Aaron, the Yankees offense got rolling earlier to early today. How much do you credit Gary Sanchez with that two run single in the first was setting the tone? Well, that's what it's about right there. You know, big situation guys on base early in the game.  You know, that's what we need out of a guy like that. It was a big part of this offense and he showed he almost had a homer, you know, later in the game too, but he's swinging the back well and, you know, got us going, going and kind of give Domingo a nice little early lead. You added to that early lead with a two run shot in the second inning, your third home run in two days. How dialed in do you feel at the plate right now? We're getting there. We're getting there just trying to have good at bats, you know, just trying to do what I can for the team. We got a lot of good guys in this lineup that are putting the ball in play, hitting the ball hard and you know, I'm just trying to do the same thing. Aaron, I know you're always modest. You say you're getting there, but how much better can you be in your mind? You know, I missed some pitches tonight.  I've been taking some off speed pitches early on when I knew they were probably going to go there and now it's got to stay aggressive.  You know, you hammer pitches in the zone and I think that's what we're all kind of doing right now is staying aggressive and the results are showing. You now have 11 home runs this season. Six are against Orioles pitching. What is it about going up against Orioles pitching that seems to bring out the best in you? You know, I'm not too sure.  Got some good off speed pitches and I think I'm just kind of getting lucky. You know, we played here quite a bit. I think that kind of plays into it, too. We've played the Orioles quite a bit this year. Fifth straight series win for the team. But when you look at the last two series in particular with all the adversity this team has had to overcome, what does it say about this team and the confidence that they're playing with right now? Yeah, we're a confident team. You know, I think, you know, with all this stuff kind of going on, I think it's kind of helped us get away from a lot of the chatter. You know, we got a lot of less, not too many meetings before the games.  So I think that's really helping the boys out and because we're a great baseball team. A lot of great guys here that, you know, come to work ready to go and, you know, we're showing it. Just got to keep it going. Aaron, appreciate the time. Yeah, thanks, Meredith.


Welcome back everybody and thanks for joining us for this final set of presentations for the last day of the spring 2022 CNI member meetings virtual event. We have two project briefings and then an invited. An invited presentation. We will close the session with a couple of brief reflections from a folks on some of the more interesting or exciting things that they've heard today. So with that, and without any further ado, I'm going to welcome. Welcome Christopher Gilman and Elizabeth Macaulay from the UCLA library. They are going to talk to us about ways to integrate digital collections use into the curriculum I think you will find some interesting echoes here to some other work that you've heard described at recent CNI meetings including this one. And thank you for joining us. Christopher and Elizabeth, I'll turn it over to you. Hi everyone, thank you Cliff. I'm Elizabeth Macaulay I'm head of the digital library program at the UCLA library the University of California Los Angeles. And I am here with my colleague Christopher Gilman I'll let him introduce himself. Hi Christopher Gilman digital curriculum program coordinator with the digital library program is UCLA. Chris, can you go to the next slide please. So I'm just going to give a little bit of context for the presentation that we're going to that Chris is going to give on his, his work and their accomplishments but sort of like what was the framing and how was this commissioned is is what I'd like to set out here so the UCLA digital library program has been around for about 15 years. It started before it was named it with some digital collections and we are currently a fairly large program there we manage about 280 collections and growing and we have numerous sort of named collecting programs and collection building programs as well as just standard activities that we do to make more digital collections available. Currently in those 280 collections there's about 3.4 million items. And this is just a snapshot from our front page. Chris next slide please. Well it's there somewhere. When it comes up it'll come up there we go. So what the foundation is for the work in connecting to the curriculum is that we really need to have rich digital collections that are unique. Or we tend to emphasize unique sometimes they're unique sometimes they're rare and maybe uniquely available openly or in a digital form. I put a lot of emphasis in the program on on building those collections and making them voluminous so that they become research level collections. But then an equally important foundation is that these materials when they are digital that they be interoperable and I sort of split that word out to highlight it a little bit more. I remember learning this when I was in graduate school that word was hard to to figure out and then once I figured out what it meant or I had command of the definition it was in my active vocabulary I used it a lot. And it is part of our foundation but what it means is is still important that across platforms are in an interway we make things so that they can be operated on and that's what Chris is going to highlight in this presentation. So we had to have a foundation or a technology solution that allowed for that. And then what I want these collections to be or what we're trying to achieve at UCLA is that these these collections are operational not just in situ like inside their interface that that my program works to create. But that they're also transferable and useful and operable exit to you which I think, you know, we'll see in this presentation a little bit more. So we want to get out of the interface and what I really want to do is see us get into the classroom because our motivation is not just to build it and and let it sit there and be indexed by Google but the real purpose of our, our organization the digital library program and more writ large the UCLA library is to connect with students and researchers and and make a difference in how they learn how they produce knowledge and how they develop in in creative and artistic fashion as well. So our collections can be useful in creative works. Christopher has been passed with looking at our collections and looking at our campus at UCLA and building a bridge outward from these digital collections which might be currently or could be conceived as inert and making them active. And so that's what I'm going to pass the mic over to him to talk about these things and what I guess to highlight here what are the goals. I'd like to say that we have hypotheses. And that's how we work in the digital library program at UCLA. If we have more collections we might have more users. If we activate these digital collections, they might get used more in classrooms and then we take action and then we evaluate so these are our hypotheses that that through the work that we're doing with connecting to students and curriculum, we can make a bigger impact on our campus. And I will turn it over to Christopher for real. Great. So, so I'll give you a quick overview. I'll try to move quickly through material. And I've also used the visual registers as much as possible. So you get a sense for what we're doing, even if some of the words have to be hurried. So we're going to talk in three parts, talk about canvas itself as a medium. So in this sense canvas is a learning management system, not to be confused with canvas on a triple I F viewer. Showcase our custom three unit template that we developed. That's the frame that that we refer to in the title and give you some some information about our experience this winter deploying it for the first time and then and then give some summary feedback from the student experience with this with this project. So first about canvas as a medium. So, we embarked on this project as part of a wholesale shift at UCLA from a Moodle based learning management system to to canvas and the comments that I'm making today. Presuppose that canvas is necessarily what one should use at any institution as a learning management system but rather the learning management system itself is a is an excellent medium for managing and negotiating student learning with digital collections in the classroom. The fact that we are transitioning meant that the entire university is suddenly thinking about learning management as well as innovative innovation in teaching and learning. So, just for inspiration. I'm pulling from this alias is famous anatomy, in part because I think that student learning is embodied, and also as a kind of visual metaphor for introducing our three unit template and related curriculum. So, the template itself is designed to integrate digital engagements through exploration of the collections analysis and public project work as essentially plugins into a standard university course. We created a kind of a graphic representation in the homepage with the main body of weekly topics. In our case, and quarters and 10 weeks, and then units devoted a pretty rigorously to materials methods and products in that sequence. So this is a relatively fixed sequence. We could of course, change it in the template these are all variable and implementation, but we found that this is a pretty helpful structure. So, what I just want to highlight something about sort of the affordances of a digital page structure in canvas, and that is the distinction between verbal communication and visual communication. In this case, let's think of verbal communication in a simple form of a rhyme, where two things that have very little to do with each other presumably suddenly find some sound symmetries between them a cat and a mat. And if you apply that to to visual content, you can see that there are also opportunities for essentially visual rhymes or juxtaposition of similar imagery that may come from very disparate sources. And in our case, as Lisa has essentially set us up to consider we we are active participants in the triple IF community and our and our collections are in triple IF, for the most part, and content in triple IF can be sourced and dropped into a viewer alongside a content drop from another source in this case, Library of Congress so we see the codex on me a tennis on the left, and the glads or gospels from our own collection on the on the right. In this, we have not only juxtaposition but we have the ability to deeply zoom and explore and and and change pages and so forth, and use the human eye as a tool for inquiry, and this really wouldn't be possible without these advanced digital technologies and systems. So, comparative analysis of details, as you start to see these items together is central to a process of of inquiry. With our learning management system, we can embed a viewer such as me's in this case, through very simple HTML directly into the canvas page and have students engage with it in their course context. So here is a sample page from a live course. And in so doing we essentially create a kind of longitudinal cascading effect where content can be pulled from our origin site into the learning management system through a sequence of activities, and then essentially taken outside into public viewing in a completely different context in this case, a student produced scalar project. Okay, so that was the sort of principle and now the actual experience, working with one professor chenling new zillion e, who is teaching simultaneously in the history department and Institute for society and genetics. So she used the, the template in two parallel courses that were highly symmetrical themselves, only one course derived its content from our collections. The collection of patent medicine trade cards on the left, and the Society and genetics course drew material from the UCLA or barium, all other respects are very similar. In each case, in, in her implementation, the course topics in the 10 week sequence covered principle themes that she would have taught in a previous course, irregular medicine history of pain and public health. I only know about those passingly now. In the materials she pulled in a collection of these extraordinary ephemeral objects patent medicine trade cards in for the methodology of the of the class students focused on comparative analysis and annotation and use group setting for collaborative evaluation of their students. And this is preparatory work for the otherwise relatively daunting technical and proficiency sort of skill sets needed for a scalar project. Okay, so here is an example of the sort of weekly rundown of the of the canvas site. For unit one. She and I worked very directly with Russell Johnson, the curator of these collections also worked both online and with digital with physical materials. And that focus allowed them to dig deep into the information literacies component, particularly the value of this information. Second, they focused on observation interpretation annotation as communication. And as you see on the right these, these activities this is just one of many activities in unit to where students did hands on digital work, and then we're assessed on their proficiencies. And in the third students focused on writing for the public visual rhetorics and took everything that they learned in the previous two units, and created a summative work product that could be assessed, both for content and for proficiencies. Okay, so how did the students like this. We had an extraordinary number of students who just simply said this was their favorite class, and I pulled in some quotations from comments that the students left with us. All around. It was just a great experience. There are all all cylinders firing scalar worked. The professor was great. Pat medicine trade cards are good. Great class. Another great class, and notably, the most memorable experience for me this quarter was the trip to the biomedical library and seeing, seeing these items in real life, and working with the with the curator. So that connection between the digital and the physical is really strong. And we think that this this approach can actually enhance the way students see physical materials. Okay, with the digital collections. We saw what we had hoped and what Lisa sort of set us up as a, as a goal. And that is students saw these things for the first time, many of them were upper division students. They were blown away by how many items they were looking at. And the quality and uniqueness and just general interest. And that they made their their way through four years, sometimes of an education, and had no idea that this, this, this treasure was sort of hidden under a bushel, and so forth. So on the three unit structure. What students largely said was that they did a lot of work but it was manageable because it was scaffolded and had frequent touch points with the professor. Anything they were confused about they had redundancy in the online instructor instructions and the professor filling in gaps or explaining things along the way. So, every item that the students learned was followed up in subsequent units, and they fit together in a kind of an integral whole students learn things that they that they hadn't anticipated before, and had great things to say about canvas itself as a tool. In addition, we intentionally structured in the ACRL information framework for informational literacy and a series of the particular frames and had students reflect upon the frames as they're moving through their learning and particularly we underscored information has value in the context of ephemeral items in the physical and digital collections. And the, the presentation by the curator Russell Johnson really kind of struck the students in where things are accessed that they had been originally discarded how they were collected and so forth. They just learned scalar quickly and effectively through this approach. Overwhelmingly, they liked the medium and they felt like the digital skills generally both with scalar and other things like HTML and linked media were things that they could apply in other contexts, both within and outside of the of the school. The particular affordances of the high quality triple I have content. And then we worked, both professors, the only and, and I worked with the students to consider what they would suggest for future iterations. We've already made some adjustments to our model but this is alive and iterative process, and essentially being adaptable to the, to the contingencies of the moment gave the professor a lot of positive feedback. So the, the, the bottom line for many courses comes in the course evaluations and having seen commentary we, we anticipated that they would be pretty good. And what we found is that in these two parallel running courses that there is a kind of a symmetry as well in the student responses, which suggests that the, that the model is itself a coherent and replicable from from one context to the next. The evaluations were high, and they were significantly higher than the same courses taught by professors early on in previous semesters so even if you account for her excellence as a as a professor. The big difference was in the course structure itself and the materials. The students interest in the subject matter increased significantly as a function of the course. And although the much was achieved in the course in the mastery. The difficulty was below average and the, and the workload was just about right. And this we have a couple of takeaways. One is that the LMS does effectively integrate collections into the curriculum that digital and physical collections work better together than they do separately. That structure such as the three unit template helps faculty innovate in the curriculum and manage the intensity of the work. And that students themselves learn valuable skills and really like the experience. So, with that, we can, we can wrap up I just wanted to point out that this is really part of a much larger soft collaboration with a variety of different people and, and sub institutions within the, the university, some of whom know they're contributing and some of them might not be all that aware. But our hope is that the work that we're doing has wide application and can be scaled up to a broad implementation. Thank you and we can take any questions. Thank you. This is really. These are, these are wonderful outcomes. It's great. It's great to see this. There are several comments and perhaps questions in the chat that you might want to have a quick look at. Meanwhile, folks, please share your questions either in the chat or just jump in. So I'm looking at the, at the chat from the bottom up outreach strategy and how many courses per quarter could you handle. That's a great question. I should. I should contextualize this a little to say that a parallel project underway is to create reusable modular content for sharing on our UCLA canvas commons and by that means to scale up the number of courses that can be supported. Right now we're, we're in a very intensive phase of trying out how the systems all work and what kind of responses we get from the, from the students. Generally, we're the, in terms of scale, because this, the three unit template presupposes buy in from the, from the outset by a faculty member. It's a, I'd say a small to large minority of courses that would be a maximum implementation. Not every, not every professor is, is interested in, in that, that kind of wholesale commitment to this, to this type of teaching and learning. On the other hand, it is intended for any type of course, and the numbers, in this case that two courses that we're looking at, where I'd say in the mid range of 60 to 80 students, and we've run parallel curriculum in courses as large as 300. So, the, the absolute number of students can be relatively high in this model. The number of courses is a, is another question. We won't know that I think until, until we've, we've taken this, I'd say another, another year of implementation. And as for the, the outreach strategy itself, it, it has been connected with the, what is called the LMS transformation effort at UCLA through networking and departments. And our, our various instructional support and research units such as digital humanities, hum tech, and, and others that have connections with faculty who are interested in willing to try out these kinds of these kinds of approaches. And with the center for advancement of teaching, which reaches the reaches the full campus. Let's see. I wonder if you played a role at all in assessment of student learning outcomes. That's from Tara Lynn Fulton. The, we have not done a formal assessment of the students. We did run a parallel project with the center for advancement of teachers, but I wouldn't be able to communicate that here. Tara Lynn scholarly primitives casting students is active scholars connecting established modes of inquiry with modern multi disciplinary methods. Excellent comment. The students are very engaged and empowered and particularly through the sequence of three units, many of them were not. They were particularly comfortable with the material that the methods or the technologies involved and by the end seemed quite confident and took charge of their own of their own project work. Right, any others. Well, looks like we're about ready to move on to the next presentation. Thank you so much for sharing that work. You've obviously really made an impression with it and it's really wonderful to see it so thank you so much for joining us and sharing that work.


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Hi everyone, I'm here with Sanjay Mareem Madhya from HP. I'm of course Jeff Kelly with Wikibon, we're on the floor of Stratoconference at Santa Clara Convention Center. A lot of interesting things happening today. We're going to talk today about the HP app system. Really want to understand really what it's all about and kind of your approach to Hadoop. Absolutely, hey thanks Jeff. So in Discover, HP Discover in Frankfurt in December, we announced the general availability of HP app system for Apache Hadoop. So what we are offering with HP Apache Hadoop, actually app system for Apache Hadoop is an enterprise ready Hadoop platform so that customers can focus on harnessing the power of big data. So it is a ready to use platform so that when it is delivered, customers can use it on day one. And it is a turnkey solution. We're not just taking Hadoop, we're taking a lot of HP IP integrated with the Hadoop platform and this app system is with Cloudera, Hadoop loaded, so we're taking HP inside CMU, integrated with HP, I mean Cloudera manager and we also have Vertica Community Edition bringing it all together to make it a turnkey solution. And we have the first, we have released the 10 terabyte terasort benchmark, the only company to do that. We have the best numbers on that. And we have management capabilities that will make it easy to deploy and manage. So as you grow the cluster, it's easy to grow. So just to give you a sense of what the product is all about, today the app system comes in two flavors. It's a half rack with nine worker nodes and three management nodes that's ideal for customers who want to do proof of concept. So when Hadoop is at a stage where customers want to understand, okay, what the heck can I do with that? So we are giving this to customers who want to get started. Everything integrated, we have chosen the right servers. You know, Hadoop has so many components like name node, job tracker, customers don't know where to put this all together. Usually it takes like three to eight weeks to put it together. And at the end of it, they're not sure. It's really stable, right? With an appliance, you can really slide it right into the data center. I mean, so customers right now, they want to generate value out of it. So we have taken all the pieces together so customers can get started on the analytics portion. So that's what we have done with that. Very interesting. So I like what you said about the proof of concept because of course that's how a lot of people start.  So we have a full rack as well, which has 18 worker nodes. That's like up 384 terabytes of usable Hadoop space, HDFI. And then in May, we are coming out with expansion racks. You know, Hadoop clusters, they start small. We have sold Hadoop clusters which are as big as 600 nodes in just the last quarter. And you know, some customers, we have a large mobile operator with 1500 node Hadoop clusters. So that's how big it is. So it is scalable seamlessly. So let me show you a few more details on the app system. So here is the overall architecture. So we have chosen the right level of switch. We have high availability, taken two switches. Then there's one gigabit NIC, they're all bonded. So we made sure that it has high availability features at every layer of the architecture. But I want to show some of the key features that makes it the state of the art enterprise Hadoop platform. This is the HP inside cluster management utility. It can manage, it can provision right from bare metal to all the software that is required, firmware, software. If you want to upgrade the patch of the operating system with a push button, you can update up to 800 nodes in 30 minutes. And then monitor, let's look at this chart here. If you want to look at the performance of a large cluster, now if you want to know IO performance, these are all nodes. Each line points to a node. So it gives you visualization of the performance. Then you can identify, okay, at this moment, is it the IO or the bottleneck? Is it the CPU or the bottleneck? Now, you also want to check, some customers want to see what happened in the last one week or one month. So we have a historical view. So each of these show the performance of various nodes. So you can then figure out, huh, last week when that process was run, IO was the bottleneck. You can figure out the performance of map-reduced jobs. So we have integrated with cloud error manager. So we also can visualize the map-reduced jobs. Sanjay, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through this. Really appreciate it. Hey, Jeff, thanks a lot. And congratulations to Wikibon for doing a fantastic job here. Oh, well thank you so much.


In 2020 and 2021, there has been significant progress made in the field of perovskite solar cells, PSCs. The efficiency of PSCs has increased significantly, while their stability and lead-free alternatives are being explored. Additionally, the development of PSC modules and their potential for practical applications are discussed. This article was authored by Tianhao Wu, Zhenzhen Qin, Yan Baolang, and others.


First up, our first session this morning at Big Talk from Small Libraries is Cathy Hogan. She is our international presenter, our international speaker for the day, of Ontario, Canada. And you know, I didn't even ask, is it Powassan? Powassan. Powassan. Oh, darn it. I should have asked. Powassan, District Union Public Library. And she is going to be talking about some great changes they made to their library up there. I'll just hand over to you, Cathy, and have you tell us all about what you did up there. Thank you, Krista. I'm very thankful for this opportunity to talk today. My name is Cathy Hogan, and my position at our very small library is communications and program coordinator. We serve a population of approximately 7,500 people. We have a small town, Powassan, and two adjoining municipalities that all are involved in our library. You probably have the same amount of farm animals, too, except they don't come to the library with a few exceptions. You'll find out. I apologize in advance for my Canadian accent, but I am very thankful that you put in some Canadian content today. My talk is how we transformed our little library from lovely, it really was a lovely library, to a community hub that's very lively. I don't have all the answers, but I do have a few ideas, and I'd like to give you some of those ideas today. Something must be working right, because in the past year, we have increased our participation number by 350% at our library. So to me, those statistics are humbling and impressive. So I have 10 hints on how to become a community hub. My first suggestion is to go slow. Even though it's counterintuitive and against my better nature, go slow with all your changes.  Instead of coming in for a book and leaving, now you're asking them to learn a new language, take a cooking class, or play the ukulele. It takes time for people to make that adjustment. We have changed our library into a community destination of choice, and we're changing people's habits even beyond our little community. This has to be gradual, if nothing else, for the staff too. The front desk staff will be asked to do much more than in the past. There's more money going across the counter, there's more paperwork, and there's much more phone calls, and there's just more people in the library. And their jobs will be changing. Perhaps you'll even stretch the bounds of friendship with your boss. Your library support team will be challenged. This is called, in our case, the friends of the library. And the library board members, too, want to support you. But initially, all these changes will be viewed as rocking the boat, and viewed with a bit of skepticism. So go slow, and you'll win them over.  Perhaps their sleeping, their last thought before going to bed is, what is all this going to cost us? So those gradual changes will help adjust them as well. One thing that my boss did was she collected favorable comments, and we've been doing that ever since. We collect favorable comments made about our changing library, and we store them under a comments file in our Google Drive. And they have proved invaluable in the long run. When we go to do municipal presentations, and I hope that you're doing that presentation every year, these are front and foremost in those presentations. The nice thing about doing a municipal presentation is when the library comes to town, we don't ask for money. And if you want to stand out at your municipal meeting, don't ask for cash. That's my advice. Everybody else is asking for cash. When the library comes, we have an attitude of gratitude. And we take that time to highlight things that people are saying about our library, and also to let them know some of the things that are happening at our library that are new and innovative and exciting. So keep them informed all along the way. Number two suggestion is communication. Communication is key.  That message needs to be loud and clear. We need to hear it as soon as they enter the parking lot, into the front desk, into the stacks, and overflowing into your community. The first thing my boss did when she took her position was to change our beige walls into this lovely warm red color. It was so warm and just changed everything. Our new image started then. Then she purchased a logo for our little library. The logo is important, and her advice to everyone is to go professional with your logo or go home. It is worth the money. We put this logo on everything that we can, on letterhead, on posters, on library swag. And we also put stickers with our logo on every envelope that we send out from our library. The third thing for communication is posters. We still use posters, even though in this modern world, everybody is hoping to go paperless, but not everyone is on the internet, especially in rural towns. So we need to do posters. We put posters in the library and around the town as well. Our posters are very consistent. As you can see, there's horizontal bars top and horizontal bars bottom and logo in the middle at the bottom. When this format was first suggested, I have to say that I thought it was entirely too constricting. But I've since come to love it. We use our format poster as a backdrop to everything. And people, whether subconsciously or not, recognize it as a library poster and are drawn to it because of it. Make all your posters in this format. Make it landscape. Because then when you put it on Facebook, it fits into the events portion of the Facebook page on the left. So it goes smoothly into Facebook. And plus it further makes your posters more consistent. Make your posters eye-catching. Use minimum amount of words and make it pop. We use a lot of different fonts. I know some libraries are consistent in their fonts. We like to go to DaFontdaFont.com and get a whole bunch of new fonts and have fun with it. Our posters are clear, professional, colorful, with the minimum amount of information and the maximum amount of impact. Spend time on your posters. Get two and three other people to view your posters and make comments. And although it's a bit humbling at first, in the long run, it's much better. Your poster will say everything about the quality of your library. So a quality poster is a quality library. We have an outdoor sign outside our library, which is worth every penny. Front and back is available to us. And we use that sign to give information about upcoming programs. The sign is changed several times during the week, maybe twice, sometimes three times, but at least once a week. So instead of people looking at a tired old message like Happy Valentine's Day, which stays there for three weeks, people look at our sign because there's new messages updated often. So we become a trustworthy, a more consistent source of new information. So look to that signage outside your library. So there's Kathy. We have a question, actually. Yep. Someone wants to know, what is library swag? Here's some examples of what you're talking about that you did with that. Okay. So for example, we have library mugs. And we also have library book bags. And both of them have our logo on it. Basically, any physical thing you can slap your logo on is really good to hand out to people. Exactly it.  That's totally it. And we've made, I mean, the logo honestly did cost us serious money, but we've made serious work of it. Cool. Thanks. Okay. So the next thing is posters.  And first and foremost are the posters. So we put them around town. We put them in the library. And we also put them on our community cable channel. Secondly, we use the outdoor sign to promote events. Thirdly, the Google calendar, which links to our email, is then put on our webpage. So the Google calendar is a good source of information. And if you look at the analytics, you can tell people are going back and forth from your webpage. Number four to promote events is public service announcements in the newspaper. And it's amazing how many people actually read those public service announcements and comment on it. Number five is our public radio station in Canada. It's called CBC. And we use, because it's Northern Ontario and news is sparse, we have the opportunity to do live announcements, promotional announcements about our events at the library. And this spreads out over a huge area and has attracted quite a few people that wouldn't have come to our library. Number six is our local cable channel that I mentioned from our community, from our town office. And number seven way that we promote our library is through our monthly handouts. So this is front and back of a half of 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. So this is the front. And on the one side, we have our regularly scheduled events. So at the top of this page is our weekly events and the bottom is things that occur every month in our library. At the bottom, any closures that we have and our artist of the month, we have a downstairs art gallery, a tiny one. We promote our artist on that side. And then on the other side of that handout is the special events that are happening that month. Interestingly, at the beginning of this process, probably a year and a half ago, we had to struggle hard to have people take these handouts, slip them in the books, explain. You can imagine all the conversations. This is our monthly handout. It was quite an arduous task, to be honest, even so much as to going into the parking lot and running after people, you forgot your handout. So that was the beginning. Now, a year and a half later, we have people actively asking for this monthly handout, which is lovely and keeps you honest, keeps you on your toes, when is the March handout ready? When is the March handout? Okay, I'm working on it. It'll be soon. So it's very encouraging to see that people have come full circle. The next way we promote the library is through emails. We have a very solid email list and we actively connect with people through email and we actively collect these emails from people coming into the library. Whenever there's an event, I take that opportunity to say, are you on our email list? I promise to send you just one email a month. And people have responded to that very, very positively. If there's a new family that comes to town or a new face at the library, instantly I'm at their side saying, here's a monthly handout and would you like to be on our monthly email list? It's only one email a month. Everybody says yes. But critically, and if you follow marketers, this email list is a wonderful source of gold for you. You're sending an email into their email box, which they have asked for. It's not unsolicited junk mail by any stretch of the imagination. So it has much more weight. We use vertical response. Our wonderful marketing intern, Maxim, uses vertical response, which is a free service. And we can look at the analytics of who's opening it, how many people it goes to monitoring their email adding and subtracting, which is a really great service. So we use our email list a lot. And we guard it carefully and maintain it and actively seek to expand it. So my number three from the top ten list on how to transform your library is social media. And when you're using social media, yep. Yeah. Kathy, we do have a question before you pop on to your next one. About the logo that we saw over all of your different things that you did there, someone that wants to know, said their library is considering getting a logo. How did you go about doing that? We went to a local marketer and just gave him an open book, right? You could do whatever you wanted. And that's what happened. We got vertical, we got portrait and landscape logos, colored and black and white options. Nice. Okay. So you just found somebody locally who does this kind of graphic design marketing type stuff. Yes. And that worked really well. You know, often a library will say, oh, we're going to have a contest this month and we're going to have our new logo design. So, you know, you'll get a free book if you win the contest. Don't go there. Right? That's not a thing to do. That's good. You have to go to a professional. Yeah. Could you, would you be willing to share how much that costs to do that? You know what? I didn't ask, but I know it was in the hundreds. Right. You did this. Yeah. Right. Because then you can, once you have it, then you can use it on everything, like you said, the posters and the media and your social media and your swag and everything. Did it come with like a tagline or a motto or anything for the library? I know some libraries do that or was it just the graphics? No, we chose, no, just the graphics. We chose to do that. We used the motto on our Facebook and our social media, but not on the logo. We wanted the logo to be very, very clean and simple. Right. Right. Okay. All right. Number three way to transform your library is social media. And as I said, always be Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Okay. People come to me and say, I just love your Facebook. And they view it as a positive thing and an uplifting thing. And that's my goal with social media. I ignore any political comment, any undertones of anything. Anything that has to do with sarcasm is out the window. I'm Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 24-7 and the happy, happy girl, oblivious to all of that. Post as often as you can or as often as is effective. In my case, I post 90 times a week at my little library between 75 and 90, but often in 90. And if you look at marketing books or Facebook experts, they will say, don't even go there. Don't even go half there. But yet in my town, it works. So my advice would be to post as often as is effective for your library. So look at the analytics and see if people are un-liking your post. Well, change it up. Do something else. Also, my advice for Facebook is to not make it all about you, right? Just about like the world isn't all about you. So too, your Facebook page isn't all about your library. So 40 to 60 is what I aim for. So 40% is about library programs, library programs, library programs. Great. Or library information or library volunteers. But 60% is about supporting the neighboring community, supporting a local event, interesting content, any of that. All goes into the Facebook mix and people tend to like it. Also my advice for Facebook is to use real photos instead of canned images. As you see here, we have our local artists downstairs in our art gallery. And it's an easy way to promote this event, also to give some weight to the artist himself. And people just like to see real pictures. Spread your posts out over day. Don't clump them all at the beginning of the day and nothing for the rest of the day. Don't use a scheduling feature. Save some photos and post them the next day and let your personal voice be heard. Right? I'm not a wallflower. I'm not quiet. Everybody knows that.  So you might as well not hide your light under a bushel. I have, as you can see in this post, way too many capital letters, way too many exclamation marks. But that's how I work. So that's me. People know it. And this is actually a beautiful post. This is one of our rug-hooking artists. And it was well received, got lots of hits on it. And it's lovely, right? You can see the library books in the background and you can see the work and you can see the person. I love that post. Use your social media to build relationships with businesses and groups and communities, people, interact with them, make comments, post. I mean, it's not all day 24-7 social media. So you have to be careful and use your time wisely. We also have a Twitter account from our library. And the Twitter feed is fed through Facebook. So our Twitter stands alone, but my Facebook posts, rather, go to the Twitter account and are fed into the Twitter account, which is nice, except my Facebook posts are not 140 characters. So the rest, 140 characters are on Twitter and then it's hyperlinked to the rest of the post, which is not always an effective post on Twitter. So what I do is post to Twitter separately a few times a week with a fresh image to make my Twitter more live and more relevant. It does take a bit of time, but it's worth it. Always use the hashtags, use the comments, use the shares, give people credit, but you're always engaging with people on social media. And it is amazing to see what happens as a result of this. You'll form bridges. It's really good. Our website is clean and clear and consistent and updated. If you're talking about your Thanksgiving dinner and it's February, I'm sorry. I'm not going to linger on your site because that's a sign of a dusty old library. You have to be fresh.  So there's no date on it. There's no snow on it. So that picture can stay up for a while. We update it every once in a while. But don't put time sensitive things on your Facebook. Or if you do, you've got to update that baby quite a bit. At the end of the day, all this social media does take time. You get better at it. You get faster at it. Much more efficient at it as the time goes by. But it is an effort. And you are changing people's expectations. Most people don't go to the library for their social media. But hopefully, you will change their expectations of that. And even more. My number. Yeah. Do you use a particular scheduling feature to have the posts go? Or do you pre-schedule them in any way? I do. I use the scheduling feature of Facebook, which then schedules it onto Twitter. I know on Twitter, you can use Hootsuite for Twitter. I haven't done that because I don't post as often on Twitter. And when I post on Twitter, I post live. But certainly scheduling. The built-in that Facebook has worked really nicely, too. Have you ever paid for any of the Facebook ads, done any of that? Yes. We have paid for Facebook ads. It's not very expensive. For example, when we have big events, we'll have a paid ad. And for $12, you can watch the analytics very carefully. And you can see how effective it is and how many people that post reach. And so we have found the $12 actually to be a good investment. And we have big events. Not for everything, necessarily, but for some sort of special event would be a good idea. Only for the special events because the regular schedule events have to stand on their own. Really? Right. And just what a couple of people did ask, your website, is what program are you using to do or software for that? Or how does that run? I think it's with Wix. Okay, cool. Yeah, Wix is good. We have an intern, I'll show her picture will be coming up. She does the web page. She keeps it updated. And it's very important to have a dedicated domain name as well. We used to have our web page under our regional server with a bunch of libraries. And it was a very awkward, long URL. So now we have www.PoisonLibrary.com, easy to find, easy to get to. And it's working much better for us. And also the ability to tweak your website and make changes quickly is much enhanced when it's in-house because when we had to deal with out-of-house service, it took days and sometimes a week to make any changes on a website, which is a bit frustrating. Yeah, yes, definitely. Okay, go ahead. Thank you. Okay. No problem. Number four is building bridges with the media, right? The media out there, they have an agenda. They want to attract an audience. And so you have to work within that agenda. First of all, I would say my first piece of advice when dealing with the media is to always be thankful. We have our regular cards that we send on card stock, 8.5 by 11's cut on two. And this card was our Christmas card this year. And it was a hand quilted card from a local quilt shop. And we were very glad to highlight her work. The year previous, we used the artwork of a lovely Amish woman and highlighted her work as well. So Christmas is an opportunity to highlight local work for us. And then this is our regularly scheduled thank you card, one size fits all. So send these cards to the media, get to know them, follow them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, comment, but get involved with them. And if nothing else works, invite them to the library. And this has been a real boon to us. The past year, we've had the editor of one library do a photography class. And the reporter from a different newspaper do another photography class. And we've had two writers with the newspapers do writing workshops in our library. If nothing else, they'll figure out where the building is. But all this is building bridges with the media. If there's library related events in the newspaper, I'm very quick to take them and post them on our social media with a public thank you for their efforts. And we've had really good success with local media. And what about if they don't show up? So you send a press release and you do all the right things and the media doesn't show up. Don't worry about it. Right? I mean, they've got a million things to do every day and believe it or not, your industrial library is not on their agenda. So what you have to do is send the perfect photo. So the perfect photo for me is when there's one or two or three people in the photo, their names are all spelled correctly, left to right or right to left. And importantly, you have permission to use that photo. Keep it very, very simple. This to me was the perfect photo. We have a canoe company in our town, Giesler Boat Works. And we had a tribute to this business in our town at the library this week. So I took this photo. We put a canoe in our library. We put Jerry Giesler, owner of the Boat Works company with all the books in the background. Sent it off with a nice caption. And it wasn't printed the first day and I thought all was lost. But two days later, this was printed just in time for our event. And it was really good because we had people drive down the highway half an hour to come to our event. So I was really encouraged. Don't worry though if they don't show up, keep sending those photos. The problem that I find is taking pictures of events that haven't happened yet. We're always in the business of promoting, promoting, promoting. What's the next thing coming and what's next after that? So you need to send them a promotional picture of something that hasn't happened yet. So this is where you have to get creative sometimes. Here is what we submitted for our cocktail party. And our cocktail party happened last fall and so we rimmed the glasses and put fake colored water in them and a colorful serviette and we sent it off with a good caption. And that worked. The next thing we did was take pictures of people who bought tickets to the cocktail party. And this is the mayor of the community close to us and I took his picture with his ticket at the front desk. Amazingly, the mayor of the next town bought a ticket that same week. So I think a little political rivalry rather was at play in this instance and it worked really, really well. We had a Valentine's Day murder mystery because nothing says I love you like a murder. And we had to do a promotional photo and this was a bit difficult. So we dressed up my future daughter-in-law in Sherlock Holmes type costume with the magnifying glass and took it with our sign outside the library along with a caption of the who, what, where, when. And it worked. It was printed in both our local newspapers and we got good results from that too. So that was some occasions when those pre-events photos worked well. The number five suggestion that I have is to experiment, right? Get out of your comfort zone and really as much as possible get out of the library. Take it to the streets is what my suggestion is. This is me at the local hardware store that's been very good to us and we had blind date with a book as many libraries do at Valentine's Day this month. So most libraries will wait until people come in and we handed out free books. We wrapped them with newsprint and put little ribbons on them with the tag. We gave them out free but not everybody, in fact the majority of people are not coming into the library that week. So what we did was got a basket of books and hit the streets. And this is inside the hardware store with the owner of the hardware store dressed Valentine's Day appropriately. And I had the basket with the Valentine's Day stuff and it worked really well and this picture got printed in the library under blind date with a book this February. The next thing we did was actually hit the streets. This is Chelsea, our amazing Facebook intern and multimedia intern, technology intern. And she came with me and we handed out books to random people on the street asking only for their photo in return and they were really excited and it was a chance to put local faces on our social media page and it all worked really, really well. We also use this opportunity to go into businesses and take promotional pictures. In this case, we went to the bank and they loved it in a small town. You probably couldn't do this in a city, right? In a small town, went over great. And we went to the grocery store which also worked wonderfully well. These three people are library people and because there was a magician coming for the event, we brought my bunny and I brought my daughter. A lot of people in these photos, in these local businesses, never come to the library. But in a small town, particularly, if you bring the library to them, you can guess what they'll be talking about for the rest of the day and maybe the week. Last summer, we went to the huge shopping mall in North Bay, Ontario. They asked us to come. Interestingly, they bypassed their local library, the next library south and came to our little library and asked us to do story hour at the mall, which we did with great success. We had singing and books and a fake campfire and we did songs and we had grandmas skipping rope in the mall. I wished I had a picture but I was on the end of the rope, turning the skipping rope. And we had people stopping just for the joy of seeing what was going on at the mall. And it's not something that happens at the mall usually. So it was so out of the ordinary that, again, great newspaper coverage. After we have an event or at any time possible, we take pictures of our volunteers. And this was the cotton candy team for the Christmas walk last year. And this is our public thank you. So took the picture, posted it on social media and sent it in the cards, the thank you cards afterwards. And it's just a nice thing to do. Again, the hardware store, we had an event coming up where we were making small racing cars at the workshop at our library and it was in promote. And then those cars would be put at the Fall Fair and there was a competition. So what we did was put a wooden track, a 20 foot wooden track, took over the middle of the store for a week. And the kids and the older men put the cars on the track and there was an opportunity to race three cars. And they spent the time playing at the hardware store. And it went really, really well. In fact, one of the newspaper reporters made a special trip for this little endeavor and came down and gave us really good coverage. But again, you're out of the library. Go to the cenotaph at Remembrance Day, put a wreath on behalf of the library. Invite big trucks and big people from the community to come in. You're reaching out and you're building bridges and at the same time, you're enhancing the public profile of your little library and celebrating the people. My number six suggestion for how to transform your library is change the atmosphere within. Do you want to say something, Krista? Okay, change the atmosphere. No, there is just one nice comment which actually relates to what you're doing.  It reinforces the library is a fun place. And I thought that too, yeah, the rabbit and I laughed, the big canoe just on top of all the bookshelves, that's awesome. And that's something, get creative, think of something different. And I also liked the staging, the drinks for the cocktail party. If you don't have something already, just make something up. Make a little, yeah, be a photographer type person, yeah. Very fun. Okay, the goofiness, the serious goofiness is coming up, so stay tuned. All right, my best piece of advice and it might be a little difficult, a little dangerous even, get a coffee machine. Now, whatever kind of coffee machine you have or don't have, you need to really get this coffee machine going and you need to enhance it. You need to have tea and you need to make it accessible. You need to make it cheap. But you're changing the atmosphere instantly in your library. You've become that destination. You're also cozy and warm and comfortable. We had an Amish man come into our library this winter with his coffee cup in his hand. And he was telling us that at that big library in the city north of us that they took his coffee cup away from him and he was just outraged. Of course, he's walking into our library, coffee cup in hand. And we said, I can't believe it. We were just outraged.  And off he went to the computers. You have coffee at home, you have books in your home, and nothing disastrous happens. So why don't you have coffee and gasp, even food at your library? Every single person who comes into our library is greeted for the most part by name.  And that is seriously our signature dish at our library. If you come in, you will be greeted. And if we don't know your name, we'll find out your name. And it makes an entirely different atmosphere. Once you know their names, then you know their families. And then sometimes you get to know their lives, right? And sometimes you make a difference in their lives. We like to celebrate our patrons. We talk to them and we get to know them. We do above and beyond things for them. If they like a book, we'll recommend another. If they get season one, would you like us to reserve season two for you? We cultivate that. We make a serious commitment to do that. We send condolence cards and congratulatory cards. It's lovely to send a, oh, I heard about your wedding and we're so excited, as opposed to I'm sorry about your uncle or your mother. But we send those cards anyways. We celebrate the people in our community. If you're having lagging social media numbers, put your volunteer of the month on your social media and watch the numbers fly. Right? And this is our, Teresa, our lovely volunteer who comes every week. And she's very deserving of anything that we can give her. This is our local dairy farmer who came to give a talk. These people aren't, especially the dairy farmer, not always connected with the library, but it makes ripples in your community. New patrons are always asked if they'd like to put their face on our social media. And usually they say yes, and it's a really nice way to welcome them into the town, right? Welcome to our community, welcome to our library, and their faces get to be known before they enter the main street even in some cases. Oh, I saw you on the library Facebook, welcome to the town. It's lovely. My best patron story is Paul, and Paul's very involved with our library. He's visually impaired, and we purchased a library computer specifically for the visually impaired, and so he's here quite often. Last Christmas, his wife offered to buy him the internet for Christmas, and Paul refused. And when asked, Paul will tell you that he didn't want to leave his library friends. So he'd prefer to come, you know, he has to drive at least 20 minutes every day to come to his library, and he'd prefer to do that than miss the action at the library. So have fun, celebrate your patrons, take goofy pictures, get kids involved, kids love their faces on the internet, parents are pleased and proud to have their kids featured on the social media for the most part. One thing I will say is that you have to be seriously careful with children's photos, and other people's photos as well, but particularly sensitive to children. There's many cases where children's photos can't be on the internet, so make sure and sure again that you have permission to post. My number six suggestion on how to transform your library is to work with local businesses and to align your goals with them. Now of course, everybody has local businesses, and everybody knows that their goal is to have happy customers and make money.  You have to know your businesses and not over ask. Realize that every day someone's looking for a handout from these businesses, and it's quite tiring. So you have to be creative and involve them without using money. So here's an example of two local restaurants, and last summer during our kids program, we asked them on separate days to come and make a presentation during food week. So one restaurant made quesadillas, and the other made ice cream with the kids, and it was a huge success. Now these restaurant owners took time out of their lives, provided the supplies for free, but the trade off for them was all the advertising money that we provided. And I made sure that there was a lot of advertising for them, both before the event and after the event. So they thought it would be worth their while to do it. Here's our gingerbread house that we did last Christmas. We had a workshop with limited enrollment, and if you can believe it, an excavation company sponsored the gingerbread house. He gave me the money, I provided the receipts back at him, and I went and bought $100 worth of candy at the store. And I got a few stairs, but it was fun, and the gingerbread house workshop was lovely. And I sent him a thank you card afterwards, but the next week I had a photo printed of one of these children and put a special thank you, a secondary thank you in his mailbox. The photos told the picture. We also have a real estate agent in town who sponsors our Easter egg hunt every year. And she buys the Easter eggs and a few baskets in advance, drops them off on Holy Thursday. We hide the eggs after the library closes. The libraries close good Friday and on Saturday morning. The day before Easter we open our doors early for the Easter egg hunt, and for about 15 minutes the library is wild with excited kids. It's an amazing event, but worth the publicity for our sponsor, and also a great event for the kids and the families, they really like it. My eighth suggestion is to read Unselling by Scott Stratton, he's a Canadian author, or Zig Ziglar, I love Zig Ziglar, I follow Zig Ziglar on podcasts. His motto is you can have everything in life you want, if you'll just help other people get what they want. And then Unselling, Unselling is also is actually required reading by our library staff. This book is about over the top experiences, customer service experiences, and it really is what we strive for as a library in Poisson each and every day. Not merely meeting people's expectations, but exceeding them and doing the unusual to do it. My ninth suggestion is programming, and this is near and dear to my heart. We started out with a lovely library with books and some weekly events. Then I decided to add a local history night, and again my advice to you is if you have sagging numbers, pick a wintery night and have a local history night, and I guarantee that your numbers will go over the top, we had standing room only in our library. And it was history night that really convinced me that things could go much better and much bigger and use the space better in our library, really to get creative with programming. We packed the downstairs room and just went on from there. The next thing I started, I've been a homeschool mom for 25 years, so I started a homeschool group in our library, and the kids and the parents, again, loved it. One thing I will mention is for a few groups, for example, beekeeping, homeschooling, our photo club, we have a specialized email list, and the week before that special event, I will send them a reminder notice, which seems to be working in our case. We had chicken night, of course, and this is my chicken henny penny, and the event was how to raise backyard chickens, and it was really well received, again a packed room, and the local newspaper loved this photo and we got great newspaper coverage. We had a dog walk, which I was skeptical about, but the dog walk was over the top successful, and you can imagine walking 30 or 35 dogs through your little small town and how much attention it received. We have all sorts of events of all shapes and all flavors and all sizes, and the amazing part is where I first struggled to come up with the ideas. Now people are coming to me with speakers or ideas for workshops and asking me to find speakers, and it's been very, very encouraging and very rewarding for me. Number 10, my final suggestion is to have fun. Always, always be professional, but laughter and a sense of fun are contagious. So I really try to enjoy life along the way. And also I've been doing some short videos, so we had some architect students come, we're in the midst of doing an expansion. So here's our little video with Henny Penny, of course. I won't show it all, it's not very long though, that's the secret. People's attention spans are not very long these days. So without further ado, here's me and Henny Penny. So that's my little video with Henny Penny all the way through the video. And finally, on Valentine's Day this year, here's what I did for Valentine's Day. Again, very brief, it was minus 40 that day, and minus 40 in Canada is minus 40 in America, so you can appreciate how cold it was. So here it is. Nice. That's it, that's my theme song, I try every day to be amazing. So I'll take questions, and again, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak. Great, yes, thank you so much, Kathy. That was very inspiring, a lot of fun events you're doing there. I love the short videos there, of course, at the end. And like you said, yes, short bits of information gets people's attention and they can watch that, yeah. We do have a bunch of questions that came in, all I'm going to send the next few minutes here, trying to grab as many as I can, as we have about, we have lots of questions, lots of people on the line, so we won't be able to get to all of yours, but we'll do the best we can here. So going back to more towards the beginning of your presentation, can you give specific examples of the, you mentioned that 60% of the posts, you're supporting neighborhood posts on Facebook. Yeah. Can you give specific examples of what that is, or what you're talking about for that? Okay, so for example, yeah, in a small town, you have small town events, we have the Maple Syrup Festival in Pwason, we have the Fall Fair, we have a rodeo. For those events, I take the time and I go to those events and I will take still photos, or I'll take a little video.  So you're not promoting the library in the strictest sense, but you're promoting the community within it. And interestingly, my municipality has recognized the library as a team player and as a promoter of our town, so it works both ways. Yeah, go out there and do it and they'll see you doing it. There'll be a little reciprocation there. That's what I'm hoping for. For the events when you do promote, about how far in advance do you promote them? Well, okay, I don't know the answer to that, and I agree that there's some gray areas there. You promote too far in advance, they forget, right? And because we have a built-in system of promoting the month in advance, usually the events are all done by the middle of the month before, so the 15th, and then we start making our monthly posters, and then by the end of the month, we start posting them onto Facebook and around town. So really, I'm working from a month to month schedule. And for the big events, probably a month in advance as well, with increasing publicity as the time gets closer. Right, right, step it up, yeah. How many staff do you have at your library? Okay, we have seven. Okay, we work efficiently, right? And everybody has their expertise, and everybody jumps in and out of different jobs. With a small staff like that, and you have to pretty much do that. And was it easy to get them on board? How did you get them to do a lot of these, you know, the goofy things? Well, mostly I'm the goofy one in the photos, in the videos especially, but it, and because they are more professional than I am, right? I try to be professional, but I'm a professional goof. So I'm not really, I'm very willing to go out on an edge with stuff like that. And I think they have come on board just by the sheer momentum of what's happening in the library, and they feel that pride of their work being much, much more meaningful and more engaging, right? It's much more exciting to be in a happy, dynamic place. Mm-hm, the being proud of it, having ownership of it, it really makes a difference to getting your staff, I think, involved and wanting to promote the library and wanting to be there. Again, I have asked different staff members to do workshops, right? And that's even more, it gives them more of an ownership in the process, too. Oh, sure, absolutely. And the last one I'll pull out of from here, what is your PR budget like? How much did you spend on things like the cards and coffee and the extra things? We don't spend anything on coffee because the coffee is self-supporting, right, which is lovely. And for the most part, my programs are self-supporting, too. I think I know I have a summer budget of $200, and that might be my annual budget. I don't care. My boss has designated a special fund to collect programming monies and programming donations, which is lovely. So for the most part, I'm self-supporting, too. So the community is donating to it, as well? Yes, they see value in it, and we always try to have free, free events, or else have the price so low that it's only covering the supplies. But for example, we started a seniors lunch program with a guest speaker twice a month, Friday at noon. And that program, we got a little bit of a grant from the government, but people have been so generous and liked it so well that we have enough money to continue it for a year, even after our grant has finished. Nice. All right. OK, I think that will wrap it up here. I know we don't want to go too far over. Thank you very much, Kathy. It was great to hear what's going on. And you had asked earlier if we have the similar things in the US as municipalities and areas like that, and I said that, yes, of course we do. But it's not that big a difference from a different country. I mean, Canada, the US, you're doing the same things that I hear libraries doing here and having the same struggles and issues and things going on. I think it's just great to see that. Thank you, Krista. Thank you very much. All right. All right. If you do have any other questions or anything for Kathy, you can sure find our website for the library. Reach out to her for anything else you may want to ask. So that wraps it up for our first session of the day.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting the convergence of file and object, brought to you by Pure Storage. Okay, we're back with the convergence of file and object in a power panel. This is a special content program made possible by Pure Storage and co-created with theCUBE. Now, in this series, what we're doing is we're exploring the coming together of file and object storage, trying to understand the trends that are driving this convergence, the architectural considerations that users should be aware of, and which use cases make the most sense for so-called unified, fast file and object storage. And with me are three great guests to unpack these issues. Garrett Belsner is the data center solutions architect. He's with CDW, Scott Sinclair is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. He's got deep experience on enterprise storage and brings that independent analyst perspective. Matt Burr is back with us. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thank you. Hey, Dave. Hey, Scott, let me start with you and get your perspective on what's going on in the market with object, the cloud, huge amount of unstructured data out there that lives in files. Give us your independent view of the trends that you're seeing out there. Well, Dave, you know, where to start? I mean, surprise, surprise, data's growing. But one of the big things that we've seen is we've been talking about data growth for what, decades now? But what's really fascinating is or changed is because of the digital economy, digital business, digital transformation, whatever you call it, now people are not just storing data, they actually have to use it. And so we see this in trends like analytics and artificial intelligence. And what that does is it's just increasing the demand for not only consolidation of massive amounts of storage that we've seen for a while, but also the demand for incredibly low latency access to that storage. And I think that's one of the things that we're seeing that's driving this need for convergence, as you put it, of having multiple protocols consolidated onto one platform, but also the need for high performance access to that data. Thank you for that, a great setup. I got like, I wrote down three topics that we're going to unpack as a result of that. So Garrett, let me go to you. Maybe you can give us the perspective of what you see with customers. Is this, is this like a push where customers are saying, hey, listen, I need to converge my file and object, or is it more a story where they're saying, Garrett, I have this problem. And then you see unified file and object as a solution. Yeah, I think for us, it's taking that consultative approach with our customers and really kind of hearing paying around some of the pipelines, the way that they're going to market with data today and kind of what are the problems that they're seeing? We're also seeing a lot of the change driven by the software vendors as well. So really being able to support a disaggregated design or you're not having to upgrade and maintain everything as a single block has really been a place where we've seen a lot of customers pivot to where they have more flexibility as they need to maintain larger volumes of data and higher performance data, having the ability to do that separate from compute and cash and most other layers is really critical. So Matt, I wonder if you could follow up on that. So, so Garrett was talking about this disaggregated design. So I like it, distributed cloud, et cetera, but then we're talking about bringing things together in one place, right? So square that circle. How does this fit in with this hyper distributed cloud edge that's getting built out? Yeah, I mean, I could give you the easy answer on that, but I could also pass it back to Garrett in the sense that Garrett, maybe it's important to talk about elastic and Splunk and some of the things that you're seeing in that world and how that, I think the answer to Dave's question, I think you can give a pretty qualified answer relative to what your customers are seeing. Oh, that'd be great, please. Yeah, absolutely, no problem at all. So, you know, I think with Splunk kind of moving from its traditional design and classic design, whatever you want to call it, up into smart store, that was kind of one of the first that we saw kind of make that move towards kind of separating object out. And I think, you know, a lot of that comes from their own move to the cloud and updating their code to basically take advantage of object in the cloud. But we're starting to see, you know, with like Vertica, Eon, for example, Elastic, other folks taking that same type of approach where in the past we were building out many 2U servers, we were jamming them full of SSDs and NVMe drives. That was great, but it doesn't really scale and it kind of gets into that same problem that we see with, you know, hyperconvergence a little bit where it's, you know, you're always adding something, maybe that you didn't want to add. So I think, you know, again, being driven by software is really kind of where we're seeing the world open up there. But that whole idea of just having that as a hub and a central place where you can then leverage that out to other applications, whether that's out to the edge for machine learning or AI applications to take advantage of it, I think that's where that convergence really comes back in. But I think, like Scott mentioned earlier, it's really folks are now doing things with the data where before, I think they were really storing it, trying to figure out what are we gonna actually do with it when we need to do something with it. So this is making it possible. Yeah, Dave, if I could just sort of tack on to the end of Garrett's answer there, you know, in particular with Vertica with Deon Mode, the ability to leverage sharded subclusters give you, you know, sort of an advantage in terms of being able to isolate performance hotspots. An advantage to that is being able to do that on a FlashBlade, for example. So sharded subclusters allow you to sort of say, you know, I am gonna give prioritization to, you know, this particular element of my application and my dataset, but I can still share that data across those, across those subclusters.  They need faster storage. They need, you know, sort of a consolidated data storage dataset. And that's what sort of allows these things to drive forward. Yeah, so Vertica, Deon Mode, for those who don't know, it's the ability to separate compute and storage and scale independently. I think Vertica, if they're not the only one there, one of the only ones, I think they might even be the only one that does that in the cloud and on-prem. And that sort of plays into this distributed, you know, nature of this hyper-distributed cloud, I sometimes call it. And I'm interested in the data pipeline. And I wonder, Scott, if we could talk a little bit about that, maybe where unified object and file, I mean, I'm envisioning this distributed mesh and then UFFO is sort of a node on that that I can tap when I need it. But Scott, what are you seeing as a state of infrastructure as it relates to the data pipeline and the trends there? Yeah, absolutely Dave. So when I think data pipeline, I immediately gravitate to analytics or machine learning initiatives, right? And so one of the big things we see, and this is, it's an interesting trend. It seems, you know, we continue to see increased investment in AI, increased interest and people think, and as companies get started, they think, okay, well, what does that mean? Well, I got to go hire a data scientist. Okay, well, that data scientist probably needs some infrastructure. And what often happens in these environments is where it ends up being a bespoke environment or a one-off environment. And then over time, organizations run into challenges. And one of the big challenges is the data science team or people whose jobs are outside of IT spend way too much time trying to get the infrastructure to keep up with their demands and predominantly around data performance. So one of the ways organizations that especially have artificial intelligence workloads in production, and we found this in our research, have started mitigating that is by deploying flash all across the data pipeline. We have data on this, sorry to interrupt, but Pat, if you could bring up that chart, that would be great. So take us through this, Scott, and share with us what we're looking at here. Yeah, absolutely. So Dave, I'm glad you brought this up. So we did this study, I want to say late last year. One of the things we looked at was across artificial intelligence environments. Now, one thing that you're not seeing on this slide is we went through and we asked all around the data pipeline and we saw a flash everywhere. But I thought this was really telling because this is around data lakes. And when many people think about the idea of a data lake, they think about it as a repository, it's a place where you keep maybe cold data. And what we see here is, especially within production environments, a pervasive use of flash storage. So I think that 69% of organizations are saying their data lake is mostly flash or all flash. And I think we have 0% that don't have any flash in that environment. So organizations are finding out that flash is an essential technology to allow them to harness the value of their data. So, Garrett and then Matt, I wonder if you could chime in as well. We talk about digital transformation and I sometimes call it the COVID forced march to digital transformation. And I'm curious as to your perspective on things like machine learning and the adoption and Scott, you may have a perspective on this as well.  What happened to injecting AI into my applications and machine learning to that go in the back burner? Was that accelerated along with the need to digitally transform? Garrett, I wonder if you could share with us what you saw with customers last year. Yeah, I mean, I think we definitely saw an acceleration. I think folks are in my market are still kind of figuring out how they inject that into more of a widely distributed business use case. But again, this data hub and allowing folks to now take advantage of this data that they've had in these data lakes for a long time. I agree with Scott. I mean, many of the data lakes that we have were somewhat flash accelerated, but they were typically really made up of, you know, large capacity, slower spinning, nearline drives, accelerated with some flash. But I'm really starting to see folks now look at some of those older Hadoop implementations and really leveraging new ways to look at how they consume data. And many of those redesigned customers come into us wanting to look at all flash solutions. So we're definitely seeing it. We're seeing an acceleration towards folks trying to figure out how to actually use it in more of a business sense now, or before I feel it goes a little bit more skunk works kind of people dealing with, you know, in a much smaller situation, maybe in the executive offices trying to do some testing and things. Scott, you're nodding away. Anything you can add in here? Yeah, so first off, it's great to get that confirmation that the stuff we're seeing in our research, Garrett seeing, you know, out in the field and in the real world. But, you know, as it relates to really the past year, it's been really fascinating. So one of the things we study at ESG is IT buying intentions. What are things, what are initiatives that companies plan to invest in? And at the beginning of 2020, we saw a heavy interest in machine learning initiatives. Then you transitioned to the middle of 2020 in the midst of COVID. Some organizations continued on that path, but a lot of them had to pivot, right? How do we get laptops to everyone? How do we continue business in this new world? Well, now as we enter into 2021, and hopefully we're coming out of this, you know, the pandemic era, we're getting into a world where organizations are pivoting back towards these strategic investments around how do I maximize the usage of data? And actually accelerating those because they've seen the importance of digital business initiatives over the past year. Yeah, Matt, I mean, when we exited 2019, we saw a narrowing of experimentation and our premise was, you know, that organizations are going to start now operationalizing all their digital transformation experiments.  So what are you seeing in this regard? 10 month Petri dish is an interesting way to describe it. You know, we saw another, there's another candidate for pivoting there around ransomware as well, right? You know, security entered into the mix, which took people's attention away from some of this as well. I mean, look, I'd like to bring this up just a level or two because what we're actually talking about here is progress, right? And progress is an inevitability, you know, whether it's, whether you believe that it's by 2025 or you think it's 2035 or 2050, it doesn't matter. We're on a forced march to the eradication of disk. And that is happening in many ways, you know, in many ways due to some of the things that Garrett was referring to and what Scott was referring to in terms of what our customers demands for how they're going to actually leverage data that they have. And that brings me to kind of my final point on this, which is we see customers in three phases. There's the first phase where they say, hey, I have this large data store and I know there's value in there. I don't know how to get to it. Or I have this large data store and I've started a project to get value out of it and we failed. Those could be customers that, you know, marched down the Hadoop path early on and they got some value out of it, but they realized that HDFS wasn't gonna be a modern protocol going forward for any number of reasons. You know, the first being, hey, if I have gold dot master, how do I know that I have gold dot four is consistent with my gold dot master? So data consistency matters. And then you have the sort of third group that says, I have these large data sets. I know how to extract value from them and I'm already on to the verticals, the elastics, you know, the splunks, et cetera. I think those folks are the folks that that ladder group are the folks that kept their projects going because they were already extracting value from them. The first two groups we're seeing sort of saying the second half of this year is when we're gonna begin really being picking up on these types of initiatives again. Well, thank you, Matt, by the way, for hitting the escape key. I think value from data really is what this is all about. And there are some real blockers there that I kind of want to talk about. You mentioned HDFS, I mean, we were very excited, of course, in the early days of a dupe, many of the concepts were profound. But at the end of the day, it was too complicated. We've got these hyper-specialized roles that are serving the business, but it still takes too long. It's too hard to get value from data. And one of the blockers is infrastructure. That the complexity of that infrastructure really needs to be abstracted. Take an upper level. We're starting to see this in cloud where you're seeing some of those abstraction layers being built from some of the cloud vendors. But more importantly, a lot of the vendors, like Pew, are saying, hey, we can do that heavy lifting for you. And we have expertise in engineering to do cloud native. So I'm wondering what you guys see, maybe Garrett, you could start us off and others to, I mean, as some of the blockers to getting value from data, and how we're going to address those in the coming decade. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it we're solving here, obviously, with Pew bringing Flash to a market that traditionally was utilizing much slower media. The other thing that I see that's very nice with FlashBlade, for example, is the ability to kind of do things, once you get it set up, a blade at a time. I mean, a lot of the things that we see from just kind of more of a simplistic approach to this, like a lot of these teams don't have big budgets and being able to kind of break them down into almost a blade type chunk, I think has really kind of allowed folks to get more projects and things off the ground because they don't have to buy a full expensive system to run these projects. So that's helped a lot. I think the wider use cases have helped a lot. So Matt mentioned ransomware, using Safe Mode as a place to help with ransomware has been a really big growth spot for us. We've got a lot of customers very interested and excited about that. And the other thing that I would say is bringing DevOps into data is another thing that we're seeing. So kind of that push towards data ops and really kind of using automation and infrastructure as code is a way to now kind of drive things through the system. The way that we've seen with automation through DevOps is really an area we're seeing a ton of growth with from a services perspective. Hey guys, any other thoughts on that? I mean, I'll tee it up there. We are seeing some bleeding edge which is somewhat counterintuitive, especially from a cost standpoint, organizational changes at some companies. Think of some of the internet companies that do music for instance and adding podcasts, et cetera. And those are different data products. We're seeing them actually reorganize their data architectures to make them more distributed and actually put the domain heads, the business heads in charge of the data and the data pipeline. And that is maybe less efficient but it's again, some of these bleeding edge. What else are you guys seeing out there that might be some harbinger of the next decade? I'll go first. I think specific to the construct that you threw out, Dave, one of the things that we're seeing is the application owner, maybe it's the DevOps person but maybe it's the application owner through the DevOps person, they're becoming more technical in their understanding of how infrastructure interfaces with their application. I think what we're seeing on the FlashBlade side is we're having a lot more conversations with application people than just IT people. It doesn't mean that the IT people aren't there. The IT people are still there, for sure they have to deliver the service, et cetera. But the days of IT building up a catalog of services and a business owner subscribing to one of those services picking whatever sort of fits their need, I don't think that construct, I think that's the construct that changes going forward. The application owner is becoming much more prescriptive about what they want the infrastructure to fit, how they want the infrastructure to fit into their application. And that's a big change. And for certainly folks like Garrett and CDW, they do a good job with this, being able to sort of get to the application owner and bring those two sides together is a tremendous amount of value there. For us it's been a little bit of a retooling. We've traditionally sold to the IT side of the house and we've had to teach ourselves how to go talk the language of applications. So I think you pointed out a good construct there and that application owner playing a much bigger role in what they're expecting from the performance of IT infrastructure, I think is a key change. Interesting, I mean that definitely is a trend that's put you guys closer to the business where the infrastructure team is serving the business as opposed to sometimes I talk to data experts and they're frustrated, especially data owners or data product builders who are frustrated that they feel like they have to beg the data pipeline team to get new data sources or get data out. How about the edge? Maybe Scott, you can kick us off. I mean, we're seeing the emergence of edge use cases, AI inferencing at the edge, a lot of data at the edge. What are you seeing there and how does this unified object? I'll bring us back to that in file fit. Wow, Dave, how much time do we have? Two minutes.  You got it. I'll figure it out, right? How much time do you have now? At the end of the day, and that's a great question, right, is if you take a step back and I think it comes back to Dave something you mentioned, it's about extracting value from data and what that means is when you extract value from data, what it does is, as Matt pointed out, the influencers or the users of data, the application owners, they have more power because they're driving revenue now.  It is, no, I have to adapt. I have to follow what my application owners mean. Now, when you bring that back to the edge, what it means is that data is not localized to the data center. I mean, we just went through a nearly 12 month period where the entire workforce for most of the companies in this country had went distributed and business continued. So if business is distributed, data is distributed and that means in the data center, that means at the edge, that means at the cloud and that means in all other places, in tons of places. And what it also means is you have to be able to extract and utilize data anywhere it may be. And I think that's something that we're gonna continue to see. And I think it comes back to, you know, if you think about key characteristics, we've talked about things like performance and scale for years, but we need to start rethinking it because on one hand, we need to get performance everywhere. But also in terms of scale, and this ties back to some of the other initiatives and getting value from data, it's something I call the massive success problem. One of the things we see, especially with workloads like machine learning is businesses find success with them. And as soon as they do, they say, well, I need about 20 of these projects now. Well, all of a sudden that overburdens IT organizations, especially across core and edge and cloud environments. And so when you look at environments, ability to meet performance and scale demands wherever it needs to be is something that's really important. You know, so Dave, I'd like to just sort of tie together sort of two things that I think that I heard from Scott and Garrett that I think are important and it's around this concept of scale. You know, some of us are old enough to remember the day when kind of a 10 terabyte blast radius was too big of a blast radius for people to take on or a terabyte of storage was considered to be, you know, an exemplary budget environment, right? Now we sort of think as terabytes kind of like we used to think of as gigabytes in some ways like you don't have to explain to anybody what a petabyte is anymore and you know, what's on the horizon and it's not far are our exabyte type dataset workloads. And you start to think about what could be in that exabyte of data. We've talked about how you extract that value. We've talked about sort of how you start but if the scale is big, not everybody's gonna start at a petabyte or an exabyte to Garrett's point. The ability to start small and grow into these products or excuse me, these projects, I think is a really fundamental concept here because you're not gonna just go by five, I'm gonna go kick off a five petabyte project. Whether you do that on disk or flash it's gonna be expensive, right? But if you could start at a couple hundred terabytes, not just as a proof of concept but as something that you know, you could get predictable value out of that then you could say, hey, this either scales linearly or non-linearly in a way that I can then go map my investments to how I can go dig deeper into this. That's how all of these things are gonna, that's how these successful projects are gonna start because the people that are starting with these very large, sort of expansive greenfield projects at multi-petabyte scale, it's gonna be hard to realize near-term value. Excellent, we got a wrap but Garrett, I wonder if you could close, when you look forward, you talk to customers, do you see this unification of file and object? Is this an evolutionary trend? Is it something that is gonna be a lever that customers use? How do you see it evolving over the next two, three years and beyond? Yeah, I mean, I think from our perspective, I mean, just from what we're seeing from the numbers within the market, the amount of growth that's happening with unstructured data is really just starting to finally really kind of hit this data deluge or whatever you want to call it that we've been talking about for so many years, it really does seem to now be becoming true. As we start to see things scale out really folks settle into, okay, I'm gonna use the cloud to start and maybe train my models, but now I'm gonna get it back on-prem because of latency or security or whatever the decision points are there. This is something that is not gonna slow down and I think folks like Pure having the ability to have the tools that they give us to use and bring to market with our customers are really key and critical for us. So I see it as a huge growth area and a big focus for us moving forward. Guys, great job unpacking a topic that you know it's covered a little bit but I think we covered some ground that is new and so thank you so much for those insights and that data, really appreciate your time. Thanks, Dave. Thanks. Yeah, thanks Dave. Okay, and thank you for watching the convergence of file and object. Keep it right there, right back after this short break.