Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and it will be posted to our archives later for you to watch at your convenience. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, so we provide services and training and resources and grants to all types of libraries in the state. So we will do shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries, public academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, on and on. Really our only criteria is that something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have, as I said earlier, we do record the show. If you do have any questions here during the live show, please type, you can type into the questions section of the GoToWebinar interface. I'm monitoring that here and I'll grab all your questions for our presenter today. I will do my usual reminder. We are recording and our archive will be posted to the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel for our archives. So anything you say will be saved and posted to the internet for posterity. Never any trouble with that, but I just like make sure everyone knows what's going on. We do have, sometimes we do shows here with Nebraska Library Commission staff talking about things and services and whatnot we're doing through the commission, but we bring in guest speakers sometimes. And with us today is Robin Hastings, who is from Neckles, as you can see here in the Northeast Kansas Library System. Good morning, Robin. Good morning, Christa, and everyone else. Yeah, she's a friend and colleague of mine. And she's been on the show, but a few times over the years. She was just a month or so ago here with us. But she's back again to talk about training new library directors, Apple and Kansas, very appropriate name, obviously on purpose. And so if you are a new director or maybe not even new, just a director. So some of these things could be useful for you. So I'll just hand over you, Robin, to tell us all about Apple and Kansas. All right, well, thank you, Christa. I just have a little story about Apple. It started many years ago actually as a completely different program and has evolved into what will be next year, which is yet another completely different program. Just in case you guys. Oops, next. There we go. Sorry. I can work technology really just in case you guys have questions. My name is Robin. As Christa said, my email address is our Hastings at Neckles.org. And I'm happy to answer questions or comments, take anything you guys have so. All right. So Apple, Apple stands for applied public library education. The only way we can actually get the acronym to work is by making those first two letters, the AP capitalized. That's that's what happened. It is basically the idea is that new directors in in Kansas as as everywhere else. Quite often, I mean, sometimes new directors are do the libraries, this is their first library job. Sometimes they have a little bit of library experience. Sometimes they have an MLS, but whatever the level of of experience and education they have. Sometimes it differently in Kansas sometimes. And so it's, it's a good idea. We thought to have a educational program that explained kind of how budgeting works in Kansas and, and all the different specific things so at least in our system and I will take a moment now to mention Kansas has a state library which is like the Nebraska Library Commission. But we also have seven regional library systems. My system is the one closest to Nebraska. Northeast Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri are our northern and eastern borders and then we go down to Richmond, Kansas and over to Tepika for southern and western borders and so what has worked is we have, we have decided that, despite whatever education whatever experience you have, we invite all new library directors to go to Apple. Different systems manage it differently. We have different requirements and, and, you know, the kind of categories we're looking for. People don't require the MLS folks to do it. We do in, in Neckles, but regardless, beyond the education, this is also a chance for new directors to meet peers. And so they have a chance to network with people who are in their same situation all across Kansas, and they have somebody that they've met, and maybe they've, they've had a nice conversation with a couple of times, and they feel comfortable bringing up the phone and calling and saying, listen, this is what's happening in my library. What's going on in yours? Have you ever dealt with this, you know, that kind of thing? And, and we have found, I'll talk a little bit in a bit about our surveying project that we had, but we have found that that has been a really useful part of the whole Apple thing. So, we did not start off, however, with Apple. Those are supposed to be books, but I stretched it out too long. Sorry. We did begin new director training years ago, 1989, I believe, was the first year of a program called Kplace. And that was done as a combination cooperation between Emporia State, the SLIM program, and the State Library. And so librarians took a week, went to SLIM, stayed in the dorms at Emporia State, and spent a week learning about their new job. And they did this three years running. This was a three-year program. When you were done with all three weeks, each year you graduated. So that was intensive. It required a big, a big commitment. It used to take place in May. And by the time they graduated, after their three years, they've received 90 hours of high quality training in community analysis, community information access, technology, budgeting, personnel management. Sorry, I'm recovering from a cold, so every now and then I'm getting a little snotty. I apologize. Trusty development, short and long-range planning, organizational projects. So they had to do this every year for three years? Every year for three years. They had the first year, and then the sophomore year, and then the junior year, and then they graduated. So yeah, this was a big project, but it's hard, first off, to get folks to be able to commit to a week, much less a week for three years running. And it required a lot of commitment. It also required that librarians stay in place for three years, which we are finding is an issue, as people move around. So in 2013, I came to Neckles in 2012, November of 2012, and in April of 2013, Apple started. So I was maybe not in the very first discussions of the Apple program, but I came in, and when I sat down, I was told I was doing the technology module. So that was, I was like, oh yeah, okay, that's cool. So Apple began in 2013 as a program to kind of take up where K-Place left off, but be less commitment of a commitment that it was... The way we work it now is it is a single day, sort of from noon one day to noon the next day, retreat at the Rock Springs 4-H Ranch in Junction City, just south of Junction City, Kansas. And we spend that day getting to know one another. We have a speaker come in who talks about how to be a great director. They kind of get things started, get things kicked off. We have meals with one another. We have, in the evenings, where we stay is a... It's not the camping part of the 4-H thing. It's the leadership lodge. So we have, you know, beds and showers and linens and all the comforts of home. But we also have couches and tables in the middle. And so we can sit and talk and share information and just really get to know one another in person. And so that's our kickoff for the program. And then after that, there are monthly webinars. And I'm going to talk about those in just a second. And then we try to get together at the KLA, the Kansas Library Association conference, which happens in late November or late October, early November. This year it's very early November, first three days of the month. And then we used to have a... Instead of that, what KLA was during pandemic times, we would have a online meeting. If people wanted to get together, they could go to Salina, Kansas, and we would meet at the library there, but most of it was online because lots of issues with the pandemic. So we get students from all across Kansas. Six of the seven regional systems will send people. We have... Each of them have five spots. Our limitation is really those beds at the leadership lodge at the Rock Springs because we have to be able to fit all of the staff and all of the students. And there's a limited number of beds. So what we do is each system gets five spots. However, some of our western most systems don't always have five people. So there's a little bit of horse trading. One-year nickels sent nine people. So, yeah. The year that I took this picture on the left here, we only had three for our class that year. This is a smaller class. The picture on the right is kind of the whole group. Well, half of the whole group, I guess, probably. With Sandy Nelson, she started our keynote speaker for years. She came and she talked about how to be a great director. And then we use Judy Calhoun from Southeast Kansas or Southeast Oklahoma regional system. And this year we're going to use Gina Millsap, formerly of the Topeka Shawnee Public Library. But this year we're doing a lot of changes. So... Nice. Yeah. Good names, people I know. We're real excited about having quality folks come up and talk about how to be a director. These are all folks who have been directors. They've done the job. And they're ready and willing to come in and help our folks learn how to be great directors right from the get-go. So that's nice. Normally what we do is... I'm kind of in charge of welcoming new directors to Neckles. So as soon as a director is hired, I will go out within usually a month and meet with them, introduce them to Neckles, kind of give them an idea of what we can do, and chat with them about Apple. We used to, up until a year or so ago, whenever you were hired, that next April you were eligible for Apple. And we're backing off on that a little bit now. If you're hired later in the year, we'll give you an extra year if you want. We don't make you start on Apple while you're still very new at the job. Because it is a monthly commitment with some homework. And it's generally homework that is... it's not busy work. We try very hard not to make it busy work. But it's stuff that you have to do anyway, like creating a budget or putting together a yearly report for your board or, in the case of my technology planning, putting together a technology plan for your library or dealing with your website, different things like that. So most of the folks who come, like I said, are new to the library world. A lot of them, this is their very first library job. And they've been hired as a director. And they don't have the background. And so this, you can kind of see in the back of this picture on the right, there's several of our consultants, Gail, Santi, and Richard. Everybody comes and shares and helps provide the support that these new directors need. So click on the right spot. So the program itself, like I said, we start off at Rock Springs with the big kickoff and how to be a great director. And then every month we have a different topic. It's a webinar. It's a one hour webinar. Most of them have homework assigned associated with them, but not all. And we start off with library planning. So strategic planning, just kind of generally thinking about what your library is going to be doing in the future. Then we go with library technology, which is the one that I do. And I just try to kind of a basic, this is what you need to know to manage technology in your library kind of thing. Community awareness is the next one. And that's demographics and understanding what your community is made up of and what they need. We then finish up or follow that up with customer service, which is something that I think a lot of directors want to know a little bit more about how to make sure their staff are providing service for their patrons. And then we do a session with Tiffany Henshel, who is a HR professional with Johnson County. She used to work for the Johnson County Public Library, so she's very familiar with libraries. And this year we actually as a gift to Kansas, Apple opened that up. So instead of the 14, I think people we have in the Apple class this year, we had 70 folks at that at that webinar. So there's a definite need for information about HR law and in that kind of stuff. And it was very Kansas specific, but it was useful. And for a lot of, a lot of folks don't have an HR department to rely on, you know, these tiny libraries, they may have themselves and an assistant, and that's it. So there's, that was a really useful, a really useful thing. Then we'll have collection management, where we talk about how to buy books, where to buy books, how to get rid of books. There's always, you know, weeding is an important part of the class. Yes. So we talk about that. And then we go through library laws. And that's kind of the statutory basis of libraries. We go through what exactly, you know, how your bylaws work and what the statutes are that apply to you. And this is where it gets really key of the specific for us. And that with the next session, which is budgeting. And that's usually a two hour session. That's just, it's a big topic. And when it comes is about the time that libraries are supposed to be pulling together their budgets, kind of the beginning of the year getting things ready so we do that in January these days. And then we finish up with youth services. So things to do for the kids and teens in your library. And then the final month is a self paced session on ethics library and ethics. We use Pat Wagner's series of she did five or six sessions, 10 minutes on ethical topics. We ask them to watch those sessions and then comment on the discussion board and we have kind of a discussion in the class about on the discussion boards about the ethical topics and things that they might not have known about. A lot of them are very, I tell you the big, the big thing that gets most people is not chatting about the books over the counter. They're not saying, Oh, this is a great book on divorce. I read it myself. You know, people don't necessarily have that information. I don't want that broadcasted everyone around. No, no, no. So if the picture starts the conversation grand, but it's just something we people just haven't really thought about it. And so it is something that almost always makes an appearance on those on those discussion boards. We use Moodle instance. Moodle is an open source version of like canvas or a blackboard, which is here at the library commission here as well we use Moodle for our basic skills courses which are for directors to learn. Same thing as what you're talking about how to do their job, how to do the job out of how to do those basic skills. So we make use of the Moodle by having the homework is assigned and turned in through Moodle. We have forums, a couple. I know at least a couple of our sessions. The only homework is to post in the forum to have a conversation. And so if people do that they get credit. So each of the systems are different. We each kind of figure out what constitutes passing and who, who is a successful graduate of the Apple program. After that, that March ethics program. That's me know who, who has the, who has passed and then we get certificates and it decals we, we go out to the board, and we present the certificate to the, the director in front of her board, or his board, so that they kind of what, what their director has been learning and how hard they have worked over this last year to graduate so that is, that's kind of how we run that project. Okay, I mentioned earlier that we have done some surveys. We do a survey every year at the end, just the same questions just send it out by a survey monkey. But in 2020. About the time, I think, I think the idea came before the pandemic, but since the pandemic hit, it was a good time to send out stuff that didn't need to be done in person. In 2020, I sent out a survey to the 70 previous 74 I think was the total number previous directors who had gone through Apple, and asked them how useful Apple was to them, now that they've been out of the program for a year or or longer. There were a lot of great comments. I learned so much and it's helped me with my job more than you could ever know. I'm thankful for the training. There were so many changes that needed to be implemented at my library. And the Apple course gave me the information I needed to make those changes. They were not all entirely positive. Most of the homework was a waste of time. I have a library to run. I didn't have time to waste doing homework that was of no value. The library law and budget homework were all that were worth taking time to do. That's still good information for us. We can't please everybody all the time, but we got a lot of good information like that. And then for those who found that the content covered in Apple was still useful. There were a few neutrals and a couple of disagrees, but mostly agree and strongly agree were very, very common. So we have from 2013, I guess technically it would be 2014 because the program ended that year, the one we started in 2013. So from 2014 on we have yearly. How did you feel about the program surveys and then in 2020 we did this big kind of longitudinal survey where we asked everybody how they felt about it and and how it went and it seemed to be mostly positive, not entirely all there were there were definitely suggestions. And so we took those suggestions and over the course of the last year, we've kind of re-invent re-envisioned I guess is the term Apple so we keep narrowing down the amount of time we're asking our folks to spend. First off, when I started in 2012, the idea was to do Apple for a year, maybe two and then we'd run out of directors right. So after that we do you know every other year every third year. However, often it was needed to get these new directors. Yeah, in August of 2023, I went on for new director meetings, we had four new directors start in August. The turnover we have never takes the year off it has been every single year. As we talked about earlier you thought, you know, with the three years everyone had to go to so much turnover and well okay that sounds bad that makes it like every library is getting your direction at the time it's not. It's just, we all like here in Nebraska in Kansas we have a lot of libraries in the state to maintain keep up with, and there's always, there's always staff changes. So here in Nebraska, we have 270 something public libraries. That's a lot of, there's going to be staff changes always be somebody leaving someone new coming in, somebody is just moving from one library to another. A whole new situation and a whole new, new climate for them to deal with the new people and whatnot so people need are going to need this kind of thing as a constant refresher, whatever, yeah. I think one year, we did have few enough new directors that we actually opened it up to people who were came in after K place ended but before Apple started. So they were folks who kind of missed that library, so we had a few not first year library directors that year. But that was, that was a single year after that. I mean this year we only had 14 total. It was a very small year as the smallest year we've had so far. But next year, we're going to be begging for more spots because like I said, for, for new director meetings in April, third August, so and then I've been into a couple since then. So there's a lot of new directors that are, are coming up who are going to need this information. Some of them have more experience than others. We do have actually in this year's class, Marie Pico, who is the new director of the Topeka Shalini Public Library. She has, I want to say 28 years of experience in libraries. She has her MLS. She is still going through Apple, not only for her just to kind of get acclimated in the job, but she's also a really great resource for our other libraries. She can, she can help mentor. Working and making those connections that was deaf. Yeah, I mean that's not that's part of it too. The, like when we do, like I said, using Moodle here we do this so much thing where they do all the discussions on them on the on the message boards and whatnot. And it's so it is very interesting and I love reading because I am the instructor, I suppose would be the words not really structures mostly self paced but with us guiding them along. It's very interesting to see the conversations when people have done these things before who are, and ours is not just a new director thing it's just anyone who wants to take these. But that is something I think a lot of libraries, they really, and then, you know, we require them to a certain amount of conversation but inevitably certain ones just keep going and going and going and that's great. That's what you want to be talking about it going back and forth throwing out ideas. Exactly. And, you know, kind of not feeling so alone. Our big thing is that directors tend to be alone. They're, they can't really talk to their staff.  They, they tend to be out there, not really having a great support system sometimes in Kansas we don't tend to have city libraries. The libraries are, the boundaries are cities but they're not city departments and they don't have that kind of structure underneath them they don't have other department heads they can talk to or that kind of thing so they are kind of one of the things we have, we have found from various surveys and questions, is it people do feel like they're, they're kind of thrown out there with no safety net and Apple kind of helps them, not only gives them information, but gives them people that they feel they can because they also get to know us as consultants because we're always there for for answering questions and things like that so. And now is the new director to Pika, are they from Nebraska, or not sorry from Kansas, they come from outside I don't I'm not sure. Marie has been working in Topeka at the Topeka Public Library for a very long time, so I think he comes from Kansas. Nebraska like something you were to mention too was how this is something I hope everyone understands and forgot people here watching from Nebraska a lot of things Robin is talking about are specific to Kansasness. She's obviously making that very clear in Kansas we do this way. And when you do get library directors like for some of the bigger systems or bigger libraries that come from out of state. I need to know be learned okay this is how it was in your state and this the library statutes there as now in Nebraska or in Kansas is going to be different. So, being a new library director doesn't necessarily mean first time library director ever, but first time at this particular library in this particular situation in time. In this particular state. Yeah, knowledge to learn. Okay, how do I do things now on the new state I've just moved to, you know, and, yeah. Our new the new director of adjacent Kansas just came from Missouri. And I also come from Missouri I worked in Missouri for 14 years in libraries before I moved to Kansas. And so when I emailed him I said, you know, this is a very different environment than you're used to in Missouri. I would like to come and introduce you to the resources that you have available to you that you that were that were different than Missouri Missouri they have a strong central public state library. And then they have support organizations more net provides internet technology and, and different things like that so it's the whole regional system thing is very different. So yeah, it's he, despite the fact that he's been a director before, you know, he has library experience. He's still going to have to go through Apple to learn those those Kansas specific. So, reimagining Apple, we spent a year talking about how to change Apple so that it was less burdensome for the libraries and, you know, it was hard to make the case sometimes that an hour a month is burdensome but that's with homework and, and all this so what we have done is, we have loaded up that April kickoff retreat in Rock Springs, we are having like I said Gina is coming in and Gina Milsep from formerly of to peek a shiny is coming to talk about library and ship and how to be a great librarian director. But we've cut it down to two hours because we're also adding the community awareness, kind of an informal evening on the couch discussion of ethics, planning policies and board relations, those all will be kind of tucked into that kickoff while we're all there together. And then, at some point, we don't have exact dates but I'm hoping, August, the library law webinar will happen and that's a that's a two hour webinar. So what I'm planning to do in Northeast Kansas is have the folks in my region come to Nichols, and we will watch it together and then we will discuss it afterwards, so that they can ask questions, either of the instructor or a bus, and get another dose of togetherness. The webinar, we're going to open it up again next year, because there was so much interest and things change every year. She had, she was talking about the two new laws that were just passed on pregnancy, and making sure that people have pregnant and people who have just given birth have a place to go to express milk or breastfeed. So, those were brand new this year, so she updates it every year, and so we're going to do that again. And then KLA usually is at the end of October, like I said this year, it's at the very beginning of November, but at KLA what we're going to do is ask folks to go to sessions that deal with collection development, customer services, youth services and advocacy, and then meet back on Moodle and give us take away so that everybody has to pick one or two of these topics, but then everybody talks, gets together on Moodle and, you know, posts their takeaways, what they learned from the sessions, and kind of shares that information with everybody. So that's while KLA itself is going to be together and will be in the same physical place, the actual class happenings will happen on Moodle in the discussion forum. And then in late January, early February, depending on on times we also have state statistics that are due in early February and those are a pain. So we don't want to, again, be too burdensome, but budgeting is important and it needs to be done at the beginning of the year. So Eric Norris, the director of the Manhattan Public Library is going to do a two hour session on budgeting in Kansas. And that will be, that'll be interesting. His Laura Devon has been doing it for the past 12 years. We did drop a couple of topics. Technology is no longer included in there. Really? Yeah, we decided after the pandemic that people have kind of what we were doing was teaching them how to connect and almost everybody has at least basic Zoom skills these days. And so we have, you know, that may be in KLA if there are, I usually do at least one technology session at KLA this year I'm doing one on artificial intelligence and chat GPT. So if they want to pick up technology that might be an elective, but it's not a requirement. So it's, it's going to be an interesting, see how that, see how that works out. But that was, there were a couple of things that we, you know, you can't keep adding. Eventually you run out of time. And I'm sure, I mean, he said based on surveys and what people are looking for. Absolutely. Yeah. One of the, one of the questions that we ask every year is what were the most important sessions for you and library law and budgeting are always right up there. Customer service sometimes makes it collection development often. But, you know, technology almost never made it. And that's, you know, as people get, you know, as technology becomes more and more ingrained in our lives, it just becomes less necessary to go through it. So we'll, we'll see how this goes next year. This is brand new for 2024. This year we're still doing the webinars each month we just did the HR webinar actually in September. And, and so we're still doing the class, the way we've done it for the last 10 years this year but next year, this new schedule will will take off and that will be the same responses you I think the one here for our classes and when we do encompass live shows anything youth and teen services and collection development and cataloging the numbers just go through the roof for both of those. It's I don't know if it's just there's so many people that do that work or there's so lacking in training for it. I don't know this doesn't seem like it but those for here are the big easy. We know from the questions we get asked you really need customer service and library law training so we're going to make you take, we'll put that out there too, we can tell. Yeah, I get, I get so many questions from directors about how to help their staff become better at customer service and so it's a real Savannah ball from the Wichita Public Library. She does our customer service webinar she used to be a system consultant and she moved over to to working in Wichita. She still does it. The vast majority of our sessions are taught by system, either system consultants or former system consultants. Like Eric Norris was the state librarian for a little while and then he was the director of North Central and now he's the director of Manhattan. He's never actually been a system consultant but just about everybody else has been at one point or another a system consultant, and they are providing their, their expertise for free. They're doing it as a, you know, because as part of their job to help library directors in Kansas. The HR webinar we do pay and the kickoff motivational kickoff we pay for the way the financing works and this is going to continue. So what we pay for is that each, each year we charge $450 to $500 for tuition for the year, and that pays for the Rock Springs kickoff. The two outside speakers that we pay for any extras, you know, if we have something at KLA a little party or whatever, you know, that kind of thing. They're not paid by the directors, the systems pay those. So if we have nine people in Neckles taking Apple we're paying, you know, $9,500 at 500 bucks each. So the, the systems pay for it so we do require that the library board sign off on the directors taking the time to do this because we're, we're funding it for them. And then for us at Neckles, it's part of the, the accreditation process. If you have not passed Apple within, you know, a couple three years of your being in the, in the position, you're no longer meeting all of your accreditation requirements. Even if you have an MLS, even if you have lots of experience with libraries. This is, this is something we think is really important. So we've made it part of our, our accreditation process. So that's accreditation for the, the director, the person, or for the library. The library. Okay, same thing we have here. Our libraries are accredited and our library staff get certified certified. Yeah. No, we don't do certification of library staff in Kansas, but we do accredited libraries. And that's one of the things that we require here in, in Neckles is that you've gone through Apple in order to ensure your libraries accreditation. So there is one system that does not support new directors. They don't, they weren't interested in joining us, which is fine. But this year of sorry, I've read from my phone off rookie mistake. So the, the one system that's not joining in and basically what, what I do is the manager of Apple is every year I get. Totals from each system and I send them invoices and they pay back and our Neckles business office manages writing checks and keeping track of money and doing all the stuff that I'm really bad at. So, which is lovely. But because we do have that one system that was not interested in joining us, the PLS, which is the public library section of KLA has started a scholarship for up to three students a year who are not supported by their system to join Apple. And so we have, we have somebody from that. The way it worked out this year, they voted on how to spend the money a week and a half before I needed final numbers for rock springs. So we only got one out of the three scholarships, but next year we'll have five scholarships. So, so that is, is expanding the reach a little bit. We can now officially say we are training all of Kansas new directors. And so they just make their application PLS approves them or not and sends that information on to me. And they are students just like any other in their, in their cohort. We have had cohorts of up to 40 some people, which is at that point, some of the staff have to spend the night at the hotel and junction city because there's not enough beds. But this year our cohort is 14. Next year I think it's going to be another bumper crop, but, you know, however that works. But the, the basic thing is it doesn't cost the directors anything if they decide to go to KLA we do have a stipend that we can send them. Of course they can, and most systems have continuing education grants to pay for state conference attendance. But then they can also get a little money from us and get some of that money to attend KLA so that it kind of makes it easier for them to go and attend the sessions and, and then report back by Moodle on what they learned. So, no. We do have a question while you're on this slide here I just saw that it had come in and is on here so wants to know and you may have mentioned this and I missed it. Who do you use for the library law session. That is Richard Brooklyn he is the director of the Southwest Kansas library system. He was a consultant system consultant for a while until he got promoted. He has also been a library director for many, many years prior to working in the system and he has, he keeps, he's part of our government governmental affairs committee for KLA and he has a pretty good grasp of the statutes and the legislature and how things work. So, basically what he covers is, like I said, just, you know, Kansas statute, specifically to Kansas. Yeah. Yeah, specific to Kansas, the things that that Kansas allows and doesn't allow for library boards and libraries. He talks quite a bit about that advocacy in the sense of talking to your local legislators and getting them familiar with your library before they have to vote on on something that has that affects your library so he talks quite a bit about how to do those kind of things. Thank you. That's interesting because that's very similar to what we have here we just did a library law session and there's been multiple ones in around the state at various events things too over the last year. Yeah, here too. And it is one of our we have regional systems here in Nebraska, they are not anything that libraries joined they're more like outreach here from the commission or boots on the ground I like to describe them as, and one of our system director Scott Childers who's the director this Southeast library system is kind of our expert on library law and open meetings act law, because he's just taking that on as his thing. And he also was a previous director at libraries to, but he is the one who's are you know, why go to sometimes about this question. And how would we know how do you interpret this.  Yes, everything we do is prefaced with the I am prefacing with this with the caveat that I am not a lawyer and nothing I say can be taken as legal advice you may want to consult a lawyer if you really are in a legal situation. But here's what we know as with through our experience and working through the laws with other libraries and like his his it himself his own previous experience. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, that's pretty much how we do it we have Richard come in and he shares his his vast amount of experience with Kansas libraries and, and how the library law affects the operation of Kansas library. All right. Well, there's my email address again. I'm open for questions or. Yeah, all right. Yeah, awesome. Um, thank you. Is anybody if anybody has any questions we have some of them, about 10 minutes left of the session here. Yeah. If you have any questions you want to ask of Robin or myself. If you're in Nebraska person, of course, go ahead and type into the question section of our go to webinar interface and we'll answer all your questions we have here. You can always reach out to Robin later or myself here in Nebraska I am generally as library development director and the person that our libraries would come to for the legal advice board advice. We have other various staff here in the commission that would answer questions at other things. And in our CE training session so this was this is great to hear about what you're doing there Robin and it's it's always good to know every state is trying to get their directors up to speed on things. Right. It's hard. One of the, you know, the hardest thing is like, what do you do to help the new director is not be like terrified. As much if they've never done it before. And we do here in Nebraska have lots of non MLS library directors actually most of them are not right. Small rural. That's not what they're going to do. They're never going to go and get a degree. It's just not a thing but we offer training and ours is the basic skills classes with ongoing training throughout the year of all the different things that you might need to know to do your job. And it's not specific to directors is for any library staff. Things. Yeah, yeah. We do much the same thing. We have, I think 300 and 300 plus public libraries in Kansas. And there are, depending on how you count them 4550 in Northeast Kansas. So, of those, I would guess the vast majority are are led by people who do not have an MLS. And so that's kind of what we feel at Neckles we're providing is that background knowledge. So they can call us and say, Hey, I'm not sure exactly what to do here. We can, you know, I have 28 years of experience in libraries and and the MLS so I often would people call and say, Oh, what do I do. I have, you know, I've seen this before and this worked. So, yeah, and oftentimes it's just needing the, the hand holding is saying it's okay you got this you are doing the right thing. Yeah, don't sweat it. You're working on the right track. I had a librarian who would call me almost weekly with well Robin, it's time to bounce some stuff off of yet. I almost never had to come up with a solution. She was great. She had it all under control that she'd be like so am I right in thinking this. Yeah, absolutely. And that's that we said networking and get people to meet each other and talk to another director and say, Hey, what would you do. Yeah, we do have some comments and questions coming through. Let's see. Okay, this is the long one. Sorry. Okay. All right, we'll start with. I think this first one will help me to the second one. So I'm going to do this in this other order. Okay. All right, so this is someone. Tony who's a library director here in Nebraska, and I'm just going to read what you put in there. It says in my first year as director I reached out to our regional library system. I remember telling them that I thought I was in over my head with the help of Central Plains library system and the Nebraska Library Commission we became accredited and have received grants to help our library grow. Yay. We're happy to do that. I have learned a lot of useful information from the basic skills classes it is nice to have the support system for new directors. You know, more just of a comment there's thank you so much Tony I'm so glad we're able to help you. I work with Tony a lot. Yes, on various things. But so that is the yeah that is what we have here that same kind of trying to get our libraries to do just do do good and do the best they can for their community and they're and there's in the citizens in their area. So the whole the whole purpose of the regional systems is to provide to support libraries in providing the best possible library service for Kansas citizens. That's why we're here. So, whatever it takes. And then the other question that these actually both can make the exact same time says is Apple available only to Kansas librarians. Unfortunately it is a specific I'm not sure it would be as valuable to anybody else but if you are a Nebraska librarian, Krista has resources for you. Right. Exactly. Yeah, and the reason we're putting this here on our show I mean the Brassica and come us live is the Brassica library Christian show but it is worse national show that anybody can come to and watch. That's a good example I think of the kind of things that train that can be done or the kind of things you would want to learn about as a library director. So, if you're not in Kansas, look for something like this in your state. Here in Nebraska which this person is, I can tell from their email that they are here from Nebraska. We don't have this kind of a, we don't have our program is not like the same thing we have a basic skills program here in Nebraska, where we, it's for, it's free, we provide free to any library staff person at any type of library in the state, or, or a citizen of Nebraska actually who's interested in becoming a librarian we're very free and open. It doesn't cost anything except for your time it's all online courses done in Moodle. And actually since we're talking about it I will pop over to. All right, I'm going to bring presenter control to my screen. Sure. To show you. There we go. Do that over there. Okay. So, on our library commission website and I'll see it at Nebraska dot gov. We have education, and there is lots of different things here education related, but basic skills classes on here, and you will see we push this out when on our social media to when new classes are up for open for registration. So if you look at our Facebook or Twitter Instagram you'll see just recently a new one went up saying here's the next class that's open. And this is a series of courses, as you can see all the topics we have here collection management community library communication customer service, etc, etc. And then there are some elective courses down here. Now anyone who wants to, as you can see here in Nebraska residents or people employed by Nebraska library so this is Nebraska specific. If you can take any of these courses you want to you can take them just because you want to learn more about that particular topic, or you can take them for the purpose of become getting your certification. Public library and certification that we for public library directors. So we have our public library staff. Sorry, it's not specific only is not limited to directors. So if you're in Nebraska library employee of any level. So remember, if you just want to, you know, is mainly for running the library but you can take any of these classes you want to. But if you want to do it for the purposes of earning your certification which does feed into your accreditation here in Nebraska we do have public library and certification. And then if you are in order for a library to be accredited the director at a minimum has to be certified and then you can earn more points towards your accreditation the more staff, other staff people that are also certified. So, these classes are done throughout the year. I see the schedule here. At the same time pretty much the same time the same order every single year. So just rotate so every January you know you can take communication. And then right after that it'll follow customer service library governance etc etc etc through all the classes. So to become certified you do six basic classes and then the seven electives, but you, and you have a three year time period to get all of that done so you can take all of this in one year all one, like one giant classwork. You split it up between a month to three years. But if you're just taking the classes for your own education, if you are like the program in outreach library and you just want to pop in and do that one do it. You don't have to do it for the purpose of becoming certified. You can take any classes just because you want to learn a little bit more. And there's our at the end of the year we've got our children's and teens class. So this is what we offer, which would I guess be as similar in Nebraska what we offer it would be as similar to what Apple in Kansas is doing. And just an ongoing program Holly Duggan is our CE coordinator in charge of this it's all done within Moodle. She is working I'm putting some, she is testing out doing things in niche Academy, have you used that at all, Robin. I have not, although I'm working on some classes to go in niche Academy now I don't have them done and haven't really played with the platform yet so. She's experimenting with it to yeah I think she did a communications classes in there as a self paced class. We're trying to do more of that to we've gotten a lot of requests for, well I can't do the particular class at that time of the year. So trying to do some more that are self paced you can do at any time. So you don't necessarily need a. But anytime of the year. I mean you can see here we do have a self paced into the cataloging class that just means there's it's a month long, also the communication one. There's no specific instructor there. You can just monitor it of course, but those are you have a whole month for those and just do it on your own more so, but she's thinking of more self paced as here's just a class you can do at any time of the year when it's convenient to you. And that's something she's working on right now. This is what we've got. So if you're a Nebraska librarian, look at this and this is where you can get that same kind of training as what Robin was talking about in Kansas. Not in Nebraska Kansas check out your own state either state library. If you have regional systems, whatever you have there's probably something in your state that is similar. They may call it something different. Like, you know, yours is very specific for dive by directors, ours is just basic skills for any library staff person. Look around and I'm sure you can find something if you're not. Yeah.


And I think to resolve this problem, young people should actually rely on parents' guidance. Parents should give guidance on how to use the Internet. And same for the teachers and schools. Because I think the first time that we approach Internet, maybe from parents or from schools. So the seniors should be able to play a very good example and tell us when and what ways to use them.


We have Alberto Sanino from Facebook's Novi talking about Narwhal and Tusk, a dag-based mempool and efficient BFT consensus. So I'll let you take it from here. So my name is Alberto Sanino, and this work is about Narwhal and Tusk. So I'm trying to give you a brief overview, it's a 15 minute overview, but if you're to ask questions, since the paper is probably going a bit longer than that explained. So this is John Warp with these people, so George, Lesteris and Sasha, and the work has been done when all the authors were at Facebook Novi. So I'm skipping all the introductions about blockchains, why they're cool, why we need them, and so on and so forth. I guess by now everybody knows them. Just to say here we work on a permission setting. So that's classical Byzantine poems. So what is all about, so this talk is just about how to build really high performance blockchains. So we've been trying that for a long time, different techniques, and we believe we have one that works fairly well. So here is the beginning of the story, right. We have those consensus protocols for a long time. And either that you look at early versions of TMBFT, previously Libra, GFT, hot staff, whatever it means. We realize that they're all being monopoly protocols that share transaction data as part of the consensus protocol. Then we have a 30 years literature that tells us how to minimize the overall message complexity of the consensus protocol itself. And so these is probably one of the key problems that we have for a scalability state. So here is a traditional leader-based protocol. So we have a leader that typically makes a proposal, it makes a blog, broadcast it to all the other replicas, gather some votes into a certificate, and then we broadcast back the certificate. Something like that, potentially they don't use a leader for aggregator, but the general story is the same. And when we look at the resource authorizations of all those machines, we realize that when a node is elected leader, it's the bottleneck. It uses a lot of its storage, CPU, bandwidth, and all the resources it has, while the other replicas are brutally underutilized. Anyway, the leader rotates because it's a blockchain, and so it means that all machines need to be overprovisioned, while only one of them at every single time uses the full capacity of the machine. But not what we want. What we want is to see the graph there, where it's read everywhere. Every machine needs to be utilized at maximum capacity all the time. And so, after a lot of thinking, we realized that the mempool is actually the key in all of this, that reaching consensus on metadata, if those are small, it's actually very cheap and message complexity does not really matter a lot for consensus. Again, if the mempool already did the bulk of the work and sheets all the data around. So here it's about separating the data propagation, which is will be the role of the mempool from reaching consensus of metadata, which will be the role of the consensus protocol. So first of all, normal. So that's the mempool. I'm going after to explain you how we take that normal, the mempool and build the consensus protocol on top of it, or actually add any consensus protocol on top of it. So here is the mempool. It works like that. So nothing complicated at the beginning, we have the client's transaction, the left and the normal mempool, which runs on every single note. So the mempool is composed of a number of entities, the workers and workers and the primary one primary for mempool. So I had that question a lot so don't look too much for the trust relationship between those workers and the primary. If it's easy just assume that all the process each worker is a process on the same machine as the primary. So all a single machine, imagine them like that. And so it's a single guy a single trust authority that operates a single note. Then we can actually say well that node operator actually can own multiple machines, again under its own authority, and then you can have one worker per machine if you if you like. So these have not changed at all the trust model and the threat model of the Byzantine forum. So what happens is the client submits the transactions to the workers through some kind of low balancing each worker receives different transactions from the client. Here is where we can apply techniques from your gift your others. These are complete your program. Every worker receives its transactions and add them into batches and each worker broadcast the patch to all other workers to the worker of all other nodes. So take an example worker one gets transaction from a client makes a batch and I'll broadcast the batch to all other workers number one of all other nodes worker number two makes its own batch and sends the batch to all workers number of all other nodes. But so no worker one is not going to send any message to worker number two, for instance. So you'll see a little bit how these will enable the scalability of the system. So in addition to composing those batches, every workers hash the batch as well and sends the digest to the primary. So these are various modes like 32 bytes, the primary is the process or dedicated machines that receives from a lot of very small amount of data and what it does with that it runs the mempool protocol. So what's the mempool protocol right I'm going to explain it now just keep in mind the mempool protocol protocol is per se lightweight in the sense that it only operates on mid data. It's a block header that embeds all the all the digest that it got so far that block header, well, the very first release will lead to three to 12 plus one Genesis blocks. It broadcast the header to all primary machines of all other nodes and gather some votes. And it's very easy is just that you votes for a header. If it's the first header you see from a validator from validator for specific ground number. Then the validator just creates all the votes into a certificate and rebroadcast back the certificate. So that's a very common pattern. So the next block not linked to the Genesis of course it would just link to 12 plus one certificates of the previous round so that we build a structured round. These what you see on the graph here, we consider it around one. And for those who want to do more of those things you realize that if we do that a lot of time we eventually achieve some Byzantine consistent broadcasts. So every node does that in parallel right so here I removed all the links except for node one for clarity on the on the graph but every node does the same thing. Round one is all the things that I showed before round two similar but it links to 12 plus one certificates of round one. And so we have that day. So that's what the member gives you that's what it outputs to the consensus layer. So now we have that we have a structured member and let's see what we can do with that to have a consensus protocol. We're going to present tasks, which is a zero message asynchronous consensus protocols. What we mean by zero message is that we just look at the bag and we interpret to derive a total order of transactions. So new consensus engine will not send any message at all. So let's assume that we have the back like that right so round one happened and run to and now we're about to reach around around three so we already saw as a node 12 plus one messages of from three. So first small modification. We include a share of random coin every every odd round so that every odd round we can actually open and look around the coin. So once the threshold of the random point is 12 plus one so we arrive at round three. We have been with 12 plus one certificates for round three right enough shares to compute the coin and we use it to elect a leader or from air minus two. So now that we have the common coin we can see what was the leader or from one. The leader of ground one was at one. The one you see on the screen there. And now we ask ourselves the second question, which is how much support does that either have. So what support means it means how many nodes from around to linked to the leader. Here we see on the picture that it's only one. What we want is actually at plus one support for a leader. If not we say just leave the rest, not enough support, and we just continue we don't do anything. So really there it's pretty nice because we do not have you change also a leader is considered to have failed according to some definitions of fate right. So, let's go on the bag continue to grow. For instance, we may have some gaps in the bag that happens, not a big problem. And now we're on round five. So round five. It's an odd number again so we can open the new common coin. We open the new common coin that tells us who's the leader of round three. So it's a two. In the previous before we look, what's the support for the leader of two. Let's just look at round four and check how many blocks of round four actually linked to the leader. Now it's cool we have F plus one support F plus one notes links to the leader, and now we can commit. So that is the commit for now. How does it work. So we look at leader two, the one that we just found has not support, and we check if it had if it's linked to the bag to any previous leader, but here you see on the graph, well it's linked to one the leader of one. So now what we do we first commit one, and then committed to. So that's very important we need to be a little bit cursive we go back and we start from the earliest leader, we commit the leader, and then we advance until we commit the leader to. So what does committing a leader means we're committing a leader means committing all it's so that. So for instance, when we say we managed to commit to, it actually means that we commit all the green blocks there, whatever it's linked by or to. So whenever we manage to get a leader with enough support, we actually commit a gigantic number of transactions at once. And so that was the task consensus protocol. If you follow that, it's actually really that simple there is very little more more than that. So this is task on top of normal, but in fact we can also have other consensus protocols on top of the number member. So what we do, we try to have hot stuff running on top of normal, we just replace the member and we have the traditional hot stuff consensus protocol, running on metadata provided by the member. We just have one flight modifications to commit through. Well, it's every time that we commit that hot stuff commits certificates that we use as payloads, what we can commit towards that is just we order the certificates and then they're cosily links so there is no problem in just ordering deterministic. And so we see that the member grows synchronously and whenever hot stuff managed to commit whatever it's payload, when we commit everything that follows. So you can see when hot stuff gets a payload we contain C1 and C2. The blue blocks are committed. The yellow one are next and then when hot stuff commits a blog that contains C3 what all the green one are committed as well. So we implemented that and try to see how the real thing works. We wrote that in drafts everything is open source. We use Tokyo for networking rocks to be for storage and Dalek for cryptography. So this is not quite production ready but we believe it's quite close to production ready system. And we're still working to improve that. So we took an experimental set of like the following we take five data centers as far as we can in the world, and we put an equal amount of machines. So here is the happy path, the throughput late Instagram. Just for the sake of time, forget about the orange line, the baseline hot stuff is the red one what happens if you just take hot stuff as it is, and we run it in the same condition so it's not the one that you may see on other papers that are actually in the data center, and compared on the same condition same transaction size to the rest of the protocols, the normal over task is just the same hot stuff protocol but just using normal as a medical and task is the protocol explained before. You can see that actually on those conditions task managed to have 150,000 transaction per seconds. So again, these are your complicated experiments with about three seconds latency. So that's about 20x above the state of the art for a synchronous consensus protocols have one more minute. So what about scalability. What happens is now we take a worker. And we, we have every worker on different machines, and we increase the number of workers. And so you can see that the protocol scales linearly very well. Here it's set up with four nodes, and we take 147 and 10 workers, and we look at the throughput latency graph. If you look at the one on the right, the line, the straight line, you see that we get about half a million transactions per second. 10 workers. Again, the latency does not suffer much at all actually three seconds per task and still about two seconds for hot stuff. And that's it. So, in conclusion, a separate consensus in the data dissemination is what enables high performance on these blockchain designs. So, again, one of the regulatory resource utilizations was actually key. So we all use auto machines as much as we can, the workers are the heavy, heavy base, everything else is quite light and operates on metadata. That's why we scale and link to the paper, link to the code. Let me know if you have any other question.


No, I would not give them the death penalty because I don't believe in the death penalty, which means they never would have put me on the jury in the first place. I came down the weekend after the bombing and spent all day down here walking around Boston and realized that there was no way that a small group of people was going to take away our way of life. We're a society in the world and we were trying to do that and terrorism doesn't work and it has never worked and it'll never work especially in the United States. I don't think that the case necessarily provides any end to what happened here. I think that it's a terrible tragedy but I don't think that charging someone is going to bring ultimate peace to even the family. People think that it will but you have to find peace within yourself. To turn it into like, it's like glorifying it a little bit and I think that it would be better to just leave it as what it is like a tragedy and not make it into, you know, like this big great thing for Boston because it wasn't a great thing. It was tragic. The jury is slow right now. They're probably not asking a number of questions to the judge to get any clarification. We're going to have to hear what's going to happen when the judge and everybody gets together to find out how he's going to be sentenced. They've been conducted fairly. I think that there's been a really adequate representation all around and I don't think there's been as far as I'm aware a lot of objections to the men which the proceedings took place. I would not assign the death penalty because I believe their penal system should be more about rehabilitation and punishment and it's also economically more feasible not to assign the death penalty that's actually more expensive. So both practical and moral reasons I would say. You know I wouldn't give him the death penalty because I think there's other ways of securing him in prison for life and I don't think that we need to kill people as a way of punishing. I just don't think it's really our place as people to put other people to death especially given how flawed I think our justice system is. To be totally honest with you I would rather see somebody sit in prison for the rest of their life and suffer but I would not be life without parole. So no opportunity to get out and I know that it takes the systems and the money to keep that person in jail but honestly I think if you kill the person then that's it. You know they could get suffered once and that's it. It's over so I'd really rather see him run.


In the next seven minutes I'm going to introduce the R package GS scraper, which is for scraping search results from Google Scholar. Google Scholar is useful as a resource in evidence, synthesis and meta-analyses, because it's a web-based academic search engine that's free to use. It's also very easy to use, which is why it's so popular. There's no human selection of the content, so unlike bibliographic databases, any information that looks like academic content is included in Google Scholar, and that's regularly crawled from the internet, so it's very up-to-date, more up-to-date than many bibliographic databases, because it doesn't require manual inclusion. It also identifies great literature, things like pre-prints, and has been shown to be a useful addition to databases and other searching in systematic reviews. It's not suitable as a single source of information in systematic reviews or other evidence synthesis for a number of reasons. Firstly, it doesn't support full Boolean search strings, only basic strings. You can only see 1,000 search results, and the order of those search results is unknown. So if you have more than 1,000 search results returned, you can only see the first 1,000, and you don't know why those 1,000 are being shown as some black box ranking algorithm. There's also no bulk export from Google Scholar, which makes it difficult to integrate into review management platforms. And there's a very sensitive bot detection algorithm, which makes it difficult to do anything in a patterned way. One of the solutions to these kind of problems with great literature is web scraping, which is the extraction of patterned data from information on the internet. There's a range of different ways of scraping information, from the human-driven copy-paste to more technical machine learning type approaches. But the most common perhaps is HTML parsing, in which you extract chunks of content based on unique or repeated signatures in the HTML code. Within Google Scholar, you can identify each result in a page of results by the tag class equals GSRI within the HTML code. And for every one set of search results, there is one tag, which makes it quite easy. On the left you can see the search results in Google Scholar, and on the right you can see the HTML. And there's an entire div with the class GSRI, and we can then extract each of the pieces of information within that search result using this code. So I've produced some functions within GS scraper. One is build GS links, and this allows us to build a Google Scholar URL that takes you to a real page of search results based on patterns in the URL itself. So you specify the terms exactly the same as you would for the advanced search, and it generates functioning URLs for pages of search results. So you'd input the information as you see on the left, and the function on the right allows you to specify how many pages of search results you want brought back. And it will provide, in this case, 100 URLs for the first 1,000 search results. The next function save HTML saves these URLs or any given URL from Google Scholar. And it uses two or any web page, in fact, it uses two methods to avoid bot detection. The first is a consistent pause between calls, and the second is a specifying a multiplier to multiply this pause depending on the response delay of the server. So if the server takes 1.2 seconds, it multiplies this by the pause and waits that long between the next, between the current call and the next, and that just introduces some randomness. So if we see these five URLs given here, the function would pull back the HTML pages for those five URLs waiting, in this case, five seconds multiplied by whichever server delay happened at the time, and it would save them locally. The next function is to get the information out of those HTMLs. It uses a sub function called split by div, which breaks the HTML into chunks of code, each starting with div space class. It then uses regular expressions to extract each set of search results in a single chunk from within an HTML file. And it extracts specific citation information based on the position of the sub chunk, so the subset of text within each major result chunk, based on its position, and we know its position because Google Scholar is consistent. And the output is a data frame where each line is a search result and each column is a title, author, description, year, link, or DOI. And the DOIs is really useful because the DOIs are more often than not embedded within the publisher URL, so we can extract that information that allows us to very consistently link to other systems like Crossref. So this code here shows the function that's used to extract titles from each search result within the HTML. And it uses a few substitutions, either global substitutions or single substitutions, to remove field codes to make it easier and more consistent to have the text rather than the embedded code as well. And the final function is save and scrape Google Scholar, and that's just a wrapper that takes the building, saving and scraping functions and pulls them together into one function. So here you can see you just input the terms that you want in your search, and then you can create a global object, in this case info, which is a data frame of as many search results as there are in your HTML files. And this just looks locally within your working directory for any HTMLs and extracts all of the relevant information that's saved as part of that function. So in this case we're specifying 30 pages of search results, which would give us 300 results. There are some challenges though, and despite the pause and back off, the bot detection is still an issue, so there's a need to tweak that a little bit and try to improve it. I tried using IP stuff, but it's much harder for me, I'm not an expert in that. Another issue is that not all of the links that are provided by the publisher contain DOIs, but I was surprised by how many did. Future work is to build a link to Crossref, I've done a bit of work on that, but it needs tweaking and improving to validate the records that are extracted. Some of the other resources that already exist, like publish or perish, get much of this information, but they don't get the description or the DOI, so that's quite unique improvement I think. I also want to improve the bot evasion and allow exporting as RIS format files, probably using synthesizer from the metaverse. Thanks very much for your time.


If the map disagrees with the territory, trust the territory. The map could be out of date filled with paper towns or you just might be holding it upside down. Regardless, the map exists to invite you into the world. So put down the map and start exploring.


Thanks. So hi, I'm Haya. My pronouns are he, him. And I am currently the reproducibility librarian at the University of Florida. I'm here today to talk to you about a project that I worked on in my former job as a postdoctoral researcher on improving accessibility and reproducibility in ecological time series analysis. So although this conference is virtual, I still want to acknowledge that the University of Florida occupies land that is the territory of many nations, including the Seminole and Tamekua peoples. And furthermore, the project I'm going to talk to you about involves collections of ecological data. And we haven't gone through and looked at where all this data was sourced from, but it most likely includes at least a few examples of what has now been termed parachute research, which describes the scientists to basically go into a community and collect data about or within the community in a way that benefits the academic in their career, and not always involving the community or trying to understand how their interests might align with the research. So to give you some context about this talk, so like I said, in my previous life, less than two weeks ago, I was a computational ecologist, and my training is in time series analysis, developing packages, software packages, and the programming language R, and working on research and dynamic systems and chaos theory. And so the project I'm going to talk to you about, we are calling mats, which stands for the macroecological analysis of time series structure. It's a software package that currently exists on GitHub and has a nicely rendered website using package down. And mats, the mats team involves several different members of the lab, including both of the PIs, Ethan White and Morgan Ernest, as well as grad students, Renata Diaz and Ellen Bledsoe, our lab manager, Glenda Yenny, and statistician, Juniper Simonis. And so we have a lot of different people in this lab, but we call G-Lab at the University of Florida, with lots of expertise across different domains. So that includes software development, statistics, field ecology, and population and community ecology. And so in general, our lab is interested in lots of big ecological questions. Some of them include things like how accurately can we predict population changes? How far into the future can we make those predictions? What ecosystem properties are associated with those changes in abundance? Or maybe our drivers of those changes in abundance? What kinds of changes occur in the whole ecosystem communities? And are those changes in the community merely the sum of individual population dynamics or are interactions between different populations in an ecosystem important for directing that community level change? And so I feel like I should probably also mention right now at the exact same time, there is a meeting, a virtual meeting of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative. And so we actually have team members that are split. Some of them, I think, might be in the audience for this talk, and some of them might be in that virtual meeting as well. So to kind of summarize our perspective on research and what we're interested in doing, we basically want to do all the analyses on all of the time series. And so in order to really try and approach that kind of work, we really have to focus on data analysis in a systemic way. And so we do this by gathering open ecological datasets, tidying them and ensuring that there's consistent metadata about things like location and the taxonomic ID of species and populations. We use diverse modeling approaches, population dynamics models, as well as machine learning and statistical models. And then we also write software for reproducible analyses. And again, this is something that is achievable because in the Ecology Lab, we have a lot of different folks with diverse backgrounds and a depth of skill and experience. So among the seven members of this project, including myself, five of us have PhDs. And I have to admit that this is not actually the typical situation for an ecologist or an ecological researcher. So for example, suppose you are a necologist and you are interested in testing some of your hypotheses on ecological populations and how they might be changing in time. And you know there's a lot of open data out there that might be used. And certainly this is definitely the experience that many are going through now, given that COVID is restricting field seasons and other kinds of research activities. A lot of folks are more interested in doing computational research. So you have an idea and then you like browse, Twitter, and based on the recommendation of the RStats people, you decide that there's this nice book R for Data Science that is going to get you started. And right in the middle of chapter one, you see this nice workflow diagram that describes how you're going to accomplish your analysis. And so that seems pretty straightforward. Of course, it is a workflow diagram. It is this kind of like flow chart that is intentionally a simplistic model of how to approach data analysis. And so once you start getting into the weeds of doing the research, you realize that there's actually a lot of skills that are involved in trying to do this research, right? You have to figure out how to obtain and import the data. If you're getting data from different sources, you often have to figure out how to get them to be consistently formatted. You might have to change how dates are structured in the data. There might be errors in the identification of species that you need to fix. Then you'll have to come up with your statistical model that addresses your research question. You have to learn programming to code it up. And then after you've gone through all of these steps, you might then learn about this notion called reproducibility and all of this literature about how research is not reproducible and there are these best practices out there that you have to follow. And so this is all kind of like large daunting challenges if you are trained as an ecologist, but not as a statistician or a data scientist or a software developer or a philosopher on how scientific knowledge gets generated. And so as a team, we thought about how we can build a project to reduce some of these barriers for a reproducible data analysis and focusing specifically in the areas that we have expertise, which is working on ecological time series. And so what we came up with with maths is cyber infrastructure that basically has functionality to accomplish all of those steps in the data analysis and make them as easy as possible for researchers to do. And so it has functionality, for example, to allow you to obtain ecological time series data. We have written code that transforms all that data into a common format, template workflows so that you can take an analysis on one data set and basically repeat all of the data sets that we make available to you so you can conduct that large scale comparison. And then finally, we have functionality for generating reproducible reports and sharing your code with other researchers. And so the way that that kind of works in like a software level, we build off of an existing software or existing data kind of collections manager called the data retriever that obtains data sets from different places. We build off of the tidy versus set of our packages for transforming data sets into a common format and deal with irregular or missing samples in the data. We use the Drake workflow package to help organize all of the analyses so that when you are applying your statistical model to a lot of time series, it does it in a way that really organizes all of those different sets of results in a coherent way. And then we build off of templates like those in the use of this package to provide research companion template to enhance reproducibility and make it really easy to share your work. So some of the data sets that we have linked to with our project include the North American breeding bird survey, the global population dynamics database, the biotime database, as well as 10 individually curated data sets, and totaling over 300,000 time series. I don't actually know the number of data points given that each time series has different number of data points, depending on the length of the sampling. And we provide this all in this like standardized data and metadata format so that when you decide on how you're going to do your analysis, you only have to make it work for one data set and then it can be applied to all of the data sets that we give you access to. And furthermore, the most exciting part for me is trying to come up with a way to promote reproducible workflows. And so having had many years of experience teaching in our users groups and workshops for the carpentries, there's a lot of information about being an effective teacher and employing good pedagogy to teach programming and data science skills. But one of the principles that I've kind of synthesized through all that experience is that providing good user defaults is essential for getting people started. And so you can provide a lot of teaching and workshops and readings and resources for learners, but if they don't have a default computational workflow, then when the students try to actually do the research, they end up coming back and needing more help to get started. And so we try to do this by using Drake, which is a workflow package to organize code. And then we provide a research compendium to package all of that up in a research project. So I know a lot of you may not be familiar with what a research compendium is, but it's basically a bundle of code and data together in a way that makes it easy to share and reproduce the results. And the way that we have constructed this for our project is to actually extend the functionality of our packages. So if you've ever worked in the R programming language, you know that there are all of these R packages that are out there that provide additional functionality and you can install them very simply. And so the idea behind the building a research compendium in the same way is that if there is a compendium that defines a particular analysis, a particular research project, you should be able to install that as easily as an R package, get all the data and the code and be able to reproduce the results. So we try to make this as simple as possible. So I'm going to kind of guide you through how we have thought about this. So this is the only graph I have in the talk. And so I have on the x-axis the ease of use and the y-axis capabilities of different kinds of tools. And so on one extreme, you will have something like the curing one push button coffee machine or you push the button and it makes coffee. It's really easy to use. It does one simple task really easily. At the other extreme, you have these programming languages, which can do a lot of different things, but there's a steep learning curve to learning how to use those tools and get started. I put Microsoft Excel over here. It has a little bit more functionality than the coffee machine. But in many cases, if you're doing a statistical analysis, you're still pushing like a few keystrokes or a few buttons to run a very specific statistical test. And then, of course, I have to put the conference travel reimbursement as very difficult to use and only performs one very simple function. And so we have designed mats with the intention that trying to produce these research compendium that do these large scale data analyses as following somewhere in this area of the space. So that it has as much capability as those programming languages, but also as easy to use as possible so that basically with one push of a button, you have accomplished as much as the analysis as we can reliably automate for you. And so we do that by providing you with the functionality where with one line of code, you can create a research compendium. And in fact, it's so simple that we have actually built in scripts to automate the example of it. So I'm going to go through and click on this to show you now. So we structured the math project as the software package on GitHub and we have automated the testing of it so that every time we make changes to the software package, we automatically generate a new example of the research compendium that by default gets created when you run that line of code. And so what you're seeing here is that automated example that exists on GitHub of what that sample research companion looks like. So it in fact is an R package that you can download from GitHub directly and contained within it, you'll see an analysis folder that has a templated report that shows you an example analysis applied to some of the sample data sets that we have included. And so this is done in our markdown, which will be the topic of a later talk I think in this conference, but you can see it goes through the instructions of exactly how to read in the results and process the results and then generate plots of some of the outputs for this particular example analysis. And then of course, because we care a lot about assigning credit appropriately, we also make sure that all the data sets that get used in this analysis report automatically get added in as citations to this report, as well as references to this the math software package that generated this example analysis. So let me go back to my talk. Okay, so we have that automated example. And you can go and click on click through and see what that looks like. And so we have we are actually using maths currently in several different kinds of projects. So both internal and external collaborations in the lab. One example is to explicitly study forecasting and what influences the forecast skill of populations on testing different hypotheses about whether life history characteristics or time series properties or environmental covariates influence the forecast skill with the idea that we want to produce general guidance on how to choose a good forecasting method. A second project is what we call maths LDACs, which applies this particular statistical model, the latent Dirichlet allocation and Bayesian time series analysis to identify and quantify different patterns of community change to test whether across all the different ecological data sets that we have, what kind of patterns of change we see in those whole communities. And so to sum up, I've talked a lot about how there are these barriers for large scale computational research. They aren't all going to go away immediately. But we think that, you know, we our project here is a prototype example of how they can be addressed, at least partially through the use of tools and technology. Doing this work, of course, does have upfront costs because while you're creating these tools, you are taking time away from doing the research yourself. And so it's important that we get funding and support for this from funding agencies. So we're thankful that like the NSF and the Moore Foundation has helped to fund this work. But we hope that the results of this project is going to end up being a force multiplier for research and help lots of other researchers out there do really cool things with these data sets. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Yeah, we got several questions. And I guess I would just jump in and say thank you to the Moore Foundation for supporting the CSV Comp as well. It's always nice to thank our funders. The question, I think we have time for one is can, how can this type of work be better supported, incentivized, and scaled up? Do you have any kind of thoughts about that that you would? That is a great question. I would say that is something that I am thinking about a lot more in my new position as the re-predecibility librarian. I'm really interested in how we can make structural systemic change in academia to support these kinds of efforts. I think it might have been Vicki, Steve's actually who mentioned earlier that a lot of these kinds of work, this like support work is all, you know, gendered and valued less than for, for example, like the, you know, lone genius or the innovator. And so I think it's, you know, we really have to be talking with, you know, like funding agencies and publishers and making sure that there are incentives and acknowledgments and recognition of these efforts in order to really promote them. Yeah. Okay, well, thank you very much.


What is up Marvel Squad and welcome back to our channel. If you guys are new, make sure you go hit that subscribe button and turn your post notifications so you get notified every single time we post because we post every Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. And also guys, if you wanna be entered in our Apple Watch giveaway, make sure to be following all of our social medias right here and make sure you're just showing a bunch of positivity and love throughout the comments on our Instagram post. The person who is most active will win the Apple Watch giveaway. So, I'm going to be doing being insecure to see how my boyfriend reacts. I got this video idea from Montana and Ryan and she did this to her boyfriend. I thought it was really funny and slash cute to see how her boyfriend would react. So basically I'm gonna do the same thing and I'm going to just be like talking about myself like, ew, I feel down about myself today. I tried doing my makeup, made my hair straight in my hair. I still don't feel good. Like, I'm just gonna make myself insecure and I'm gonna see how he reacts. I just wanna say this also guys, it is okay to sometimes feel insecure. Some days I don't feel confident but I just want you to know, everybody you're all beautiful in your own way.  Feel pretty, feel good about yourself and it's okay to be down sometimes. Everybody has bad days and I love you guys so much. I want you guys, everybody to know that you guys are beautiful in your own way. I just want everybody to have positive vibes and yeah. So he thinks we're gonna be filming a story time today but we're not actually filming a story time. I'm just gonna start, we're gonna start setting up the camera, I'm gonna start fixing my hair and stuff and I'm gonna be like, I just don't feel good about myself today and see how he reacts. So make sure to give this video a big thumbs up, Marvel Squad. I'm gonna give the beginning of the video post-immacation shout out. Shout out to Oh Saad and she said, when I hear the quote, your kindness will lead you to success. I think Ryan, Bill, instantly. Oh, and she wrote this whole paragraph and I think it's so sweet. They're supporting us and being a part of our channel. We love you so much and we're gonna get this prank going. Bill's gonna be here in a little bit. See you guys when he gets here. All right, baby, ready to film? Yep, let's get it. Let's get it. Oh, oh. Ready? Yes. Let's go. I don't know. I don't really know if I am ready. I thought I was, but like. Ryan, look at me. You already. Let's get it. I don't know. I just feel ugly today. I just feel like my makeup doesn't even look that good. I feel like I just washed it. Okay, baby. Okay. Let me see. Go up to the camera. Go up to the camera. Yeah, you look good. Oh, I don't. Baby, you look good. You're looking cute. Oh my God. You're looking cute. Mariah, come on. Have confidence. You're fine. I just feel like. You're fine. I just feel like, I don't know if I wanna film better. Oh my God. Mariah, stop. Don't do that. I just feel like my makeup just looks really bad today. You gotta have food in your corner in your email. Exactly. Like, I just. Hey, do you wanna know something? You look better than me because look at it. I just, I. I wasn't even gonna wear makeup today, but like, I just feel like. I put makeup on and I look, I just made myself. How about we try filming? And, because I know you look so good. You look good. Literally, even with your makeup off, right out of bed in the morning, you look freaking. I don't know. Spooky. Like, it's like curling up. You look good. That is cute. It gives it accent. It literally like, instead of some boring straight, oh, I got straight hair. Has a little wee, you know? Okay. Mariah, let's try filming. Are you okay? We don't have to film if you don't want to, baby. Like, what's the difference between today filming and like, tomorrow? I don't know if I'm in mood today to film. Like, I thought I was. I was just setting up the camera and I'm just like. How about, just try smiling, try smiling. Go like this. But you look at my teeth too. You are so cute. Like, I just know I don't. No, your teeth look amazing. Everything about me just looks bad. You look. Because every shirt. You are not like this. Because every shirts that I wear, I like feel ugly and this is the look that I felt somewhat decent, but then I looked at the camera and I'm like, oh, I just, it doesn't fit me. Like, none of my clothes look good on me anymore.  Yes. You rock this.  Damn. I know, but. That's cute. I understand you like it, but just because. You rock it. I understand. I really like that you think that I'm beautiful and that's all that matters. I know you're always going to have like, lack of confidence on yourself because I am and I'm sure everyone else in the world is even like the most prettiest people in the world. Like, they get one freckle and they're like, oh my God, I'm ugly. I know, but like, I know that you think I look pretty and everything, but I just don't feel good. Everyone thinks that. I really wish you just not filmed today. If you don't want to film, we don't have to film that. Are you mad? I'm not mad. I just want you to have confidence. I know you didn't film, but it's gonna be a lot of time. I know, you were down ever since I came in the house. Don't pull this from me. You have a little stress ball? Yeah, cause I just, I'm stressed out about like, I just feel really, really insecure about myself recently.  You feel insecure? Maybe we just turn off the camera. Let's try filming. It's already been filming for forever. Let's just try filming. I don't think I can, but. Okay, I'm a huge deal. We don't have to film this video. If, let's try filming, right? And if it goes good, we'll just do it. And then if it doesn't go good, then we'll just turn it off and film them all. All right, let's just try to film. All right, ready? All right, I love you. Good luck. Okay, ready? Oh, look, there's a little smile. I saw you smiling. Stop, stop. Maybe you need a little tickle. No, I'm fine. No! What is good, Marvel Squad? And welcome back to see, I can't do it. Okay, okay, do it again, do it again, do it again. What is up, Marvel Squad? How's it going, guys? And welcome back to our channel. Look at this beautiful girl. She's so cute. I can't do it. Raya, you're flowing so good in the beginning. No, I wasn't. Let's try it one more time. I don't think I want to. You're bringing me down. I'm bringing you down? You're bringing me down. You gotta lift. Sorry, I'm gonna put you down. I just, I don't feel confident in myself today. You don't have to feel confident. Well, I should. You should, but you don't have to. Well, I should. To have a good day. Okay, come on. Raya, it's okay. You don't have to. Raya, literally just, babe. Just go. Like, look at, my makeup doesn't even look good. Look at how the frame just looks blotchy. My like lips, everything, ugh. You look amazing. You're literally like, it's like you're making fun of yourself. I just don't feel good today. And I don't feel like filming. Just film, it's okay. It's not okay. Raya, you are fine. I think you're just like, understand that I'm not really feeling good. Okay, I totally respect you, but literally you are beautiful. And I don't know why I acting like this. I don't feel beautiful, so let's just turn off the camera. Oh my God. Babe. Can't we just turn off the camera, babe? Raya, you literally. Can we just turn off the camera? I think so. Well, I'm gonna turn off that because I'm not gonna deal with, I don't need to be my face being on camera right now when I don't feel good. It is okay to be not.  No, no, no, you don't. No, I totally, we don't have to film today. I just want you to have confidence in yourself. Well, I don't today. Stop, okay. Baby, I get sometimes things are annoying, things are hard, things are whatever, but you can get through them.  I was, I did a reaction where I made myself look like I was being scared. See me this whole time that I cared this much? You're just pranking me? Yeah. Get out of here. I didn't realize how life advice I just gave you. You're on both. No, you still could do that to me even if I didn't feel insecure, so. Yeah, but I, you were having a moment. I'm going to bed. I'm going to bed. I'm going to bed. I'm going to bed, guys. I'm going to take Team Mariah in the comments. So, let's film our video. This was the video, feeling insecure. I want to film another Mariah prank. I'm going to film our other video that we're going to film. Comment down below if you guys want to hear the story time that we were going to do. Come the lovely one here. Yes, it's about us and our relationship. Yeah. Yeah. He cheated on me. What? Okay. No. The heck, babe, you honestly had to turn such a cute video into a prank. Yeah, it still was cute. Oh my God. I literally like, guys, get ready for my pranks because they're going to be coming back even stronger than this prank. She did catch me in my feels, and I did try to make her feel better, but I will conquer this. All right, everyone? So, if you're not subscribed, stay along for the journey and go hit that subscribe button so I can see you in my pranks next because, no, Mariah doesn't just prank me. I literally come back way stronger every time, so. I'm not, I'm not, I'm just saying. He wishes it was like that. Anyways, it was fun. We're going to give her any of the video post notifications shout out, and this shout out goes to DreamyFish. Shout out to you. We love you so much. Thank you for being a part of our channel. And if you guys want to see more of us, make sure to be following our social medias. To also be entered in the Apple Watch giveaway. Wait, did you do an intro? Yes. Did you do the Apple Watch giveaway? Yes. Hey, everyone, if you want to be entered in the Apple Watch giveaway, she already told you what to do. You got to go follow hers and my Instagram and make sure most of all you're subscribed to our YouTube channel so we can notify you. If you win. I think we're going to start doing an Apple Watch giveaway like every other month. Yes. And this one ends at the end of this month. Yes. So you only have what, two weeks left? Yes. So you better hop on that guys. See you there. Thank you guys. That was fun. We'll see you guys in the next video. But until then.  I'm going to get her back guys. Believe it or not, I have something planned in the planning. I know that was fun. I will see you guys in the next video. But until then. Peace. Love you guys. You're so cute. Look at that girl watching on the screen right there. She's so adorable. Look at the little girl that's smiling. She's like, oh my God. Don't look at me. My little girl? I know. The girl that's watching. Oh, I see a guy too. I see a few girls actually. Hey, hi. Hi, we love you. What's up? We love you. If you're new to the public, come say hi. If you made it this far in the video, you're a true fan. Yeah. All right. And if you're not subscribed, make sure you subscribe too. Yeah, make sure you subscribe too. You could become a true fan. Yeah. All right, peace out. Peace, bye.


What is the minimum requirement for English language proficiency? Is it based on the TOEFL score? We're looking for folks who have English that's good enough to participate in a academic program in the United States. We're not going to be doing the TOEFL test, but we do ask on the application for people to self-rate their English, and then we'll be looking at the essays, obviously, to see how well they're written. During the interview process, I think it should become apparent whose English is strong and whose isn't.