook vendors and their interfaces was palpable to anyone who worked the front desk of a public library. The goals of this project were threefold, to make access to digital content more simple for patrons, to also create an eBook platform that was not only commercial-grade but open in both standards and protocols, and thirdly, that brought together into a single interface eBooks from at least the three primary public library vendors at the time. So why SimplyE? What were the problems that NYPL and every other public library were facing? Each vendor had their own interface as well as search and browse mechanisms, and logins of course were different across platforms. Requiring patrons become comfortable with multiple platforms is difficult at best, but it also required the library staff to be able to support each one. Accessibility was not a significant concern for most of these services, and patron privacy was almost non-existent for some. Instead of promoting the relationship between the patron and the library, branding was vendor-based. There was incredible dissatisfaction with Adobe's DRM. Both by library staff and patrons. Installing a reader, getting the ID, going through the steps in just the right order, it was so much easier to just purchase the eBook, which was exactly what the publishers wanted. The friction in this process was intentional because publishers wanted people to purchase their eBooks, not share them from a library. One of the results of this is that libraries, some of them large libraries, chose to support a single eBook vendor forgoing the diversity of titles provided through multiple vendors, because it made it easier for their patrons and for their staff. Currently, there are about 345 public libraries using SimplyE across the country. This is incredible uptake since 2017. There are three major hosting providers, all library nonprofits, Califa, Minotex, Lyrisis, and Amigos Library Services. There are a few libraries hosting themselves, and I want to give a shout out to one, the Georgia State Library, otherwise known as the Georgia Public Library Service. They are in the beginning stages with just a handful of libraries, but when you look at this map in another six months, I expect we will see many more Georgia libraries. The big news for this audience, however, is the addition of academic libraries. We have Columbia and NYU who went live within the last couple of weeks, and at Amigos we have a third, Concordia, who will be going live this spring. So a little bit about Amigos Library Services, if you're not familiar with us. We are another nonprofit library consortium similar to Califa, Minotex, and Lyrisis. We have over 500 members, about half of those are academic libraries, about a quarter public. We do a lot of different things, and SimplyE is just the most recent service for us. We pride ourselves on having a staff that is primarily made up of librarians. We've been there, we've done it, we understand what you're going through. We became involved with SimplyE in 2017 when James English, who you will hear from later, demonstrated it for me at ALA Midwinter. We spent the first couple of years creating the infrastructure for ourselves and piloting the service with libraries. In the fall of 2019, SimplyE became a true Amigos service available to any library, member or non-member. We currently host over 130 libraries with another 20 in the queue. Many of these are due to a project with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission called E-Read Texas. For any accredited public library in the state serving a population of 100,000 or less, the state library will pay for a SimplyE instance, and in addition provides a statewide e-book and audiobook collection, which they continue to develop. About two-thirds of this collection is available to any library in the state, including academic libraries, and that brings us to our first academic library, Concordia University, Texas. They will be offering this collection to their students soon, and then I expect interest from other academic libraries. A quick tangent, this Texas project was very well timed. You can see here statistics from one of our mid-sized public libraries identifying the number of events for specific time periods. The top graph shows the incredible increase in the use of e-books during the pandemic in April and May of 2020. This is wonderful news by itself, but the bottom graph is more important. We are still looking at the number of events, but over a longer period of time. The usage went up during the pandemic, but had not yet decreased. Timing was everything for Texas public libraries. Last year, we had a group of people talk to you about SimplyE at CNI. They gave you an introduction to the app, which at that time had about 200 libraries in it, discussed the beginnings of governance, the results of a feasibility study focused on academic patron usage, and plans for 2021. So what has happened since? Public library adoption has been remarkable, with a 170% increase from last year. We have two academic libraries that are live soon to be three in the spring. These and other academic libraries stand on the shoulders of the work done by public libraries in the app, and in its turn, they will extend functionality, much of which will support public libraries. As both move forward with their specific agendas, their work will cross and support each other. We are solving issues for each other. There has been and continues to be impressive synergy. One thing you will find out, however, as you listen to Rob, as you listen to Nancy, and as you listen to James, this is not a perfect app. But it is moving forward, and it can be the basis of an open reading landscape. And I think you'll be excited as you hear both Rob and Nancy describe to you their visions of the open reading landscape. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rob. Thanks, Christine. At Columbia, our goal is to transform the academic e-book reading experience. We are adopting open e-book technologies, and leveraging the tremendous work that's come out of public libraries that Christine mentioned earlier, from places like New York Public Library and many others. We are partnering with Lirisys for software development and hosting services, and we are branding our service Columbia University Libraries. The library is the brand. Our plan is to deploy Simply E for Columbia in three phases over three years. Starting this academic year, we've launched Simply E for Columbia with support for up to 50,000 e-books and up to 500 users. In fall 2021, we moved to phase two, the great e-book expansion, with up to 250,000 e-books and support for up to 5,000 users. And then in fall of 2022, phase three, we will move to 1 million e-books and support for up to 50,000 users. We've launched Simply E for Columbia in February of 2021 with SAML Shibboleth Campus Authentication developed in close partnership with Lirisys and the University of Minnesota, Minotex. Lirisys is also hosting our circulation manager, the service software for Simply E for Columbia. And all of this is integrated and connected back to our blacklight based Clio Unified Discovery. At launch, we have 23,000 licensed and open access e-books. Our licensed e-books include University Press e-books from Johns Hopkins University Press and others, and Casolini's Terosa and Longo e-books. We also have open access e-books from OA-PEN.org and unique holdings from our digital collections. At this time, we are supporting non-DRM PDF and non-DRM EPUB e-books. And we've also started a student and faculty survey that is underway at this time. You may learn more about Simply E for Columbia at this link below. Now I'd like to give you a live demonstration of Simply E for Columbia. I'm going to start with Clio, our Unified Discovery interface, and search for a book, Green Alternatives and National Energy Strategy. When I look at the item level record, I see on the right that I may select Read on Simply E, and then at this point, I may borrow the book. Not I've borrowed the book, let's go over to the iPad. So this is a standard iPad with Simply E installed. When I launch it, I can see that I view Columbia University Library's collection. Let's log in to Columbia University. I can go to the Settings tab, and under the Columbia University Libraries, I can log in to Columbia using our standard campus login. Columbia uses Duo Mobile to factor authentication. This will send a push to my phone, and at this point, I've logged into Columbia University, and I see that I've signed in right underneath Columbia University Libraries. Now I see the Columbia University Libraries catalog, but you know, I could also see whether the libraries may be available. I can go to the New York Public Library. I can also go to the Brooklyn Public Library. Many libraries, one app. This is absolutely terrific for our users, but let's go back to Columbia University Libraries and take a look at that book we just checked out. So on the bottom, second from the left, I can select my books, which is my personal bookshelf. Oh, and look at that, Green Alternatives and National Energy Strategy has appeared in my bookshelf. I can select that link and download the book. I can also look at the description, and I can see a full description here, and if I wanted to, I can actually go back and look at the catalog record in Clio right here. That takes me over to Clio, and I can look at that one, and I can jump right back to SimplyE. So I can go from Clio to SimplyE, and Clio to SimplyE, and SimplyE right back to Clio. Let's read the book. Now, I happened to read this earlier, so I'm going to jump to my earlier chapter that I was reading, chapter four. And now I'm reading the book. It's a standard EPUB book. I can navigate and turn pages. I can jump to change my settings, including larger text. I can also change the font from a serif font to a sans serif font. I'll go back again to serif, change the font smaller one more time. And of course I can go and change my chapter via the table of contents. So that is SimplyE looking at an EPUB. Now I can also look at other books. In this case, I've got an OAPen book. This book is a Springer Nature book that's been released to open access in OAPen. Let's download that book. Okay, now that book is ready to read. So here's a nice OAPen open access book. And I could also go and find something from our digital holdings, our digital collections, Homes in Hawaii. And I'll download that book as well. So from one app, I can look at licensed ebooks, open access ebooks, and ebooks from our digital collections. Now as I showed you earlier, that Homes in Hawaii book was a PDF. And here I see it with three different sizes, an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet running Android and the iPad, which is a 9.7 inch iPad. And on the right, you can see the EPUB that Johns Hopkins Press EPUB book, again in the iPhone, the Samsung Tablet and the iPad. So one app, many devices. And we also have the ability to generate reporting. Here we have generated a report using Google's data studio from APIs that come out of the circulation manager. And we think this is absolutely terrific. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Nancy to continue. Thanks, Rob. Hi, I'm Nancy Lin from NYU. NYU has also just launched the SimplyE service. Like Columbia, NYU contracted lyricists to build our SimplyE implementation. Lyricists helped us integrate the SAML campus authentication needed. Our project includes 150,000 eBooks licensed from ProQuest eBooks Central. Books from the pilot have unlimited user licenses, including DRM and DRM free titles. We included only EPUB formatted eBooks. And users can download a book for 14-day loan periods within the SimplyE app. On this main page of NYU's SimplyE collection, we have organized our browse lanes to highlight certain groups of titles. With 150,000 multidisciplinary titles from major academic publishers and small presses, we wanted to offer users easy access to popular and useful material. Our browse lanes highlight the following categories of titles. We have over 200 course books to support our Spring 2021 classes. We've also included our popular or top downloaded titles. And we also wanted to highlight our own NYU Press titles, including new, award winners and specific collections to support various events like Black History Month. We also have thousands of reference books from Oxford, Sage, Elsevier, etc. Under the nonfiction category, we have over 100,000 titles split in multiple sub lanes. We even have quite a few fiction titles. To clarify, NYU did not pay more for access to these eBooks Central titles to be in SimplyE. The EPUB files and digital rights management remain on ProQuest servers. We did need to work with ProQuest and lyricists to develop APIs and metadata and link exchanges using OPDS standards. NYU had several goals with the SimplyE project. First, we wanted to improve our user experience and offer more ways to access our books and mobile devices. We wanted to eliminate unnecessary additional logins to make it easier for users to download and read books. On our eBook Central website here shown in this page, users currently have to log into several different accounts, including platform accounts and Adobe accounts. This requires 13 clicks before you can read a book in an eReader app. In the SimplyE app, as shown by Rob, you log in once with your campus ID and you can access all the books in the collection and easily find, download and read in just three clicks. In addition to improving user experience, NYU is very interested in using and promoting open standards. NYU believes that all players, libraries, consortia, publishers, aggregators, software vendors can create better, more efficient, more innovative reading systems using open standards. So I hope you can see from this presentation that we have proven this to be true. Through using open standards and building upon open source software, NYU and Columbia were able to bring the SimplyE service to users quickly and without huge development costs. Lyrasys and Amigos were able to leverage their experience and technical infrastructure to provide and grow their services. Here are just some of the open standards and software used for our SimplyE project. I would like to emphasize that the use of standards and proven software helped NYU get easy buy-in from central IT, library IT, and our biggest eBook vendor, ProQuest eBook Central. If we even tried to build a bespoke eReader, we would have certainly hit challenges with costs and buy-in from IT and our other vendors, as well as integration challenges when trying to expand content to other publishers. So speaking of innovation, NYU's goals in this project was also to build upon the infrastructure and experiment with supporting other services like ILL and Reserves. NYU has campuses all around the world, including Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. And now with the global pandemic, we want to be able to more easily and efficiently deliver titles. We're in the midst of developing a new interlibrary loan system called ReShare through our policy consortia. Rather than attaching PDFs through email or course reserves or special download sites, we will begin testing whether this library simplified backend can help us deliver limited access copies of materials more efficiently to specific users. Again, this would be building upon open standards and established infrastructure. I will not need to build another SAML integration and can build upon the newly developing LCP rights management software that Lyrisis already has in place for other clients. As Christina Rob pointed out earlier, simply is not perfect. However, the whole system is built upon standards and the chance to iterate and improve. It's not just the software app itself, but the whole backend system that is built upon extensibility and collaborative opportunities. Who knows, maybe another app or a desktop reader will come out in the coming years. This open infrastructure can allow us to easily plug into that if we want to in the future. With almost three million eBooks and the pandemic forcing remote learning, eBooks are the lifeblood of our services now. NYU does not want each publisher or aggregator or open source collection to build infrastructure that's not open. We've seen what happens when Adobe dominates the DRM piece. We've seen what happens when the public library world has closed apps from overdrive and other vendors. We cannot let the lifeblood of our services be trapped. We want legitimate ways to share materials, respect copyright when needed, and open access when available. We believe we can grow services even faster if we can support open standards. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy. Hello, everyone. My name is James English and I'm a product strategist at Lyrisis. Lyrisis is a member driven nonprofit who provides services to public and academic libraries looking to use simply to improve access to eBooks. Like Amigos, we implement and host a simply platform across the country for libraries and states seeking to improve access to digital materials. I'm excited today to share with you our role in bringing this platform and solution to academic libraries for the first time with Columbia and NYU. Up front, Columbia and NYU represent two distinct implementation approaches. My intent today is to share with you our roles and goals as an implementation and integration provider, compare and contrast the two implementations, describe efforts to integrate SAML authentication, describe how they link to their discovery layers, share the different ways they use to present the collection to their users to aid in discovery and exploration. And lastly, I'll close with what we learned our next steps in the project and share with you our vision for the platform and its potential future. Our goals learned by doing last mile is sometimes a paved road and sometimes there's a little trail breaking involved. Our role in the project was to implement and host the technology so that we can understand and establish workflows for metadata and content integration. We also needed to enhance the platform by developing needed authentication support, develop any needed content interfaces. We also had the responsibility of supporting and maintaining the implementations for Columbia and NYU so that we could help gather feedback for the platform roadmap. The platform consists of middleware that others have already told you about. We call it the circulation manager. It connects to the different content as well as authentication systems that a library may use. It then presents out that information to the web catalog and the mobile reader apps. The web catalog is a discovery layer, but it's also an integration layer with existing discovery layers such as Blacklight or Alma or other type of iOS systems. And the reader apps, of course, are another discovery layer inside that also can open and read the content on Android and iOS. To connect the content metadata with Columbia, we basically use already existing interfaces to content that were existing in the application. But we had to do a little trail breaking to authenticate SAML into the circulation manager so that we could connect things like CAS, Shibboleth, ADFS, or LDAP or ILS. And then present the content that we've integrated back out to the mobile clients and web clients. Connecting content metadata with NYU was where the trail breaking was involved. For this, we had to do an API integration with ProQuest. But the lucky thing was we could already use the SAML implementation to just fall in on that already traveled path to implement authentication. Let me talk a little more about that authentication. One of the tools we found very useful in getting through this type of integration was the use of an integration diagram. This interaction diagram that we developed here for NYU shows the various systems involved in communicating a SAML authentication and accessing content. With this transaction roadmap before us, we could easily then fall in on different type of standards in the attributes that are communicated with SAML, such as persistent IDs and affiliations. And it also helped us understand how we would want to solve the problem of expiration. This isn't something that's really covered in the specs, but it's something that you need to think about when implementing SAML. Because how do you want to define your expiration, whether that is by a device or by an application or by content access? Then lastly, Federation is your friend. Groups like InCommon help you smooth the metadata exchange between different institutions. Columbia and NYU use different ways of presenting the collection in the platform. So the platform allows you to organize your collection and present it out to the user. Based on whatever type of goals you have or objectives you want the user to achieve. For Columbia, that was to help them explore the digitized collections that were hosted in the Internet Archive as well as access to broader ebook collection. For NYU, they wanted to focus the ebook discovery on certain works like their courseworks or their reference materials, but also highlight things that were the popular downloads or that were things that they thought in their collection that they wanted users to look at. What we learned in Next Steps. What we learned are standards are your friends. Adopt them, use them, and more importantly, document them in your implementation as a university. We also need better tools than Mark for linking discovery systems. APIs and persistent document IDs are the foundation for that. We also need an alternative classification system in the SimplyE platform. The mappings designed for a public library aren't appropriate for academia. The Next Steps. Monitor and measure what we have implemented. We need to collect and analyze user feedback and then work with libraries to explore other pilot capabilities of the platform, like license content protection, control digital lending, using license content protection, new provider integrations, and then utilizing things like the DPLA exchange or the Open Research Library in Fulcrum to bring those collections into their libraries. The Future. Well, we see an open ecosystem for eBooks, one in which we can go beyond just eBooks and start to link to digital repositories using open standards like OAI, PMH, but leverage the open publication distribution, OPDES, protocol for connecting to different eBook providers as well as publishers, as well as some of these open access repositories such as Muse, OAPN, ORL, ORL and Fulcrum. We believe in library-driven technologies. We also believe in open technology standards and applications are a key part of this ecosystem. We believe common interfaces for metadata such as SAML for authentication and authorization to content are important. And then accessible formats such as EPUB 3 for media publication is important as well so that we can ensure everyone has an opportunity to read and learn using eBooks. Well, that's it for me, and I'm going to pass it on to Christine to close up for us. Thank you. You have now heard of the incredible work done by Columbia, NYU, and Lyrisis and a vision for a possible future. I'd like to leave you with just a few ideas to consider. The water is warm. It is time to come on in. This is a great time to become involved in SimplyE. The app itself includes enough functionality for most library patrons as is, but there's so much more we could do with it. Involvement now means providing direction for its future. Also, leveraging open-source software through open standards allows us to do many things. It allows us to interoperate with metadata, authentication and content, the three pillars of eContent, and also makes the integration of other services and libraries a quicker process. NYU was able to be live in just six months. It will also make it easier to sustain the project. Finding developers and other people to work on the project will be much easier. We also want to work with vendors, not against them. If you work for a vendor and you're listening and you're interested, we want to talk to you, please contact one of us. We are also not interested in dominating the market. We don't need to win to influence. We can foster core library values and sustainable access, making changes in other services by modeling it in SimplyE. I hope you see what we do, that the creation of an open-reading landscape is not just a dream, but it is possible. SimplyE is not the destination, it's just a stop along the way. If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of this, please contact any one of us. We'd be happy to challenge.