Welcome to this DCDC session on the design and build for access to collections for teaching and research. As I've already stated a couple of times, my name is Daryl Green. I'm the head of Special Collections at the University of Edinburgh and co-convener of RLUK Special Collections Leader Network. This is my first DCDC and it's been lovely to see where people are tuned in from using the chat window. I am calling in from my home in East Fife and just to caveat, I've got a four-year-old in the room. So we're all dealing with the dangers of virtual. Just a reminder throughout the session, so we've got both the chat window and the Q&A function operational. If you could put questions into the Q&A, that helps me collate and keep track of questions proper. If they do go into the chat window, it's absolutely fine. We've got a couple of moderators who will make sure that questions will move across, but there are two buttons down at the bottom of your screen. Also, if you're joining in from the DCDC platform, this is just a reminder that things will work better and sound better and look better if you leave the platform and join directly via the Zoom link that's provided to you through the program. Okay, so it's my job to introduce the session today. Myself and my co-convener, Joanne Fitten, will be co-hosting the session today. Which will take us from overview to case studies to surveys and our favorite, a little bit of audience participation. We'll have two moments for Q&A. One's just following on from the case studies that we have here in the beginning of the session. And another moment as we wrap up the session, getting on towards one o'clock. And after we've heard more about some of the survey and work that our UK has been doing in this space. So to set the scene, we've heard a great deal at DCDC this year about the pivot of our services, our spaces, and perhaps the most important thing, the kinetic nature of our work to a fully virtual and now hybrid space. So much of our work as cultural heritage professionals is about being in a space with our collections and with people connecting our crowds or individual readers to our collections. Some of the core pillars of our work were hobbled or completely knocked over during successive lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, the reading room, the teaching space, the exhibition gallery, the lecture theater. All of these spaces needed to be reimagined, reinterpreted. And we had to bring along our staff, our administrators, and most importantly, our audiences along with us in a journey of technological experimentation and adaptation. Cultural heritage services of all sizes have been grappling with the same problem this past year. How can we employ technology at all scales to reopen and reimagine access to our collections? How far beyond pandemics and lockdown will some of this technology be useful? Are we at a critical pivot point in how we deliver some of our services? All of these questions have been put into the panic blender this year, along with a healthy dose of budget cuts, hiring freezes, research grants, belt tightening in the arts and humanities and so on. Some services, including my home turf, have been able to employ small or medium scale technological solutions to bring the collections to a virtual classroom. As you can see here using ceiling mounted visualizers and virtual learning environments. Other services have employed desktop cameras, webcams, even old iPhones and other devices to provide access to researchers stranded at home or even a continent away. The virtualizing of the reading room is another area that we will be exploring today. So as to not steal any thunder from our case studies, I'd like to introduce our first group from the University of Bristol. Joe Ellsworth, Lucy Powell and Julian Warren who are going to live demo some of the small, medium and large scale setups they've implemented at the University's fantastic theatre collection. Joe, over to you. Thank you, Darrell. So Julian is going to share slides. Thank you. So in this demonstration session, we hope to give you an idea of how we have begun to use simple technologies to enhance offsite, online, real time access to collections produced in the theatre collection reading room. We are a small team and the solutions we have found require no specific technical expertise to operate. They are quite affordable too. Our session will include two demonstration sessions, a quick fix approach and our virtual reading room facility. Before we move to the demonstration sessions, I'd like to give you a little bit of background. Prior to the pandemic, researchers from within and beyond our own institution primarily engaged with our collections through the reading room. And we supported teaching frequently with object based learning sessions also in the reading room. Everything changed in March 2020 when the university suddenly transitioned online. And so did we. Next slide please. Here is the AverVision U50 document camera, aka portable visualizer, which runs directly off our laptops. This is a cheap solution as they cost less than £200 each. When we got them, we thought we would be using them to facilitate teaching sessions, which we have done, but we are increasingly finding other uses. They have become particularly useful tools for real-time sessions with researchers triaging material to help them plan future in-person visits, as well as to select material to scan when they cannot visit. In terms of handling inquiries about collections, we are finding that a one-to-one visualizer session is much more time effective than a prolonged email conversation. And as researchers can quickly identify items of relevance, it makes for a much more focused request for the supply of scanned images or even capturing them on the fly during the session. The portability and the grab-and-go nature of this visualizer lends itself to informal pop-up responses. And whilst we purchase them to support our service in terms of teaching and research, we also think they play a role in collections management. We are likely to become the go-to solution to allow staff working on-site to have real-time access to collections held in our off-site stores. Using them will also save unnecessary transportation materials between sites, reduce risk of damage, and enable other staff who might be working remotely, whether in the office or at home, to see and interrogate the collections. So now hand over to Julian, who's sat up in our little reading room, who will demonstrate to you. Hello. So this is the AbbaVision visualizer. I'm sat by just saw that last slide that Joe showed. And I started using this small visualizer last summer as I worked with a lecturer in the University Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and a lecturer of talk master's module in the autumn. One of the collections we used for the module is Source Materials, the Medieval Players Archive, some of which you can see on screen now. They're a touring company that's specialised in travelling light to bring plays from medieval and Shakespearean periods to non-traditional venues and outdoor spaces. And the visualizer was a great way of introducing the students to a large amount of material within the collection quickly and easily. It was a similar way to how we would usually have done in our pre-COVID in-person teaching sessions without the need for prior scanning or digitisation. It enabled us to be immediately responsive, reactive and in the moment with students and academic teaching staff during the teaching sessions in a much more dynamic and hands-on way than you can be using digitised still images. The visualizer works a little bit like a kind of digital version of the old overhead projectors. So it's hands-free and you can flip documents over. We can zoom in on details. So we can zoom in here. This text is really, really small on the original print. And then you can highlight things. You can draw attention to bits. Highlighter. So this is for the mankind play that was part of their 1985 tour featuring the devil Titovillus. You can also take a snapshot and capture the image kind of straight away, which we found really useful. So that was a way in which we could quickly take pictures and then these could get uploaded to Blackboard or Padlet or Mural or whatever other online system was being used to support the module so that the students could return to them again for future reference. The software also allowed you to record the session, but we didn't use that as the recordings for the sessions we normally made on Microsoft's teams. And the software itself, it came with that mark. The software itself was came on a CD in the old fashioned way, not a problem for us archivists with our versions of disposing of obsolete hardware. And once we'd found the DVD player and uploaded it, the software to the laptop is incredibly intuitive and straightforward to use.  We also found the camera delivered a surprisingly good quality image. So here we have, this is Titovillus in action. It comes with a light. I'll just turn that off and it sort of gets rid of the reflection. I was just really set the zoom. And just being able to show items like this, being able to move them around, turn them over, it really felt like you were able to give the students an experience that felt closer to the materiality of the item than the person with that sort of stillness that you get with a JPEG file. The only restriction really is the camera itself sits about 40 centimeters or so off the top of the desk. So anything much bigger than A4 is quite difficult to kind of get under it. But we used the, I used to visualize a regender in the second semester with Art History MA students who were taking an exhibition module in curating. And again, it allowed us to introduce collections quickly and efficiently and taking the snapshots that were then uploaded to another app mural we used. And the students could then use that material to develop their curatorial ideas and select items for exhibition. It's also seen quite a bit of action from other colleagues who've been using it to show to researchers who've been unable to visit us in person. And the second visualizer as well, we're also using in our offsite store, as Joe mentioned, between colleagues. So we're able to share collections using it, which really reduced the need for us to take items back to the main campus. So that's a very quick demonstration, and I'm going to hand you back to Joe and my colleague Lucy who can tell you more about recent developments. Thank you, Julian. We can go to the next slide. Thank you. So in December, we were awarded AHRC Capco funding to improve our digital infrastructure in both the theatre collection and the university's special collections, and to digitally enable both of our reading rooms. The idea was was that the rooms would be equipped so that they could work in an onsite blended or online environment, allowing us to share our physical, digital and digitized and born digital collection in person and online in real time. Each setup for the reading rooms cost about £13,000. Whilst we initially envisaged the kit being used to help us mitigate against the effects of the pandemic, we are now realising it does have a long term future in terms of the climate emergency, reducing carbon footprints generated by international and national research trips. Lucy is in the reading room now, and she will show you the kit in action. Thank you, Joe. In preparation for a funding application earlier this year, we needed to gather evidence of an archive collections value to contemporary research. In pandemic free times, workshops would have been held at the theatre collection, where potential researchers could view a selection of material providing inspiration for new avenues of research and opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion. Although in person sessions weren't possible, as a result of the funding Joe's just outlined, we did have options. And using these are workshops with academics, practitioners and creatives went online via teams. I'm just showing you here the Lumens PS752 document camera, which was in the Joe's last slide. I found it very easy to use. It just plugs in by USB into a laptop or PC. It's great for displaying quite a variety of material. And I think you can see it's got a really good zoom, really good quality. And again, you get an idea of the physicality of the material. It's also great for photographs. And again, as with the one Julian was using, you can turn off the lights if necessary. It also, because it has a bed to it, unlike the visualiser Julian was showing, it's possible to change the lamp to backlight material. And so it's useful for things like negatives as well. They can get really good to zoom in on it. We also used it for showing objects. This is a more unusual item from our collections. It's a brick on wheels that was created to charm the housing, the arts committee of the arts council into providing funding to a peripatetic theatre company for a van, which they wanted. This fund was normally just for bricks and mortar projects, but they were saying they wanted theatre that moved. Oh, and Joe's keynote I point out quite rightly that the use of financial times is not an example of our standard storage, but it does recreate how the brick was originally delivered to the arts council. The visualiser does have its limits. I show you this poster. You'll see we're beginning to get in terms of size to the limit of what it's able to cope with. So this is an A3 poster, which I have to sort of display in two halves, the top half. And then the bottom half. But because we also had the cameras embedded in the reading room for larger material, I was able to deploy that. So this is our ceiling camera in the reading room, and I've put out a selection of more outsize material. And I'm still sitting at my desk, but I can zoom in on material from here and I can move the camera around. This is an artist book which was created to record the creation of a new building at headquarters of the theatre company. And you can see on the left hand page, that's this actual book. These are the pages of that book being laid out before being collated. It's also great for larger items like posters. And again, you can zoom in and get some really good detail. In numbers of participants, the sessions that we held were incredibly successful. We advertised nine at 45 minute workshops, which were attended by over 40 people, including international participants. The most at any one session was seven, and I would have said that was getting to the upper limit in terms of the quality of the experience and feedback that we obtained. We were pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of the sessions, and the enthusiasm shown by participants for the archive reassured us that they had provided researchers with meaningful engagement with the collection. Thank you. Thank you, Lucy. So, some concluding thoughts from our experience to date. Ultimately, the use of the visualisers increases the flexibility and level of the service we can provide, regardless of whether we are operating within COVID restrictions or not. When in-person visits are not possible, for whatever reason, the virtual reading room captures something of the materiality of the collection and enables a real-time, two-way conversation between the collections and our users. And whilst it is no substitute for in-person engagement with collections, it does seem to allow for a different type of conversation, something which is exploratory and certainly very active and where, at least to some extent, the materiality of the collection still remains evident. Thank you, and thank you, Julian and Lucy, for joining me. That was wonderful. Thank you very much to the Bristol team, to Joe, Julian and Lucy. It was great to see the scalability of technology and its use in different environments. And we'll come back to the three of you in our Q&A session. Next, I'd like to introduce Siobhan Konri, Assistant Director for Collections and Keeper of the Hunterian Books and Manuscripts from the University of Glasgow, where those attending DC-DC all of this week will have already had a brief look under the hood of some of the exciting things that are going on there. So Siobhan, over to you. Thank you. Can I just check that you can see everything okay? I'm seeing the back end. Yep, that all looks great. We can hear you just fine. Okay, well, thank you for inviting me to speak today. It's good to join DC-DC, as ever. I see some familiar names pop up on the chat. And obviously, welcome to new members of the conference. So like Bristol, Glasgow has developed its virtual rename service, but this case study is going to be looking more at collections-based teaching in Glasgow and our response during the past year or so. So curiosity and discovery are at the heart of everything that we do with our collections at Glasgow. They form a vital part of our research infrastructure. And collections-based teaching is a major service that features very strongly in terms of our academic engagement portfolio. And we deliver in normal times, teaching across a range of undergraduate, postgraduate programmes, principally in the colleges of arts and social sciences. And many of these sessions and associated work form an integral part of that close work and some of these are core assessed works. So when the long-term impact of COVID on teaching on campus became a part last spring, the team turned their thoughts and their considerable imagination to how we could continue to support collections-based teaching. Result was a redesign programme delivered over a month. It was a programme that was based on collaboration and co-creation, involving not only our team of librarians, archivists, conservators and support staff, but also an amazing group of academic partners who are willing to pivot their teaching and work with us on the design. And we benefited hugely from the expertise of our team of learning technologists whose advice early on was critical in scaling up the ambition of what we could deliver. Initially, the team's thought was a local kind of overhead sort of viewing camera, but our colleagues in IT who had worked with setting up anatomy lab and infrastructure brought their skills and expertise there to get us to think about doing something slightly grander. So what does our virtual classroom actually look like? Well, we deliver primary source handling sessions. This is delivered via a ceiling-mounted document camera. For those who want to know it, it's a Wulff Vision I-14. That's what I checked my notes. These sessions are streamed live via Zoom or other video-conferencing software, and they can be recorded in advance for asynchronous viewing. The sessions can be recorded as seen for viewing later. That's access via Moodle, which is our virtual learning environment. And with closed caption subtitles and transcript using ECHO 360 software. So it was important that we thought from the beginning about accessibility issues and building that into design. So the camera allows, a powerful camera set allows students to peer over the shoulder of the handler as they leaf through items and enjoy their class. On the screen there is a very happy academic. So in total we delivered past academic year 39 classroom sessions. Most of these were conducted live at the class time, with only six or so pre-recorded. And the headcount of those attending those sessions by our students was around 1,200 student engagements. We taught across all manner of courses from information studies through to history of art, English language, school of modern languages, courses, history. But we also supported a collection-based teaching in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Archaeology and Heritage. We also contributed our 40 pre-recorded films, which were embedded in courses and available on Edge Share, which is our teaching and learning repository. So some immediate takeaways or observations on the reach and potential of collection-based teaching using the visualizer. As I said, the earlier the ceiling hung camera provides an over-the-shoulder, almost vicarious, handling experience. We've all seen the ability to zoom into high-resolution permits through the detailed examination of materials and materiality. For us, it also was a powerful and equitable viewing experience for all participants and delivered against universities' accessible and inclusive learning policy goals. And probably most powerfully, this collection-based teaching meant that we were reaching students at levels we previously had reached. So previously we'd be at level four in Scotland, the fourth final year of the university study, or postgraduate. The main student users were up with their collections. But in the past year, we've reached the levels, entry levels, levels one, two, three, four, and five, with classes of sometimes up to 200 at a time. So we're really expanding the collections beyond traditional PGT and PGR audiences. And gathering qualitative feedback. We've talked about the quantity there. Let's think about the quality from both staff and the students. And that's been absolutely critical to us as we've evolved and continue to evolve and adapt the service. Some of you may have caught earlier in the week, my fantastic colleague Joanna Green from Information Studies at the University of Glasgow, and colleague Bob and Clay in presenting on their experience of delivering the classes themselves. Joanna's been an extremely powerful advocate and an extremely innovative user of the technology to advance her classes during this period. And her feedback, her contribution from the beginning, and her continued feedback where her students have been invaluable. I'm not going to read the whole quote there, but maybe just focusing in on about something that I think is important to come through in discussion about how this is revolutionized, how we can teach with collections of the difference, not just a substitute. It's actually revolutionized in the categories. So as you see, this is more than just the delivery with some high-res images over soon. I think where we've got real potential is where staff have really explored the software and have kind of exploited that and built some engaging exercises into their classes. So this is a screenshot here of some live poem from a class which was exploring the codecology of one of our medieval manuscripts. And another audience that we're consulting with and trying to get input in is from our early career scholars. We need to understand what their needs are in working in a virtual environment. And of course these are the often people who are carrying out some teaching with the collections as early career scholars. So this is a padlet from a recent workshop where we're engaging, getting their feedback. And again, that will feed into our future development. And that was actually working with the HRC Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. And one of their PhD candidates, Chris Fields, along with another couple of PhD students, we commissioned to do some films so to go and play with the visualizer and to feedback on their experience. And I should emphasize those blue lines you see on the screen are not the original. This was a screenshot from the film and it's making use of the software. But one of his observations struck me quite strongly and Chris doesn't mind me quoting from it directly. He said, the visualizer technology offers new approaches to handling examiné documents with a newfound focus on physicality, materiality, and the experiential phenomenon of the archive. So again, I think there's something new here, not just a substitute. And more recently, as we reconsider how blended and experienced we're all going to have next year, whether by design or because of further outbreak or other sort of situations erupting, the team have been modelling some hybrid classes here. So half the class was in the room, the other half was coming online. And we see this as something that is going to be more and more a feature of our teaching offerings. And of course it has huge potential to be used in some wider engagement activities. For example, this here is the virtual launch of our 15th century printed books catalogue, which had over 120 guests come and join us for a virtual toast just in the last month. We've delivered a seminar on the 15th century booking manuscripts for EMARC, which had an international audience of over 100. So I think there's huge potential for us to use this technology to broaden out our audience. Just a few concluding thoughts then from our experience in class when using this technology in collections-based teaching, the plan is obviously for continued remote delivery of teaching in whatever blended or hybrid environment it is. I think the potential of this technology is too great to shelve. We should be able to return to our pre-coded normal world. Experimenting with hybrid classes is going to raise new challenges for equity, delivering a kind of equity of experience and engaging learning. Another thing that I think struck us is that there is a bit of a skills gap or a skills hesitancy. And so I think both by perhaps not so much our teams, but maybe academic colleagues who have not really got kind of conceived of how we can build this kind of technology into their teaching. So I think there's something there to take forward. There's potential around more joined up teaching. I think we'll definitely want to that in the discussion around what a research infrastructure at scale might look like either within institutions or museums that form part of your university or with wider communities of collections. But I think at its heart, my key takeaway from this is the importance of cooperation and co-design involving all the participants from the shelver, the conservator, the archivist, the librarian, the academic and our IT colleagues to make this a service that evolves strongly into the future. And that's great. Thank you very much. OK. Thank you very much, Siobhan. That was great. And as an attendee of the Inconabula event, I'd say that the visualizers worked really well for that kind of engagement activity. So thanks very much. We'll come back to you in just a few minutes after we hear from our final case study. So our final case study comes virtually from the gorgeous John Ryland's Library at the University of Manchester. John Hodgson, the Associate Director of Curatorial Practices is going to talk us through how they've established a virtual reading room service. John, over to you. Thank you. Thanks very much, Daryl. Hopefully you can hear me. Hello, everyone. This is going to be a very brief introduction to virtual reading rooms at the University of Manchester Library with a particular focus on the researcher's perspective. I'm less emphasis on the technology because that's already been well covered. So very quick intro. We set up our virtual reading room just 12 months ago. In fact, I think we were one of the first UK libraries and archives to establish a virtual reading room. The equipment is fairly standard. So we're using Wolf Vision desktop visualizers. We're a grade one listed building. So saving mounted visualizers are the boat. And we've heard from Bristol about some of the recommendations of desktop visualizers. We deliver the virtual reading room service by Microsoft teams for Manchester users and Zoom for external users. We wanted to keep the technology as simple as possible for remote users as well as our own staff. To start with, we operated with two members of staff. Now, generally speaking, it's one for efficiency reasons. So we're delivering four one-hour sessions per day. So far, we've delivered 175 visualizer sessions. And that compares with 225 onsite visits during the last 12 months, which is a tiny fraction obviously of our normal usage. So who's using the service? We've done some analysis. Approximately 45% of users are from the University of Manchester. I think the relatively low usage by academics probably reflects the fact that they've been pulled in so many different directions this last year. But doing new research has not been a top priority for many of them. Likewise for the other HEIs, preponderance of students over academic users. And then just over 15% are members of the public or unspecified. Normally in normal circumstances, we would have a higher proportion of public users. We've done some analysis of the geographical distribution of the users. This maps very similarly onto our recent trends. So preponderance of folk from Europe and North America. What's interesting, I think, is some of the outliers, so to speak, so people from Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, who arguably even in normal circumstances would find it challenging to visit Manchester in person. Within the British Isles, obviously a very wide geographical spread of users, as you might expect of users this spring. 86% said that the virtual reading room service was extremely useful, 14% very useful. 90% of people are extremely likely to use the service again. When asked whether they had a preference between a future digital appointment or visiting on site, interestingly it was over two to one in favour of digital appointments. We can return to some of the implications of this later during the discussion. The benefits of the service are fairly obvious, providing access to material that would otherwise have been inaccessible during the pandemic. For researchers, it takes away the time and expense involved in travel to the library. It works best, obviously, for small quantities of well-catalog material, items that the researcher can identify easily in advance of a session, less good for trawling through large quantities of on-catalog archives, for example, fishing expeditions. From a student's perspective, it's a relatively benign way of introducing them to researching primary source material, and they can fit it in around their busy social and pedagogical lives. We've also found that it's used a great deal by researchers as a preliminary to making an on-site visit, particularly since the relaxation of lockdown earlier this year. We've had a comment that the high-res visualisers that we are using can actually see better than the naked eye. That's another unexpected benefit. Looking forward, we think there's potential for people being able to compare material in different institutions through a visualisation session, through live streaming, perhaps sitting in the Rylons and doing a live stream from Glasgow, for example, or Bristol. And something I'm going to return to is how this service changes the status of reader services staff, turns them into research assistants. Obviously, there are drawbacks, comments that we've received are that researchers can feel a little awkward, particularly at the beginning, about directing library staff. As I say, it's quite difficult to trawl through large quantities of material online. It's quite hard also to replicate the materiality and aura of the original object, however good the digital images might be. The desktop visualisers, as we heard from colleagues at Bristol, aren't suitable for large items such as maps and posters. We have recently invested in some ceiling-mounted visualisers at the main library in our map room to address that issue. Clearly, if material is being requested repeatedly through the virtual reading room service, it will be better to digitise it once and for all. And we have had a few suggestions about how to make the process slightly easier through an online booking form, doing pre-flight checks to iron out any technical issues before the session starts. I've done a couple of interviews recently with a researcher and an MPL student to get their take on the service. Dr Emily Price is a visiting research fellow at the John Wines Research Institute and Library. She's based in Michigan and, in fact, her entire research project has been conducted remotely through visualisers' sessions. I hope you can hear her. Yeah, I think the virtual reading room experience does change the interactions between the researcher and the staff in that it becomes a much more intimate process, which is, as I say, a little bit awkward at first. But then, and also I can anticipate that when I was looking at the broadsheets, they're quite large and so that involved a lot of manoeuvring, but that worked out pretty well. I do anticipate that when I'm looking at the next collection I want to look at, which is private letters, which are, of course, going to be handwritten and not printed, I can see how that might be a little trickier because I'm going to want to pause more and sit there and read while the staff member just holds still. And I can anticipate me finding that a little awkward to ask another human being to stand perfectly still while I read something because, you know, but whereas traditionally I would take the letters with me, I'd be at a desk by myself, I'd be on my own time schedule, I'd be able to flip back to something that I didn't quite catch. So I can anticipate when it's something that requires a little bit of a closer read and a deciphering of handwriting, that might be a little more awkward. But at the same time, I think all of that is in my own head. I don't actually think the staff member minds holding on. So what I anticipate will happen is that this will be, again, a little bit awkward at first, and then I will just get caught up in what I'm reading. And yeah, in a way, you know what was kind of nice is when I was looking at these broadsheets, I found a couple of things that were surprising and I was able to express my surprise out loud and have the researcher be like, I know, isn't that interesting? So the staff member, so I think actually that was kind of neat. It's a different way of looking at these objects because you're looking at that in tandem with another human person. But it's a way that I can see being rewarding in its own way. No, the slip she referred to our colleague as a researcher. And then Harriet Aspin is an MPhil student at Cambridge studying Lee Wan Chia. She undertook a number of virtual reading room sessions over the winter, prior to visiting the library in person. I did feel relieved to come visit the library in person, particularly when it opened because I knew that all of these boxes of photographs and slides, which would really add in terms of being a history of art degree, I would like as much visual reference as possible. And there are all of these photographs that haven't been published and it was really helpful for me to actually see those to kind of understand what the space was like. There were occasionally some photographs of the kind of exhibition installation process. So all of those things were actually really useful in terms of framing my dissertation slightly differently. It felt more kind of comprehensive in terms of getting a sense of how the museum operated. And also, I mean, Lee built this museum himself and there are all these photos of him laboring. There are videos of him laboring. You can see all of those things in person. I think it was really helpful. So I did feel the need to come and visit. So I think this raises a number of interesting issues around the relationship between researchers and reading room or search room staff traditionally in our library and across the sector, search room or reading room staff have been perceived as actually are lower in the organization than curatorial experts. I think we're seeing a new model emerging possibly where reading room staff become research partners, engaged participants in the research process. And this I think speaks to the AHRC's recent change of heart around the research status of libraries themselves. And this clearly does have implications perhaps for the future status skills and perhaps even grading of staff involved in this activity. So very quickly, looking to the future, I think it's still too early to predict the long-term demand for virtual reading rooms and the potential impact on in-person visits. But we certainly at Manchester see virtual reading rooms as a long-term business as usual service. We're planning that they will continue and hopefully expand. No plans to charge, but clearly there is a significant cost involved in terms of the staff time as well as the infrastructure that we've created. At Manchester we have a very sophisticated virtual classroom which I haven't described. Whereas the virtual reading room services is more basic and I think was probably scope for bringing the equipment together. And in the long-term, I would hope that we can develop some sort of digital media suite for the virtual reading room and virtual classroom. Thank you. That was great, John. Thank you very much. If I could ask the panelists to kick the cameras and mics back on while everybody's doing that. John, your last point is really interesting. For all of these activities, they do require space, to do any kind of virtual activity, having what is essentially a studio space, which is separate potentially from teaching spaces or physical reading room spaces, something that is a concern. Before we get into kind of nuts and bolts, I just want to remind everybody that the Q&A section is open. If you could drop questions into the Q&A, we've already got a couple in. And there's been some good banter in the chat window as well. A lot of folks chiming in on some of the kit that they've been using or employing, including some of the kit that we've talked about, but also using GoPro's and iPads and all kinds of things. So it's been great to hear that everybody's been experiencing these kind of things. Before we dive into the Q&As that are in the box, I just want to pick up on something that Siobhan mentioned, but which applies to all three of the case studies, which is around equitability, that in some ways these technologies provide a more equitable experience for users on a multitude of spectrums. I'm just thinking that kind of standard paradigm of teaching with a collection item in class and only the people that are kind of over the shoulder of the instructor can see exactly what they're talking about. So you have to kind of pass it around or make all the students move around a table or whatever. Where instead in these scenarios that we've seen at all three institutions, everybody is there in the virtual world hovering right above you. I'd like to ask all three of you what the buy-in process has been like with the users. I want to ask about administrators as well, but how quickly did you find users adapting to the new environment? Was there cases where you had to walk people through trepidation or was it all kind of students and academics alike? What's been the experience on the ground for you all? Generally speaking, everybody is hugely enthusiastic and hugely grateful for the service that we've been providing in these exceptional times. I think people have taken to it very easily. People have pivoted to use that terrible term overnight to online for virtually everything. So it's not that alien now. Two years ago, perhaps, there would have been resistance to online access to the reading rooms. We don't perceive that as being an issue now. But I think that the other question which is really important is avoiding a situation in a classroom, for example, where on-site experience is much richer than the online. We need to find a way of levelling up or levelling down. I don't know which, but certainly levelling that playing field. I agree with you. Behind Lucy, the big screen that she's got behind her, we've got a similar setup at Edinburgh. We're in the classroom and you now have this big screen so you can magnify. Even that is really interesting development technologically for classroom settings, being able to show off something underneath the camera. Siobhan, you were going to jump in and then maybe Bristol? Yeah, I'm just picking up on John's point there. I think that how we work through the hybrid space, because I think regardless of whether we're in level zero and everything's back to normal, there will be people who can't travel. There might be people who are having to isolate. So it's how do we, you know, I think we need to think carefully that we don't disadvantage those who can't be in the room. If the room is a predominant number. And yeah, I don't have any absolute, sort of wonderful, clear idea of that. I think it needs to be mindful. But thank you about making the point about accessibility. I think it is an important aspect for all these technologies. Great. And did anybody from Bristol want to jump in, Jo? Well, Bristol I think is different to other universities in that they took an approach that we would not do hybrid teaching. So teaching has either been completely in-person for courses that have required it all completely online. So in terms of accessibility and equality of access, we haven't faced that sort of tension between some people in the room, some people outside of the room. Next year, I think we may be going hybrid. So that is something that we will really need to consider. I mean, that's a really important point that all of these developments, we're working within the constraints of our own universities as well. So some of the decisions that we've had to make have been influenced by whichever way the university decides it's going to take things as well. And that will continue to influence us. I wanted to ask before... Yeah, Julian, go ahead. I'm just going to say that our art history students doing the curating students absolutely loved it. You were able to take these snapshots of the material, which they then took away and uploaded to their mural. So they had a virtual reading room that they created for themselves of materials that they could keep returning to. And they really used their own initiative and they started having their own classes outside away from the tutor. And we're able to make a lot of independent creative decisions that they then bring back to the next session. So rather than when you all come into an archive normally and then you look at material and then it all gets packed away and they don't have recourse to it, or maybe there's a few snapshots independently, they don't have that kind of loop recourse to it. Using this really enabled them to do that. And as a result, their curatorial ideas, I think just came on and leaps and bounds. That's brilliant. And actually, that leads in quite nicely. So that kind of the element that you shot off there, Julian, of taking a screenshot while you're in session, as it were. There's a question that came in from Peter Finley about digitization workflows and how will some of this kit and functionality replace some of the digitization requests we get? Will it help influence, how will this affect the workflows that we get from going from a classroom or a consultation or a reading room setting into digitized material? So in terms of that exhibition kind of workflow, we were able to do a lot on-the-fly kind of capturing. And then the materials that they wanted to use as part of the exhibition, we were able to create high-res scans for that they could use afterwards. So it was like a two-stage process. It worked for us. Yeah. John and Siobhan, have you thought about digitization in relation to what we've been talking about today? John might have frozen there. I know that the teams are getting a lot of requests for follow-up digital content. And it's also a surrogate to having been able to do the classes. We focused our teaching in the teaching classroom with our own colleagues based at Glasgow to manage capacity so that we were learning as we went along. So I think there's going to be, I think there is, you know, that digitization workflow is a really important thing to review again. I think it's coming into the new academic year as well. Working on the pace of academics who are very tired at this time of year going to take a break and then as ever coming into the August, September period and looking to think about new classes. So I think capacity and managing our capacity to deliver this is quite tense, maybe. The success that we've had so far, we might not be able to compete with it or so how do we say, how do we plan what we can deliver and deliver it well? Yeah. We're finding that the Virtual Reading Room Service is reducing the number of small-scale one-off demands for images because that can be serviced through the Virtual Reading Room itself. But actually there's more traffic in terms of larger projects. So people will look at material through the Virtual Reading Room Service and determine that this is meaty stuff for them and then we'll put in large orders which does have some capacity, causes some capacity problems for our team because they're having to operate at a reduced rate due to social distancing measures. Just following up on John's point there, I'm hearing that quite a few people are acting or switching their travel grants to digitisation money in the digitised. So just as John says, quite large research-based photography being required and how do you build that into your workflow with all the other projects you want to do and the support towards teaching the research institutions as well. So I think it's an absolutely critical bit of staffing and resource that we need to kind of talk about. Yeah, that's a big capacity issue for all of us if we're going to see a big shift in that direction. While we're in the kind of classroom space before, we've got a number of questions that are coming which is great also about the Reading Room. But specifically in the classroom, there was a question which I'd like to ask but also nuance a little bit too. So the question around in the classroom setting, if you're delivering a class, do you record the session? And if you record the session, do you have any kind of data protection form or any kind of statement that they need to agree to? And my nuance to that too is, do you do any teaching with data protected material or copyrighted material and what has been your experience with that as well? My response on the question around the DP question pass, I'm sure the team have looked at or it's done through the participants in this sort of school and through the college but I can't answer on specifics in terms of data protection or so copyrighted materials. I think probably the theatre archive might have some more thoughts on that but from my understanding is that we've not been working with any copyrighted materials. Yeah, we've chosen materials deliberately where either things are either copyright or we own the copyright so far in teaching. Yeah, I think that's the next big step for these services is to understand what is within copyright law and data protection and what can't be as well. Right, I'm going to pivot to just a... Well, I'm going to conflate a couple of questions about the virtual reading room service. I mean these are for John specifically but for anybody who's thought about or looking at offering the reading room service and it's more about kind of longevity and sustainability. What we've been through in the past year with successive lockdowns has meant that we've had staff capacity that could help deliver virtual reading services but we move into a period where our reading rooms will hopefully be busy again. What's the sustainability? How are we going to staff the virtual side of things? Is it going to require... We already talked about facilities but is it going to require reading room opening times for example or deployment of kit and other spaces? What's the kind of medium term game look like in terms of virtual reading room? It's a very difficult question. It's one that we're wrestling with. We're just going through a major restructure and I have been able to provide a little bit more resource for our reader services team which helps where we're not planning anytime soon to return to our full opening hours pre-pandemic. So there's an opportunity there to switch the emphasis from on-site to virtual. But as I said in my presentation I think it's still too early to understand what the long-term effects of the pandemic and the provision of these digital services will have on demand or on-site. But I know obviously there are these discussions around a national network and I think while at Manchester we're very happy to provide this service indefinitely for external researchers. I think ultimately questions have to be asked about how much resource we can put into this without being supported. Yeah, I agree. Certainly at Edinburgh we're looking at virtual reading services as well but it would mean closing down the physical reading room for at least one day so that we can offer that and then pivot back to the physical for three or four days per week and that has implications for those that would want to use the physical service as well. Right, I'm going to conflate another two questions and then one more question. Thank you everybody for all the questions that have been coming in. It's been great to have so much activity in the Q&A box. Question about research and the research journey for everybody. So a couple of questions. One, I think John, your first video provoked an interesting conversation that's played out in the Q&As around library staff being part of that research journey in a different way and having that ability that we wouldn't necessarily have an reunion to have that conversation or to share in the enthusiasm or in that discovery process in a much more intimate setting but also how that might change the future of research bids for example as well. So there was a question from Alan Sudlow thinking about the kit that we're using now or that we're thinking about employing will that change the nature of research bids instead of researchers needing to factor in 30,000 pounds for travel grants and accommodation and things. What have we had any initial signs of things changing or things being affected by the technology that we're using? We've started to have conversations in Bristol with academic researchers from other institutions who are putting in big bids about how we might cost our time as partners or collaborators in terms of how they might use the reading room but we're just at the very, very early stages of that at the moment. We know we're a small team, there's 4.7 FTES when in the whole of the theatre collection as core staff. We know that we're transitioning from a stage where we had a reading room with maybe 10 different researchers, students, external academics, greater practitioners in the situation where we're looking at a one-on-one relationship for the virtual reading room so it has potentially a huge impact for us. Just very quickly on space because that was touched on by John as well and we are in a very fortunate position and I know a lot of places aren't, they're previously dedicated seminar room to work with our collections it's a smaller of a suite of two rooms a large reading room and actually what the team are proposing to do is to we're getting a similar kit in both spaces and we're changing the furniture to allow a quick turn around so we can flip the spaces so if a class comes in it's that little bit big but we still want social distancing. We can turn the reading room into a seminar room into the seminar room there's also the trade-off of having the virtual reading room and the intrusion into a more traditional study space so can you have them side-by-side or do you have to just say shut one down to allow the other team to have them and it's tricky and tricky for people who are coming for extended study like our visiting research fellows that would come and actually spend some time with us. How do we give them five few days to maximise their research? We're just thinking about the whole issue of costing our contributions to research proposals and being more realistic about the cost to us not just real costs but opportunity costs, costing in staff time and pushing more of that onto the applications rather than us offering to do work gratis so I can see that we need to get better at providing realistic costs for as Bristol are thinking costs of library time spent on a virtual reading room service. You could imagine having an embedded research assistant within the library staff for a major research project for example and we need to be able to cost that realistically. Great. There are more questions than the Q&A and especially one or two about national infrastructure which I will not park for now and we'll come back to it at the end of the session because I think the next presentation from Joanne will help steer some of that conversation so I wanted to thank our panellists for the presentations and also for this first round of Q&A but don't go anywhere because I'm going to call you back in minutes or so. So if I could ask you all to camera and mic off and now I'm going to hand over to my colleague Joanne Fitton. Joanne is co-convener in the RLUK Special Collections Leadership Network and she'll be talking to you today about some of the work that RLUK has been doing in this space as well. Joanne, over to you. Thanks Daryl. This next part of the session I'm going to be talking about the headline results of the preliminary findings of the recent RLUK survey on virtual reading rooms and virtual teaching spaces. So we're going to be using Mentimeter in this part of the session too and to access the Mentimeter please copy the Mentimeter link into your browser which I think is in the chat now or go to mentimeter.com and enter the code that's on the screen as well but please don't feel distracted by this because we're going to have time in the session to go through the questions. So I'll start with the survey and as you've seen many collection holding institutions have been actively exploring new and innovative ways to produce digital access through the pandemic and institutions have been experimenting to provide geographically remote digital access without reliance on digitisation. Various discussions have been taking place between members of the RLUK Special Collections Network and a cross-member working group from RLUK has been supporting ongoing development in this area. So a survey of RLUK members was undertaken in January and it revealed the potential scope and reach of these services as well as having a variety of purposes and as a result a second more extensive survey was undertaken between May and June of this year reaching out beyond the RLUK membership. It was extensively promoted by RLUK national and international partners and the survey was directed at services that already offer virtual reading room and teaching room services and those intending to create them. So you've already had very good explanation and demonstration of what we mean by virtual reading rooms and teaching spaces. The survey sought to establish the extent which research libraries, archives and museums were creating virtual reading rooms and teaching services within the UK and internationally. The experiences of collection-holded institutions in creation of these services their current use and requirements the opportunities and challenges these services have presented for institutions, staff and the users the institutional context in which these services operate including how they were funded and how they sat alongside physical and digital services and opportunities that the development and delivery of virtual reading rooms and teaching services provide a collaboration between collection-holding institutions. So the survey asked detailed questions regarding technological, spatial, financial staffing and skills requirements. It asked about the use of services by researchers and user groups how these were resourced by institutions and the motivation for creating and maintaining them. It concluded with questions regarding possibilities for collaboration between collection-holding institutions around the development and delivery of services including in relation to the creation of a national and international network between them exchange of skills and the creation of agreed standards and development of use. So there were 32 overall responses from institutions varying in size, geography and remit and the survey revealed that these are emerging services 56% of those who responded already had virtual reading rooms 38% had virtual teaching services and others who responded were intending to create them. But we know that there were many other institutions that were interested in the survey but didn't feel that their ideas developed far enough to participate at this time. Of those who responded only one service predated the pandemic and most in the UK have been created during lockdowns and it seems that few places are actively promoting the services so far. But there is a shift in status for both virtual reading rooms and virtual teaching spaces this is going from a pragmatic response to a crisis in the world. It's a slow process and it's not matured yet. There's a wide range of capacity from one to two appointments a month to up to 30 appointments a month by services and places range from being able to accommodate one to three concurrent sessions and most tend to be under an hour. So if we think about the user experience the application of this service is broadening. The virtual reading rooms where initially focus was on serving internal audiences many are now finding that the primary audience is from users outside their organisation. The virtual teaching space setup is seen as important for schools, community groups and widening participation audiences. Virtual teaching spaces are fewer in number but there is an expanding audience beyond the institution. There are benefits that larger groups of students can be included in a session when teaching was all face to face. There's also an emergence of hybrid on-site and online sessions especially for the next academic session and as we participate at this stage arts and humanities are the most significant disciplines being served. There's also an archives and special collections biased to the results so far in terms of the type of material being consulted but this is diversifying with museum art 3D presentation combined with data visualisations and shared screen functionality demonstrating cross-collection and format application and places of putting restrictions in place based on the size of material condition of material and access conditions as you'd expect in the reading room and in terms of copyright there are questions around whether this is considered to be broadcasting and the motivation of users is really important for us to understand in the viability of services going forward and this seems to be fitting into five broad categories so we have geographical motivations where people are unable to visit in person and the convenience when a physical visit might be unwarranted there's a big investigative element to it to assess if a physical visit is warranted so a lot of people using service for reference checking and digitisation as we've heard in the previous presentations it is going some way to inform digitisation requests if you could move on slide for me Mel, that'd be great, thank you so respondents reported delivering multiple sessions a month via their virtual teaching space largely focused on supporting teaching within arts, humanities and social sciences some practice based sessions were delivered virtually including in support of conservation courses and museum studies courses but it's quite early to tell how much this is being integrated into curriculum design at present it is seen as a valuable addition enabling work with larger cohorts of students most respondents are offering digitisation on demand already and half of the respondents to the survey are offering opportunistic digitisation of the items being consulted in the sessions so at the moment there's only been a modest impact on digitisation and catalogue in prioritisation within services there is a changing staff researcher dynamic as we've heard a lot about in the case studies it's showcasing staff expertise and knowledge mutually beneficial and a co-creative experience it's involving colleagues from across the library but there are very few dedicated roles and it's acting as a catalyst for collaborative research but raising questions about staffing levels and roles the main skills needed seems to be quite generic including confidence in public speaking and in handling collections so the requirements services seem pretty much the same across virtual reading rooms and virtual teaching spaces there is a low tech baseline to achieve good results but it's possible to go high tech as well and costs can range from a few hundred pounds to multiple thousands of pounds most have turned to internal funding so far a variety of spaces are being used as well mainly with practicality in mind such as Wi-Fi connectivity space for virtual teaching services it's that more space is needed than for virtual reading rooms and mobility and flexibility seem to be key to the decision rooms being made so in terms of sustainability this all seems doable in quiet building spaces lots of respondents are still pondering why the services should be located permanently where they should be located permanently and as we've heard staffing resource is the largest cost few places are considering charging for the service at this stage but might change the minds on that as demand increases so just move slide again thanks Mil so finally respondents were interested in understanding the potential for collaboration and this is including skills development so the creation of collaborative approaches for staff and users to gain new skills knowledge sharing of best practice and lessons learned some of what we're doing here today there is benchmarking regarding the use of these services thinking about common standard frameworks to support interoperability and the ease of navigation between virtual reading rooms at different institutions and troubleshooting by creating a community of practice having a network approach seems to be of interest exploring the development delivery of combined appointments including virtual reading rooms at multiple institutions so as I said at the start this is an emerging service we're really keen to gather more evidence of what's happening in this space right across the sector and challenge assumptions we may be making to find ways to collaborate further in particular RLUK would like to explore the potential for a coordinated and networked approach to the creation and delivery of these services and whether they present new opportunities for cross institutional and cross sector collaboration the full report of the findings of the survey is now published on the RLUK website offering a summary of the findings but also acting as an invitation to institutions and stakeholders to join RLUK in discussions around use and development of these services and alongside that the survey is going to be staying open for more contributions to come forward as we know that people are working in this area so we're going to take advantage of the captive audience that is here today to get a sense of level of interest and the mentor that we are running is focused on the virtual classroom service really we are looking so much at the teaching services in this session so this is where we're asking for you to participate and it looks like people have already kicked that off and it's good to see that there are still 119 participants in the room I don't know how I think we've got quite as many participating in the mentor meeting yet it would be great if people did contribute wherever possible we would like to get a sense of the interest in these services so I appreciate that that first question is always the tricky one for many of us about how we would describe ourselves now I'd welcome any of the panellists to comment on anything that appears in the answer to these questions as they come in but I think this is an answer that we're expecting really to understand who was in our audience today that it's mostly people working in the library archive museum sector rather than us having much of an academic researcher or student audience today special shout out to the student student in 3% academic so it's nice to have you amongst us slowly yeah so hopefully you are interested in using or already using these kinds of services so I think we will move on to the next question number two oh good already been answered there so has your institution created a virtual reading room or if not would you be interested okay interesting split kind of three way three way split yeah there's quite a lot undecided there yeah it does feel like there is still a lot that we're all trying to learn about it and where we can have had quite low tech responses I know in my service we've had quite a low tech response to be able to do this but there is that pressure of how it's going to skew maybe other parts of the service that we already offer and I think on that if you're not interested to put it in comment in the chat yeah so I'm not quite sure why people wouldn't be interested it might be the scale the type of service that you run or if you're a user it might be might be something that's been coming up in what's been said that it would be useful to understand what barriers people feel that they would have to use in these services as well so that we don't create things that yeah have barriers put in their place that would be off putting we already know that our physical spaces can be difficult for people to use sometimes I'm conscious of time so I'll skip to question three so if you have one or would like to create one what advantages or benefits you experience or expect a lot of really helpful comments coming through here yeah it's a great comment about not having enough individual scans we kind of touched on that already in the Q&A it's really great to be able to respond to inquiries really quick and easy with institutional equipment instead of your own cell phone and that question of equitable services coming up again and yeah I think there are different advantages in terms of accessibility that I think they're about disability, different kinds of access issues that people might have for on-site visits there are different I suppose maybe solving different problems that we might have experienced this is all really great thank you for these contributions because this will all add to our evidence base as we are thinking about different ways to collaborate and thinking about ways to support this kind of activity through services so on the next question if your service offered virtual read room sessions how might these influence other aspects of provision so we ask people to just select their top three I'll give this another minute we've only got 18 responses in here so far we're cataloging hey someone gave 2% to cataloging alright but it's quite an even spread across the boards digitization but then also the kind of access what we would normally have kind of crowd environments as well I suppose I'm conscious that all of us on this panel today have contributed to this survey I'm sure our institutions have been contributors to it I'm that question of integration into the curriculum and I was conscious of John saying about how academics haven't made a huge amount of use yet of the services and whether there's what kind of advocacy do we need to do there to help integrate this into the curriculum and that point around collaboration with other repositories I don't know whether anybody has tried that yet really to this idea of multiple institutions at once using the visualizer I don't know whether anybody on the panel has done that at all something we've tried out at Edinburgh Siobhan we're hoping that we'll be able to do that within the institution with our colleagues in the Hunterian Museum so we might be able to deliver a shared object-based teaching experience but we're slightly trialling it maybe in the person's direction OK and then we've got the next question so the collaborative network was to be created to support development and delivery of virtual reading rooms where would it make the greatest impact so the options there creating national standards for the development and use of virtual reading rooms sharing case studies regarding the use and development so we've got nobody thinking national standards is that something to be concentrated on but case studies seem reasonable and popular creating a troubleshooting network for institutions a few votes there supporting smaller institutions to develop services seems to be popular as well National Directory to identify who offers these services perhaps this is just so early doors on the development of services that that's getting no traction there interoperability a few votes on that and then publicising the existence of services to funders and advocates advocate for greater funding again popular I did wonder about the publicity for these services and whether any of us are really publicising them I know in the survey results it didn't it suggested that people weren't really doing that yet and I wonder whether that's because we are all a bit concerned about the amount of work that could bring if it's a capacity issue or whether is there another reason that we would not be in a position to be doing much publicity around it yet at Bristol we haven't publicised it we offer it when we feel that it's going to be something that's useful but it's absolutely down to a capacity issue which is why we haven't advertised it more widely yet yeah it's on the website at Manchester we look very hard to find it because again we're a little bit concerned about creating demand that we can't fulfil yeah we're the same at Leeds that if somebody asks about it we encourage them to do that and it's on the website but we don't really push it out any further than that so I think the idea of a national directory feels like it's probably some way off being a priority for people Joanne there was a question that came in in the Q&A in the first round of Q&A about national infrastructure I wonder if we could take that now just with the rest of the panelists any thoughts of what a national infrastructure could offer what would the benefits or the negatives be of a national infrastructure for these kind of things John or Jo or Shabon or anybody had any thoughts on some of this is born out of the idea of being able indeed to have a session where you could log into a reading room and access material for example one side of correspondence at Glasgow and another side of correspondence at Edinburgh and see both of them at the same time but do we need infrastructure to underpin that and what might that look like I'm going to say the word capacity again I think that's really we're all hesitant to to over promise and very mindful of that staff have had a really difficult year and a half and it's a lot of change a lot of demand on times and skills and things so I think it's I think it's again early days to understand what that might realistically look like and be staffed I think there's good trial opportunities though from those who've already got established services to kind of test out what the issues are and to learn from those but it would be interesting to hear what any other panellists thoughts are I would completely echo your thoughts this is down to capacity I think there's amazing potential for collections that are split across institutions or related work I think it's absolutely fantastic for researchers again it's the physical capacity of being able to run a virtual reading room and the start of capacity which all boils down in the end to funding and resources but yes so much potential out there to do that institutionally and also to reach beyond the HE sector and work with other partners as well I mentioned the potential benefits in terms of being able to compare material in different institutions in practice I'm not sure whether that's best delivered through a virtual reading room service or through other online mechanisms I think the greatest potential benefits of a national network as we say are sharing of best practice so capacity issues at the moment Thanks Shall we put up the last question which was around what might you want to learn more before investing in such services so cost benefit is definitely there for people so it feels like maybe some of those ideas around best practice encased studies will be helpful to people more of these types of sessions yes to promote what's going on and I know there's a very willing network of people that are doing this already who are very open to talk to people and offer advice one on one about what they're investing in and what the experience has been this is really great, there's a lot of really good content in here Jo yeah I think this is all really helpful for the next steps for RIUK and the small working group that's been thinking in this area about how we can do more on the collaboration side of things so understanding what the hesitations might be or the learning that people need set us in the right direction with some of those different conversations that we're having to advocate for what the potential could be


Welcome back to another acting analysis and tips for animators and today I'm going to take a look at the Disney plus movie Mulan. I'll be covering five sequences but before I do hi my name is JD and if you're new to this channel I do acting analysis clips like these I do rig reviews I do prog reviews I do animation news I do lectures and I post my feedback I do all kinds of things so feel free to browse around my channel and if you like anything you can also subscribe if you want so you don't miss any of my uploads but now let's continue let's go straight to the first sequence first up we have the sequence and I thought this was an interesting moment to change up your lip sync so imagine you have two characters right you got character one character two they're talking but the whole thing is done through this now I know squeezing the throat is going to change the vocal performance of this character or you know whatever character that you have but I thought this is cool I like this that we just kind of see this cool costume design as well and then you can do something where as the character talks again this would seem that this character is in trouble but then you can have potentially a reaction where the character starts smiling or a lean in you would think that it would kind of go back and try to free themselves but maybe they are so powerful that they would lower the heads you mean everything's a bit more and then lean forward you can see a tight grip there so it's a bit of a grip but not the choking so that the character can talk and this sequence here continues with them talking and he does kind of have this a slight smile and you can see how the lids here they kind of tighten much as it goes in nice and subtle a bit of a whining here as well a little subtle stuff there lowers the head and then starts talking and it's cool because again even here you have a little bit of movement there it almost seems like he's pushing in so I think that could be interesting and it doesn't have to be obviously something like this it could also be I don't know right now nothing actually comes to mind but it could be something where you traditionally have one or two characters talking but one character is doing something to a character without really interfering with the audio quality so it doesn't really change you know the performance that you want it to do but I think that just adds an extra neat element and for the character then to behave with a smile this on your throat and smiling would be different and then moving forward towards the threat that does this would also add some interesting character stuff on top of delivering the lip sync second sequence is this as Mulan comes in and you can see she's super busy when she comes in opens her door and talks and this is all about secondary action and just business stuff that the character is doing so it's not a character in an empty scene talking either to no one or another character in an empty scene what I like about this is that you can use the sets and the props for contrast so watch this she comes in she's busy she walks around she talks to all of these while walking she's busy she goes around they're doing their thing you know as for contrast they're very calm they're just sitting there doing not much except some handing over things she grabs this and busy busy busy you can see this busy busy busy not busy at all they realize you gotta tell them something you can see in the back here busy busy busy busy and then they say okay listen she knows something's gonna happen and already we found the matchmaker and even then here look at that still busy still busy and because of that constant movement that constant busyness when she does this ready and matchmaker you can read that on the lips and then she goes oh it just adds extra weight because if she's just standing around and doing nothing sure you could do something where the shoulders were slumped the facial expression would change all of that would also help with contrast and noticing that wheels are turning or she's shocked or something has changed in a thought process instead of mind but here you can do all this through all of that you can show busy happy all of that stuff and they realize oh this is not something i want to bam stop and hold and they continue and then here's the contrast she is locked now nothing's happening shocked oh no and then they continue with their business as if nothing happened as if it wasn't a big deal to her okay let's let's eat and it's going to be okay so that's what i always like you know that's what i also recommend to my students maybe put your characters into a scene into a set and then use props because then you can use that especially secondary action for contrast to in order to to showcase that something has changed and you can do that by stopping doing you know with whatever business that the character was doing here just like here speaking of contrast here's something else as they discuss things and she wants to say something you can see the reaction of her father and and there's something where i mean this would be a pain to animate every single thing but i like this i like that you have a moment where they're talking and this would be a cool setup too for a four character where you don't really have to go any lip sync or maybe they're just listening but it gives you a bit more framing maybe it really frames them and boxes them in or you can have any type of reaction with head turns but i like that setup and then you can see as she's trying to say something in a nicely contrasted profile here you have they and you have this is moving that's moving obviously they are reacting but if all the pieces moving and they could be something where as he does this you can see the pause long pause and then they start talking and also you can see that reaction as he starts talking here but this is something you could potentially stylize and go even further when you want this to be serious but maybe still with some contrast and maybe not contrast but some funny elements where maybe some of these just keep turning turning turning turning turning until maybe he will put another hand on it to really stop it you mean you can you can exaggerate you can ask like that whole situation and do more with it but this is again why i like props you can do something where this could be with more pieces less pieces stuff that falls you could have maybe even in the background a little a bird in a cage that would stop and do something we have there's something where this character action this um this high contrast moment could affect all kinds of things around in the set with the props and then you can push that to a bit more comedy to make this a bit less serious or make this more serious and so on and so on but i always kind of like that moment with the props next up we have something where it just every little move counts so if you have your character walk watch this she's ready to talk to him and then she does the stop and a bit of a looking down she's contemplating she's waiting should i do this i'm gonna do this and this is for anything that you do in your shot is what i tell my students all the time any type of move any type of pause any type of look is the gaze down is it up is the head down or not does the character stop or not all of that tells us something so as we continue she has that pause goes in and then the other part is this how she enters comes in like this that to me is very quiet is very potentially respectful depending on what's going on in the scene and who she's meeting but it's not a thing of hey and this whole thing flies around so look at your entrance if you have a character enter a scene this could be through a door this could be a curtain this could be i don't know whatever you have there think about well what's the speed of the entrance you can see how she's kind turning put her leg forward she's turning with her body to go through that she doesn't want to move too much i mean it's also a lot of respect towards this character so think about that how is your character entering the scene and how is that telling us something about this character also like this does nothing to do with the entrance but i like this as they talk she is in a box he is in a box he is in a box they all have their roles to play they're all kind of boxed in and the thing but kind of like that how it's framed there but anyway that's that and then here's another one about movement and how you interact with characters so as they are going up here this is the whole test and you just can't do it you can see their strain he was all right i got hesitation i'll pause in the leg and then i can't do this and bam now after her transformation she comes in and walks past and goes blah blah blah and they're all realizing whoa she can do this this is what struck me is okay how is she going to pass this character and you can see that she turns she doesn't want to hit him with this but at the end she still does and i don't know if that was there's not enough room or if it was a bump on purpose get out of my way because she's not looking and maybe that makes it more arrogant or this is just me reading into something you know that is not really the case it just happened to be something like this but i like that idea like that element so imagine this is a competition and this character basically lost can't do it now this character is passing the other character do you want to show it as in i'm going to use this to push it out of my way i'm better than you maybe with a little bit of smile maybe a quick glance or something where it's not really acknowledging like a half look over like not i having eye contact and then head up and being more arrogant continuing potentially in this shot the push and maybe looking down like oh what are you doing or you don't do it at all and you can you realize that all right he lost she's going to pass she's going to go in and in and i'm better but then she doesn't then she gives him room and in this she doesn't touch it she really makes sure that she doesn't touch this character and then follows up with this but there's no contact where she knows she's going to win but she's so concentrated and it's not a competition to her where she feels superior she's still respectful to the other person and then passes by continues so this is to me just an interesting moment something for you to think about if you have multiple characters if one passes another how is that are they holding something what's the context is it a competition or is it not is it just entering a store is it a sale in a store where they both want to buy the same thing and are they competing or are they saying no you can buy it or you you can buy whatever the context is think about how those characters relate and this could be through props this is again why i like props where you can use this or just body language or looks or you know however you want to construct the scene but to me all of that is important because any of these moves will tell us more about the character so if you do something like this and it's super arrogant or not i know more about this character and then i know more about this character how he reacts to that move he doesn't go and rip the thing apart he doesn't yell at her he just looks at her oh yeah she can do this now it's a bit of a disbelief but also probably a little bit of respect of okay she can do this now there's something going on in him and you can see this too in how he has that little look down slight frown and then look over so to me all of those elements are triggered by this moment and now i know more about her and i know more about him and this is why i like analyzing scenes like this because you can use elements now it doesn't have to be with props or within a set even though i like that a lot it could be also your character just an empty scene but every movement counts every look every look you hold or you don't can you look and how long do you blink you look away how's your posture we talked about in a previous FNA about your character pose is your character starting off the shot like this or more proud or more arrogant or is more confident or not all of that matters all your posing and the timing of the movement going past someone using something looking at someone all of that tells us something about your character and the relationship between another character if there are multiple characters in your scene so i would really pay attention to every single thing that you put into your shot and speaking about attention if you want me to pay more attention to you and your shots and make your awesome shots even better i have workshops and you know the drill all the information is in the description feel free to check it out you can sign up at any time my workshops are open and speaking of time if you're still watching this as always thank you so much for your patience and for watching the whole thing till the very end and if any of this is potentially helpful to you and you feel like yeah i don't want to miss more of those uploads you can subscribe and hit that bell button so you don't miss any of those uploads and that is it i would say thank you again and i'll see you in my next clip


Achieving access and quality of early childhood education is one of the four pillars of focus for the OECS Program for Educational Advancement and Relevant Learning, PERL. Recently, a two-day early childhood educators' leaders forum took place bringing together key stakeholders to reflect and discuss best practices to develop implementation plans to enhance early childhood education. The forum simultaneously took place in Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, creating a workshop of a group of over 200 early childhood leaders who are better equipped as advocates for the enhancement of early childhood education in their respective countries. National Coordinator of the OECS, Pearl Sophia Edwards-Gabriel says, enhancing the quality and equity of access to early childhood education rests upon the provision of enhanced facilities and the professional development of early childhood practitioners. Today, we are here with the leaders in the early childhood sector. We are doing a joint conference, so it's a regional conference where we are leasing with our counterparts via Zoom and basically we are here to discuss what are the issues and the challenges that are facing the early childhood unit. We are also looking at how the PERL and the funding from the PERL can provide support to the early childhood sector. And so as we move forward, we recognize that there is need for the leaders in the early childhood sector to have a space where they can come together, they can share ideas, practice and they can plan the way forward, especially with the view of having the OECS PERL support them as they move forward. Training officer at the Early Childhood Services Unit, Ruth Fabrié says, one of the plans to increase access to early childhood education is introducing early childhood education at primary schools. The whole thinking of increasing access to early childhood has been something that the government has been looking into. We are very happy that the PERL has provided us with some of the financial support required because now as you may be aware, there are number of spaces becoming available in existing infant schools because of the drop in the current intake of children, a drop in the child population. So it is a way of using existing space to provide a much-needed service. So for us, we welcome this opportunity because it allows us therefore to have more children go into some sort of early childhood facility and free up spaces at the government-run facilities which allows them now to increase the intake of younger children because as all the research shows, the most critical stage is both 2-3 and for us in St. Lucia, that is the age cohort that is least served on Island. Funded by the Global Partnership for Education, GPE, the OECS PERL seeks to increase the quality of teaching and learning in the OECS region by creating greater access to quality education for all children. The four-year program was designed by the OECS Commission in collaboration with OECS Ministries of Education. From the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Education, Sustainable Development, Innovation, Science, Technology and Vocational Training, I am Danielle Dubois reporting.


What is going on everybody? My name is John Hammond and welcome back from the YouTube video We're looking at the forensics category in the boot to root 2019 CTF. This challenge is called loot back It just gives us a p-cap to download. It's a Google Drive link. So it's kind of annoying can't W get it I've already go gone ahead and downloaded this it is in my current directory. It's a p-cap and G file So it's that next-generation thing You can process it out to a p-cap if you'd like just a regular old classic p-cap Or we can just kind of deal with it in our cases right now for the solution of this challenge We don't need to do anything with it We can go ahead and start to do some basic stuff with it check to see before we fire up in Wireshark If there's anything really in it's like plain text readable So just go ahead and run strings on it and at the very very bottom. There's an interesting thing It's boot to root. I am the flag format. This looks like the flag But it is not we can go ahead and submit it and see that is very obviously not the flag It's also doesn't seem to be the right flag format because that B is capital and so far we've seen everything lowercase B So we could fire this up in Wireshark, but we still have some more low-hanging fruit We can check in a regular TCP file What I'm going to do is actually make a directory files just in case we have anything in there And I will go ahead and copy that data into files So I'm going to use TCP flow which is super nice and super easy if you don't have it installed go ahead install I believe it's in the repositories if not I'm sure you can track down the github and you just run TCP flow tack R to represent you're gonna read from a file here That will go ahead and not return any output, but take a look in your current directory now You've got some extra stuff. You've got some communication that's kind of labeled in the file name between one IP address and the next with a Report dot XML will tell you everything that it had found if you take a look at these all with file You'll see that one of these is ASCII text which is kind of interesting. We can take a look at that Maybe that is the flag go ahead and cat that out. Hello server, okay? The other is a bitmap file, which we can go all the way also go ahead and take a look at I'll just use EOG or I have known to view that and that looks like the flag It is sideways so we can go ahead and rotate it Control R there it is and that's also not the right flag format and then it's not using the two zeros and boots But we have something new here boot to root am underscore the underscore one So if we want to try and submit that we can do that The underscore one and that is the correct flag. So that's that that's literally it If you were to go ahead and take a look at this within Wireshark You'll see that it is a lot of like x11 data and I struggled with that for a long long time I tried to figure out. Well, do I need to set up an x11 server? I know it's sending it back to itself. Is that a loop back thing like taken literally? I actually found a tool chaos reader or something that will let you like create the replay files But I never got anywhere with it and then I just went back to the like basics and you actually will see Like TCP flow and that basic low-hanging fruit stuff in CTF Katana if you go to my github repository Again, I'll tout that resource and we'll bring out the automated version of that soon. So that's that. Hope you guys enjoyed this Love to see in the next video if you did like this video, please you like comment and subscribe join the discord server There is a link in the description. Love to see you on patreon loves you on paypal. You know the whole nine yards. Thanks again