Thank you very much to everyone. Why are you being able to be burned in the back of the room? Good. Okay. Thank you very, very much for taking time out of the middle of your day. If you're scheduled for anything like mine, this is a really tough feat to get out of your office, come over here for an hour, and listen to this. So thank you for breaking away from all of your other commitments. I'm going to try to run through some slides. I know this meeting is scheduled for 90 minutes. I thought we'd, Mr. Cohn, we'd like to try to keep it to more like about 60. I'm going to send it to you at the end of the day if you want to schedule. So I've got about 20 or 23 slides. The images that you're going to see come straight out of our master plan, which is really in the final draft form is a couple of maps and a couple of words here and there that I want Sasaki, who is our master planner, to really tweak before I make this available to the public. But I want you to know that the images that you see today come right out of this document. It's pretty much a summary in those 20 or so slides of what's in our current 2018 master plan. A quick word about my background. I've lived in Columbia now for 27 years. First, 19, I was actually in private practice as a partner in an architectural firm. And in the last eight, I've had the fortune of being associated with university as their university architect. I just mentioned my name is Derek Booner. And it's given me an opportunity to sort of be in the business community as well as being part of the university. And for a long while now, I have felt that the university as a place of university in the city of Columbia benefit enormously from the presence of each other. There is no doubt in my mind that the University of South Carolina is more attractive because of the quality of life that the city of Columbia offers. But also, I believe that the quality of life in the city of Columbia is much enhanced by the presence of the University of South Carolina. And I firmly believe that. And it really forms the basis of everything that I think about for our city and for our university. I think it is certainly fair to say that the relationship between the university and their host community, wherever it is now, it has certainly evolved since the 60s and 70s. I think both parties were just kind of doing what each wanted. Universities in general, certainly ours, did some pretty insensitive things with respect to neighborhoods. But you're going to see in some of these older master plans and underscored in our new master plan that we have now much more profound respect for the adjacent neighborhoods to the university. And I would have to say we've got a pretty good relationship with the University Hill. And our campus village project that you're going to see in a moment gave us a great opportunity to work with the neighborhoods to the southeast of us, all the way through this hill. A couple of other quick facts. We are one of the top stadium employers. We have over 7,000 faculty and staff at the university. Our budget is in excess of a billion dollars just in Columbia. System-wide, the university's budget is about 1.6 billion. And based on some data, it's probably a couple years old now, but our students, they spend about $200 billion of discretionary money annually, which a good portion of that goes to things like restaurants that run the hospitality tax. And lastly, I'll just say a quick anecdote to emphasize this belief that we're both better for the presence of the other. In addition to our main jobs on the university, leaving the university architect and just a lot of folks here at the university, we all have our primary jobs, but we're also all ambassadors for the university. And when I walk on the board shoe, I'll always see parents and their child who's here touring the university to see if they want to come here. I don't know if you know this now, but it's not like when we all went to college where we maybe picked three or four schools. Students now apply to 20 or 30 universities. And they visit most of them too. So when I see these families on the board shoe, all they have to do is look down at a piece of paper, and I'm going to assume it's a map, which gives me the entree to go up to them and introduce myself and see if I can help them find where it is that they're trying to go and they usually do need a little bit of help, which I love providing. And then I'll get into a conversation of where are they from and what major is their child interested in. But the story that I hear quite often is they'll say that they came in from out of state or out of town. They've never been to Columbia before and they stayed in hotels and where it was just for the names you put it. And they got out and walked around that night and they did not realize what a vibrant city Columbia is. And then they'll go on to say standing in the board shoe, what a beautiful park-like setting this is and how these two worlds are so different, but they're right next to one another too. And it just brings me a lot of joy to hear that. It tells me that the university has maintained the environment and maybe you can see the love in their eyes. We have a saying that if you can get people to visit the campus and get them on the board shoe, we kind of got them.  Just one slide each. The preponderance of today will be looking at the 2018 master plan. If there's questions, please drop to me. So 1994, when the Bicentennial master plan, we employed Sasaki to come to campus. I don't think we had a master plan in quite a number of years. This is the old image that came out of that. And it provided a certain framework, but I think the most enduring thing that came out of that was it redirected our road to the west and away from the university-built neighborhoods, the neighborhoods here. It tends to grow more in the direction of the river. Then in 2007, I know you'll recall, it's in a VISTA master plan. This is prior to my time at the university. I came to the university in 2011. But there was this plan by Sasaki to privately develop the land, the kind of west of the railroad cut and dashed the street on down to a riverfront park. You can see the different phases of that that were endorsed on the city. Where we are now, the phase one green street from Assembly to Gadsden has been completed, which includes Foundation Square. Here we've gone from Assembly to About Gadsden. The second phase is going to go from Gadsden over to, well, really all the way to UG Street with the bridge over the railroad. That's been in design for some time now, and the construction is slated to begin late 2019. That's part of the penny tax. And then the third phase was to continue William Street along the river. And I don't know the timing on that, but it certainly will be after phase two. So in 2010, Sasaki came back to our campus and gave us an update. There had been little milestones between 1994 and 2010, but this was a rather complete re-look again at the campus. And part of what precipitated that was our expectation that between 2010 and 2015 we'd grow by 1600 undergraduate students. We did, in fact, grow by that amount and actually much more quickly than 2015. It also said that we had a lot of campus space that maybe wasn't being fully utilized rather than building new buildings, trying to optimize the space that we have. And it also renewed the sense of integrity that we should have toward our joining neighborhoods. And it brought Rocky Branch Creek into the discussion. That's this greenway that you see here coming through campus. We all know where Rocky Branch Creek is. We all know about the flooding that affects the neighborhoods and the university and the Olympic Hill all the way down. There was this notion that to be more respectful of this environment, try to alleviate the flooding conditions, maybe even remove some campus buildings that are in the flood plain and make it a greenway. That has not really been fully realized yet, but it's something that's still very much part of what we want to do there. So I'm bringing you up now to the 2018 master plan. Part of what justified the work of Sasaki again and take another look eight years later from 2010 was our current enrollment plan that over 10 years from about 2016 to 2025 suggested there could be a possibility of growth of about $5 a student. So what does that mean in terms of the number of classrooms we have in labs, in student union space, in housing, all those things that go with an expansion and enrollment. And this growth is not unique to USC, although it's somewhat extraordinary compared to other places in the university. We have become very popular in the last few years, but still you're seeing growth really in all the public play shifts around the country. As I said, when we get folks to visit our university and see the environment of Columbia and our campus, we're growing. People really do want to be here. And we have some very highly ranked academic programs, of course, our business school, our engineering school that brings Obing State, not-a-state students to the campus. I asked them to look back at 2010, see what things that maybe had not been accomplished and what should still be an aspiration for us. And around the fall of 2016, we had begun working with Krista Hampton, John Fellows and a lot of city staff with this idea that we would do some improvements to South Main Street from Pendleton down to Lawson. So we were really in the thick of working with the city in a collaborative way, a lot of different fronts. So the 2018 master plan really reflected what was going on at that moment with Sasaki helping us with Main Street and with the city. So the master plan continues to look for opportunities to work with the city and then just provide some guidance for other campus developments that we had going on, such as the university policy. I also asked the 2018 master plan just for a historical perspective to give a quick nod to what we had accomplished since 2010. I won't dwell on this, but you can see from these numbers the university accomplished quite a bit. There was certainly some new structures including the Darnellmore School of Business, Law School and some athletic facilities, 650 Lincoln housing, but this renovated building number also is meaningful to me. Before I came to the university, I was a design architect. I designed a great many buildings in Columbia. I had the fortune to do that. When you come to the university, what you find yourself in as an architect is a little bit of a different role. You're now a steward. You are helping some new development, trying to restore and refresh what you have because we have over 200 buildings on our campus and over 12 million square feet. In that eight years, at least a dozen or so buildings were taken and comprehensively renovated, meaning all the mechanical systems, roofs, windows, and it took a building that maybe hadn't had that level of work in 30 or more years and essentially you made a new building. This includes many buildings on the horseshoe that you would know, some of the business halls. Hamilton, for instance, you may have noticed all the windows and air conditioners went out of Hamilton in 2014 and I could go on and on with these projects and frankly it just kind of warms my heart to bring these buildings back to life and make them healthy again for the students and the faculty. Also we did our first public-private partnership at 650 Lincoln, which is something new at the university. So among the more memorable things about the 2018 plan, we wanted to continue generally infill densification, meaning that we're not trying to expand and build new buildings on land outside our periphery. We have to be sensitive to how long it takes a student to walk from one side of the campus to the other with a 20-minute class change. So we would look for opportunities where we maybe had parking lots in our campus or areas that are just not sufficiently dense to expand square footage. We did look at the classroom and lab, looked at the space, invited the enrollment row and obviously if you grow your student volume you have to get them from one place to another at 20 minutes. You start to think about those connections, the streetways, sidewalks, and how do you make it convenient to say that's another rather profound realization that has that came to the university was the importance of the quality of a street and the landscaping on just the quality of life. It's really more important than the individual buildings. The campus is more important than any one building or view the sum of the buildings. The campus is what matters and the streets are so essential for creating the character of the campus. You're going to see a rather expansive and very aspirational plan for the engineering district down here in Swaringham and we have a desperate need for student life space. So there's about 10 or so planning priorities that are in this 2018 master plan and I'm going to go through about 7 or 8 of them that I think are relative to the planning commission. First of all, this is the most recent campus plan that tries to project growth all the way out through about 2050. You can see this occurring theme of respecting the sanctity of the neighborhoods, the infill that I mentioned and also the analysis of the number of classrooms we would need for that enrollment growth and the availability of classroom space and as we build out the old law school we think is going to provide us enough space for labs and classrooms. So I just say that the importance of that statement is that we don't see ourselves building another academic building at least until after 2025 based on what we think right now. I mentioned the connections. Sasaki took a look at this and tried to determine where are people moving mostly on campus and explained the importance of these four key connectors. Obviously Green Street has been so pivotal to the Invista master plan since 2007. It's really the main east-west connector on campus connecting the horseshoe and even east campus eventually one day all the way into the river. Marion Street is important in that it connects the horseshoe down to the athletics village with the campus village right here along this path so thousands and thousands of students traverse that walkway every day. Main Street finds itself now really in the middle of our campus geographically. As we start out here with the horseshoe we see that Main Street is in the core. We think that Main Street can be improved. You're going to see some images for that. This seeks to one day join the engineering quadrangle here with this incubator tech corridor that I think is described that way I guess in your zoning words. The engineering district just to give you some points of reference this is Swearingham, the 1980's large building there that's founded by assembly to the west and Main Street here to the east. This we think about is really kind of a forgotten area of campus. In fact there are streets down there that don't even have sidewalks. When our students pass underneath the railroad bridge they have to actually walk out into the road it's just an area that doesn't match the level of development and refinement the rest of the campus has. So when Saki came back in 2018 we wanted to focus them on this area and you'll recall that some of this comes obviously in the 2010 plan where Rocky Branch Creek would be a greenway but anticipating that the College of Engineering will grow as most of our STEM majors are right now they looked at ways to add square footage with some new buildings on land that we currently own and also actually remove a building we call 300 Main which is right here right now on Main Street it's an old SCEG facility has rather enormous maintenance speeds but also is in the flood plain of Rocky Branch Creek which comes right here this is where we've had so much flooding in the past we don't even allow students to park on the empty lot next to the building so with this plan the hope to achieve one day is 300 Main is removed from this flood plain and this square footage is just replaced in other buildings and we have a greenway that can be followed all the way down and the river sidewalks to be improved in this area will become something that looks more like what we all associate with the University you see that image up there swearing that they are the distance to the left with the water feature here and by the way there isn't really no timetable for those buildings that you see here the University right now has other priorities and this being one of them Campus Village we started receiving this project probably the whole way back in 2015 talking to the neighbors and this one really evolved over the next 2 or 3 years and I have to say that the involvement of the neighbors really made this a better project too it became more than just buildings it got into conversations about safety guides how students are walking to 5 points and traffic counts and parking I hosted and this is one day realized that this becomes a model for the University for the interaction but what this will do is take the area that right now is populated by Bates I was kind of roughly in this area in Bates West and Cliff Apartments in an enormous 6 acre surface parking lot which right here all those buildings are really at the end of their useful life this plan would demolish those 3 buildings and come back and increase the bed count from around 1400 just there now up to 3,750 about 8 buildings that are all shorter than the buildings the buildings that are there now vary from about 8 floors to about 15 floors so the trick for us was we want more beds because we have desperate need to house more students on campus particularly the freshmen we mandated they live on campus and we have a lot of sophomores that want to live on campus and have enough residents on campus beds to satisfy them we wanted to increase the amount of green space and in the landscape if like what you see it gives green or horseshoe and create an architecture that is a little bit more transitional not ultra traditional but also not contemporary and modern but something that would blend with adjacent neighborhoods and be something that I think people would love for many decades to conceive these to these 60 to 80 year buildings steel structures concrete floors cast stone and masonry skins this is not wood framing construction here so this is the most current design as to where this project stands the delivery method of whether it will be a public private partnership or whether the university will sort of self-develop this in a traditional way we do that in conjunction with the state legislature and the joint bond review committee and I think we're probably just a few months away from determining what that delivery method would be and we hope to have the first phase of this building around 2022 the first phase really is this piece right here when this is complete that the students move out of Bates House and Bates West and move into these buildings Bates buildings will be torn down and will arrive really only to four stories whereas most of these are about six we decided to step down the density as you get closer to the neighborhood here we actually have also designed this in such a way that we can demonstrate there will be less cars on the way at least for the result of this one now adding parking space that we worked with the city to actually reduce the number of parking spaces required by Bates because we're finding that less students have access to cars to campus it's a great trend there's something we very, very much want to support like how to take care of the cars and take value of space parking decks are also expensive to build there is one parking structure right here that has the same number of spaces that is currently in the district and students that have the permit to park here will not have a permit to park anywhere else on campus so there's no motive for getting in your car and that's really one of the keynote strategies for keeping the amount of particular traffic on Waley Street down to current levels or even less we're also going to upgrade the safety of this railroad crossing so that's Campus Village another project that I'm sure many of you have heard about is this health science campus that we want to construct over a great number of years I was close to being profiting the intersection of this is Hardin Street here in C Colonial Drive there's some land that's been set aside to do this health science campus part of us driving this is currently the School of Medicine with the University resides out there to be a dorm facility we have a lease with the federal government that expires in 2030 and the government has made it clear that they need space back they want to take this space back for the better so we're looking for a 2030 clock that's counting down to where we're going to have to vacate our School of Medicine and move it somewhere else and we've determined that this is an ideal location because of its proximity to the Clemental Health Campus and the University also has some clinical buildings over here so we see the opportunity to create this health science campus that we have a medical teaching building first that's our highest priority and then a research building second to have other buildings that would come over the future for instance maybe one day other programs that are synergistic with health sciences could come here and free up space in existing buildings on the Clemental Campus which then means we don't have to try to construct new buildings on the Clemental Campus which is about two miles from here you may wonder why are you worried about something in 2030 things move very slow and consciously at the University along with funding challenges and state approvals we have to start thinking 12 years in advance our law school we spent more than 12 years but that was really actually in our front windshield right now I also mentioned this desire to connect the campus to the Congre River this is something that's architected I'm enormously excited about and I hope to see in my time the two main connection opportunities are Green Street which we've already talked about goes back to that 2007 plan and that went out I feel pretty good about block by block we have been improving Green Street with the support of the University Hill neighborhood which I remain very grateful to have we were able to close the segment of Green Street right in front of the Russell House and now our students when they come out of the Russell House they can just walk across the street we can have functions in the street because we cater those ends and then in phase one of the end of this plan Foundation Square is complete phase two is getting ready to begin so the bike lanes, the wider sidewalks the trees are going to make that a wonderful street Rocky Branch is still this challenge out there to be realized but when we do it's going to be just a tremendous opportunity for students and the neighbors to ride bikes all the way to the river and then connect with the sidewalks down the river and also connect with the development I'm going to show you a little bit to the south here in just a moment also I mentioned student union space as I said before when enrollment grows the services that the university provides is amazingly broad those services have to grow with sometime long about maybe the 50s universities start being just a place with a lot of classrooms and people want to get an education they became like a city within the city all of a sudden we had to provide more student health disability services dining opportunities recreation opportunities and we're not unique in this all the places that universities are doing this because the expectations that the students have now is just I'm certain like we have not really expanded the Russell house since I guess the mid 70s you can only imagine whatever enrollment growth has done since then I think it's probably fair to say it's at least triple and so we've been studying for some time now strategies to expand the amount of space in our student union which what it means by that is the student union comprises things like meeting space for the students particularly after hours meetings dining platforms that serve food that is as good as most restaurants in Columbia if that's what the expectation is entertainments game rooms all of those items along with some retail in the bookstore we haven't expanded our since the 70s we now are really the last school in the SEC not the endless student union expansion so we're focused on that some of the options that we're looking at is an adaptive reuse of Carolina Coliseum we have gone as far as just to conjecture what might a renovated Coliseum look like so these are not plans that are approved this will change but all these serve to try and do is to inform people that the old Carolina Coliseum can look completely different than what it looks like right now it could be completely reprogrammed there is no funding in place for this I showed this today with this caution this is really just an artist conception of what could happen there we're also going to look at an expansion to the Russell house to see if that's a more economical alternative than an adaptive reuse of the Coliseum but also the South Main Street I'm going to come to it in a couple more slides we see that with improvements that is going to happen starting late 2019 we hope that private sector developments will come into South Main Street create some restaurants maybe some appropriate housing other things that will create a draw for our students in addition to buy points again this is now right in the heart of our campuses this suggests and this is just a short distance from so many underclassmen, freshmen undergrad residents all Main Street has a chance to be something just tremendous in support of our student life the highlight need that we have is outdoor recreation fields we lag well behind all the standards of measurement that suggest that if you have an undergrad enrollment of X you should have this number of multi-purpose fields this number of soccer fields, baseball fields tennis court all those things are actually rules for that and we're woefully behind in that but you can kind of imagine the challenge that the University of South Carolina has because we're an urban campus our campus is still very much dictated by the grid that was laid out by McGinger in the 1780s with land cost downtown to go out and buy enough land to make a multi-purpose field is prohibitively expensive and nor should that really be how urban land is I like mid-rise lots of density because you create a cohesive fabric that way when you have surface parking lots and big gaps in that fabric it's detrimental to the character of the city more of a campus but this opportunity here that presents itself it was 300 acres down by the river that was purchased by our University Development Foundation a few years ago with the thought that first of all it's really all of the flood plain or virtually all of the flood plain so it's not a good candidate for any kind of vertical development but it's ideal for intramural recreation fields for the students so we're going to start pretty soon determining how might this be laid out to give you an orientation this is Bluff Road this is National Guard Road you can see when it's just creeping in the upper right corner there and Gamecock Park we'll be able to run shuttles back and forth from campus to get students back and forth from these rec fields but we know from real data we're using our rec fields two and three times in that intensity that we should because we don't have enough and as I mentioned before about Rocky Branch Creek if we can get Rocky Branch Creek with the Greenway one day to the river well it's not too far fetched to imagine that the Greenway along the river on this side could link down here you could easily ride a bike from your door along the Rocky Branch Creek get to the river and bike down what excites me about this is that I just think that this would be one of more memorable things about the University one day if you were on USC there would be acres and acres of rec fields on the river okay South Main Street I mentioned back in the fall of 2016 a group with the University had this idea that South Main Street really needs to take on some of the improvements that we've seen on the North Main Street the car counts are really low on that street because of course it terminates at the state house at the north end and it kind of peters out down around the way of the street to the south and there's true traffic on that street it has two lanes door, two lanes south turning lanes and there's just very very low traffic volume so as we were thinking about streets and connectivity what we started to imagine was maybe we could reduce the lanes keep on street parking in most cases but then develop bike lanes and wider sidewalks so there could be cafe seating in this restaurant so we had this idea we came up with some input from Sasaki Court so we started having public meetings with the various private sector landowners in these eight blocks a number of history three or four public sessions and we were talking about the development of the plan and with a lot of collaborative help from the City Plans to how Kristen and John sent in us notably we came together with this vision of what this corridor could be and indeed the Department of Transportation is now engaged with this and they're working on the design that the City and University created together so what you have existing up top you see the power lines and all of this asphalt and I didn't just take that picture when there was no cars you can kind of just walk out there and say take a photograph it looks pretty much like that again absolutely just an artist's conception of the way and the bikes and then some private sector development in this kind of mid-range four to six stories which is what the design overlay for this area now we request to do but you can see that still we can get an enormous amount of pro square footage in this corridor and again please look at this purely just as an artist's conception it's just this notion that if you have some parking structures and some public housing and commercial kind of around it University doesn't control all this land a lot of this state some of it is private but it's just trying to foster a vision for what this corridor can become and also we very much wanted to keep a good sight line to the dome of the capital I can even imagine when this is done it would be much like what happens in Northside when you close the streets and have an artist have a street service applauded by those students this brings me to near the end of my talk I wanted to just give a nod to the rewrite of the zoning ordinance which offers this opportunity to University and large hospitals to form their own zoning district in their realm called the institutional university and medical district and if a university or a hospital wants to participate in this what they're obligated to do is working with city staff develop an institutional development plan so what that plan will do is sort of define the realm that we see as the university realm fully acknowledging though that within that realm private property properties it's commercial there's private housing but what would be the character of that district that preserves the things I started out talking about today is the importance of good architecture of good streets and landscape and quality design that's what gives the university character and we're rather passionate about protecting it because it's part of our realm is what we think makes us successful you see there's some of the things I just mentioned that we would be trying to do with IDP is to preserve that sense of building heights and scale and mask that people identify as what the university is really all about so what I'm showing you here is something that we would be working on in the future going forward but we're really pleased with the way that the zoning rewrite is going frankly if you all know it was high time to do this there's a lot of demographics of this new rewrite there's so much more user friendly we look forward to working with the city and going through this process and ultimately that IDP as you see here would be approved by the European Commission and City Council I guess that would be later in 2019 or 2020 so I tried to go really swiftly that's the last slide I have I'm going to take a question that you might have any thoughts on the old Carolina Coliseum what you might be thinking about and after attending an event at the New Colonial Life Center any plans for better parking and access in and out of a colonial life the Carolina Coliseum built in 1969 still has one floor building that's academic we still have a program we're going to continue to use that for academics for the foreseeable future until we raise enough money to do the adaptive renovation that you saw on the slide but what we've looked at for the Coliseum with the most detail right now is more student union space that would include a ballroom taking advantage of some of the height that we have but it would take the stands it would just about be a gut but lots of student meeting space, dining, some retail we'd love to find some public private opportunities there as well companies that might come in and lease some space from the university so we can generate some revenue those artist conceptions I showed you are enormously expensive north of a hundred million we have a lot of priority right now but ideally that's what we'd like to do with the Carolina Coliseum I think it's fine to look at you you've focused most of the students the Colonial Life Arena as the parking you asked about part of the Phase 2 Green Street project requires that the facilities organization relocate I don't know how many of you know where facilities is but if you're driving down Green Street heading west heading toward the river you have Colonial Life on your right you might remember there's a one-story non-descript building there and that's actually where the facilities offices are to maintain the university that's hundreds of employees hundreds of service vehicles pick up trucks trash trucks every imaginative type of vehicle is all right there it finds itself now in the middle of a kind of burgeoning in a Vista district and because of the Phase 2 Green Street and the bridge over the railroad it's really time for facilities to move to relocating facilities for the Vista what that's going to do then is free up that land and with the help of Derek Huygens our Vice President of the Facilities of Transportation we're looking at options of providing student commuter parking there next to Colonial Life it could also be dealt with for some event parking so that's how we want to try to add parking we have thoughts about a garage in that area we see diminishing numbers of students bringing cars we're trying to be very very careful we don't build parking structures that will over part the university in the future and that's a trend we're seeing in universities too we have this shuttle program that picks up people in other places on campus now and takes them to sporting events that Colonial Life ran in and put them along and that has helped with the parking stress that's near Colonial Life so we recognize that when 650 Lincoln was developed it took some parking at that district and we were able to move that parking around I know when there were popular events we were trying to spread the parking you talked a little bit about I talked a lot about the west side and the south side what about along Jarve Street on that northern end of the campus do you have any additional plans of that way we've seen some things come through more and more the university was not necessarily upon and while so I just wanted to see if you could talk to some of your plans we had a concern about a proposed development that we thought was going to do a very tall building in the area when I think about the university realm I'm thinking south of Jarve and so that was a concern as it was for the neighborhood but as far as the university developing anything along that border there's really nothing in our plans we our foundation took possession of the Whaley House which was sort of gifted to the university we're looking at various users for that house but that's a historic house we're not going to remove that house replace that house with here there's renovated and put a roof in that house I think the university even controls everything and walked away our growth is really going to be to the west and south speaking of the university development foundation can you tell me how the buildings and property that they currently own fit into this plan or are they entirely separate I'd say it probably runs to both ends of that spectrum there are certain pieces of property that the development foundation the Whaley House that when the timing is right when the university has funding the university will acquire it from the development foundation like the 300 acres I'll show you there are other financial property holdings that they have that are not to be acquired on the university I could be a student but our foundation functions like a lot of development foundations and universities they have they can be a little bit more nimble with property acquisitions that for the university to acquire property is a long drawn out state process it sometimes takes longer than what a certain seller might want to wait the seller wants to sell these property university I have to tell them it will take at least a year so the development foundation can sometimes have its own mission which is to be financially self-supported so they have to make business decisions also that the foundation was involved in the 650 Lincoln project and so they have an interest in that and 650 Lincoln didn't mention this but it's just performing 100% occupancy the students want to live there that's an example of the foundation yeah I guess part of what I think about in terms of the development foundation is the situation with the women's club on Lawson Street that was didn't seem to be handled very well and also was not good communication between the neighborhood and the university so when you talk about this larger plan and the idea of the development foundation really it almost seems like no responsibility to this plan and no commitment to ensuring that they develop the property that they own congruent to this plan so that seems problematic yeah there's some overlap with the agreement of the rent deals but the women's club was well by the foundation frankly my office wasn't aware of what was going on with the women's club I hate to say that's one of those cases where I don't know that there was much of any development foundation they had been trying to sell that land for some number of years I thought they had a deal with a group that was going to preserve the building that I learned really just a couple of days before demolition that someone else was buying it and I don't really know what the plans are I drive by it every day in this club every day for 27 years I think but I guess my concern is that you're saying that that was a problem and I think that's agreed to be a problem my concern is the university development foundation is still a part of the university and that there appears to be no accountability to the plan that you're describing and so I'll just say again that that's concerning because I there's almost like no input no coming back to accountability or they, you know, you say they're nimble that's great but they also seem to have their own rules they are their own organization community follow I think that they got I hope they weren't causing it Derek are there any, what do you foresee as the development on South Maine and also my last question is I hope you develop and take advantage of the river that hasn't been done in this city there's more about the river I'd love to see development on the river front well we would too that's where Rocky Branch in Greenwichia, I talk about reaching the river or students the river everybody knows is a great, untapped opportunity to resource with the city so I share that University priorities have to also get to remember to be focused on what are the students paying for future missions our mission is really on campus but we wholeheartedly support the river front part but as for development on South Maine the private land can be developed and I think we're at the highest best use are by those landowners I just know that when you look at a few historic buildings our plan with development acknowledges the importance of those buildings to the fabric but also parking lots, service lots these chairs in the cohesiveness of that street we just don't think it's the highest and best use of that land so part of our belief is if we can improve the street and create what I show you in this room it becomes something to desire per project now the university does own some of the blocks along that street and one day near law school we may do an academic building that would contribute to the street but as you get up to those blocks closer to the panel we are talking also to the state trying to get them to think about what the highest best use is I guess it's the old law school first are you referring to the old law school? yeah so yeah the old law school is right here and this right now is the parking lot we've had a thought for a long time that we would agree on that and the law school doesn't make a very good edge to main street right now there's an auditorium there clunky geometrically so maybe one day we develop an academic building here that contributes to the facades that are on the street but we know that there's private holdings here with the market any other questions? thank you very much I guess if there are no other questions we'll adjourn motion to adjourn


Welcome to the webinar on Implementing Pure at the University of Western Australia. So my name is Keith Russell, I work for ANS, I'm a Partnerships Program Manager and I'm a host for today and a big thank you to my colleagues Suzanne Sabine and Natasha Simons who are co-hosting the webinar with me today. This webinar is part of a larger series of webinars that we've been organising here at ANS on what we call Research Data Information Integration and we've been doing this together with Coal, the Council of Australian University Librarians and I'd like to acknowledge and thank the Council of Australian University Librarians for also broadcasting and making this possible. The first five webinars in this series have been around systems that use at institutions capturing information about research data, so these have been things around research data management planning tools, systems managing research data ethics, data storage, data publishing and data preservation. So just to give you a bit of context around this, so research we see is changing globally and one change is the greater focus on research data as a real first class research output and so we're collaborating with the research sector here in Australia to promote better management of research data and encourage change in research culture so that research data will be actually will be recognised as that first class research output to make sure that research data is better managed, better described and published and that in turn will allow for better reuse and availability of research data down the track and one of the elements in this process is capturing information about research data and making sure that it is discoverable, not just the data itself but also associated information about the data. So as we've been talking to institutions around Australia we've noticed that a lot of institutions are revisiting the systems that they had in place or still have in place and these systems are used often to collect information about the research data. So as we were talking one of the institutions we were talking to was the University of Western Australia and they mentioned that they were implementing PURE as a research information management system and not only were they implementing PURE as a RIMS but also looking at how they could capture information about research data in that system so we said ah that's really interesting and we'd love to hear a bit more. So we're really grateful that Katina was willing to provide some time and prepare some slides and give a presentation about how the implementation of PURE has progressed and especially from the research data side of things what it means to capture information about research data in PURE and make that available. So please note that this is PURE is just one of several research information management systems that are out there on the market and we also would like to in to the future see if we can share experiences of other systems in this space too. So we'll be managing this webinar today and include and try and bring that discussion together and see any questions you might have. I would now like to introduce our speaker for today. So Katina Tufeces works at the Library of the University of Western Australia. She works there as the coordinator in the research publication and data services unit. In this role she was involved in the implementation of PURE. So I'd like to welcome Katina and thank her again for making time available to share her experiences with us. So over to you, Katina. Thank you, Keith and thank you to Anne's for asking me to present on this topic. I'm just going to say that I'm obviously here to talk about the UWA's research data repository and data migration project in particular. We're currently nearing the end of this project to migrate from our current system, which is D-Space to PURE and I'm speaking to you from these red arrows. So back in 2009 to 2013, just to give you some context on how we got to where we are now, the UWA Library received Anne's funding for three major research data projects and two of these projects produced our current data repository systems, research data online, which is the D-Space system and research data hub, which is our harvester from the D-Space system into research data Australia. I'll soon display a slide to show how complex these systems were and how they interacted with each other. Research data online, the D-Space system, it allowed our researchers to directly upload their data sets via their FEMI login. In total, we have 136 data sets in RDO at the moment. And I'm not going to go into great detail about this current system because we will be decommissioning it soon, but I'd like to take you through some snapshots so you can see how our current data sets are viewed and what our researchers are currently using. So this first slide will show you a list of communities on the left hand menu. It's a typical D-Space kind of environment and the collections within each community are at the bottom of the screen. The next slide is an example of a dataset record as they currently sit in UWA and the RDO system. So that's one of our major open data projects that we've got there that feeds into research data Australia. And that schematic diagram I was talking about, well, this shows all of our UWA sources and how the systems interact with each other, particularly for our research data sets. The web applications were highly customized in D-Space in particular to meet the initial requirements from the ANS projects. So you can see that D-Space is used to upload the data sets and import descriptive metadata and Vivo was used to link grants, researchers, publishing, publications to feed straight through to research data Australia. Our intention at the start of the project was to eventually use Vivo as a researcher profiling system, but that's something that never eventuated, which is very common in these sorts of projects. You can never tell what's to come. If all that looked confusing, well, it is, and we really wanted to simplify our systems within the institution. We also wanted to address longstanding issues which we had with our current system, particularly with community creation. You saw those communities on the left hand side that couldn't be done by the library. We had to work with IT and their priorities to code to change the code and make script changes when researchers wanted to upload their data. It was a very lengthy, tedious process. Researchers were left waiting and that's never an ideal situation. And as a result, the system was also considered very clunky and, you know, with good reason. Also, the D-Space version that we're using is so highly customized that we can never update it. And there are consistent upload tool errors with a really dated appearance and functionality. DIY creation is also a manual process. It's not done automatically when researchers upload their data sets. And there's no reporting mechanism in the system. So everything needs to be done manually there as well. This space, as I said, needs Vivo to work hand in hand to harvest into ends. Unfortunately, there are consistent harvesting errors that we get and we're using a staging database which is being used to link data sets, people, grants, publications, which itself has recurring issues. So we have an aging system and with all of its existing problems. It's served us well, but definitely time for a change. And we recently acquired a new system to manage our publications and theses. This means that we're effectively managing two separate systems, two separate repositories, which is completely unnecessary. Pure is a current research information system, a CRIS, which holds our pubs and theses and these are linked to our grants and our researcher profiles. Pure enables us to build reports, carry out performance assessments, manage researcher profiles and enable research discovery. Digital theses records are manually created by Pure by our staff in the research and publications and data services unit here at the library. The research output content under the thesis template, that's just a snapshot of the admin section, how this is also what researchers see when they want to upload a thesis. And on the left hand side, the theses there appear on the menu. PlumX, we have been integrated last year and we built an integration with Pure to create a PlumX dashboard and track metrics using data from the repository. We collate the metrics by various groups, researchers, school faculty and we embedded the PlumX widget into the UWA research repository. We're currently also investigating free altmetric API to implement and display altmetric donuts on the repository output records. The donuts will allow users to click through the four altmetric detail pages. And we have also recently integrated Pure with Orchard and researchers can now log into Pure, create and connect their Orchard ID. Once a researcher has created their Orchard ID, the Pure has the right to push output and limited affiliation data with their Orchard records. This functionality was made available when Pure was rolled out to researchers earlier this last month in April. And data sets, unfortunately, can't be pushed from Pure to Orchard, which is something we've discovered. So we embarked on the dSpace to Pure migration project. The project aims to deliver a range of benefits, improving the architecture by consolidating our research repository systems, reduction of time spent by IT managing and maintaining the old dSpace system, getting a better user experience for researchers who want to upload their data sets quickly and UWA researcher compliant with new institutional requirements and publisher and funder research data management requirements. And there is a greater potential for ongoing development of the service because it's part of a greater global community of users and they use the Pure system for research data management, particularly in Europe and the UK, enhanced system support through vendor partnership. So when we have issues, we can lodge jurors and have Pure support help us out there and also Pure enables us to link together data sets and publications arising from the same research grant, which is which is exactly what we needed. Our project team and project board members are a mixed group of individuals from both the library and IT. UWA has recently gone through a renewal process and what was was known as the research unit in the library is now known as research publication and data services. And this small team created quite a few documents for the project. And these are just a few. And currently we're going through the implementation process and redesigning the pure portal in development so that we can roll out quickly. So as with every project, there's always game game stoppers and it was imperative that we ensured that there was no data loss from the current data sets to pure so that we had no loss of DIYs or any any of the metadata that was input in there or their files associated. We really wanted to maintain the ability to harvest into research data Australia and obviously meet the minimum risk as requirements for that and enable researchers to again upload their data sets with minimal intervention from library or IT staff. And one of our hopes was to automatically produce DIYs for them as they're uploading their data sets. So if we look at the migration project, we asked Elsevier, the owners of pure to automatically transfer the existing data sets from D space to pure. But for various reasons, we decided that we should manually transfer our 136 data sets because it would take a lot of time to map the transfer, which we didn't have. And there were so few data sets that human error was considered minimal. Also, there were bound to be errors with that automatic transfer. So where fields don't map properly and we would need to manually test the transfer anyway. And pure has also has a lot more fields available for data sets and such as licensing. And we would need to contact each researcher individually to determine the licensing for each data set, which already exists in D space. So we wanted to minimize doubling up on our on our resources. So we were also told that we wouldn't be able to automatically transfer the data set files themselves. The records, the metadata records would be fine. But the files would be lost. So we would manually have to transfer them anyway to each record. So we did the whole lot ourselves in a matter of few days. And it was actually pretty simple. I also want to highlight one of the recent accomplishments in the project. And that's the development of a crosswalk from pure to research data Australia. I want to mention Melanie Barlow, who is a technical analyst for Anson, the ACT, and she to get we together developed a crosswalk, which would be beneficial for any other institutions in the future who wish to use the harvest, who want to harvest their data sets into research data Australia. Pure doesn't include data sets in the OAI handler. And therefore we needed to we needed this method to harvest data sets into RDA. We've raised this as an issue with OSEVIA and as a potential development for future release releases of pure. But for the time being, we've developed this crosswalk as a workaround and this has been set to harvest at regular intervals. So none of this has been done outside of the demo environment. But we know that it works. Along with this are all the obligatory procedures and test scripts that we'll need to do each time we update, upgrade pure to a newer release just to ensure that the harvest isn't affected. I mentioned earlier that another one of our must haves from the project was to automatically generate DOIs for the data sets. Currently, pure is configured to mint DOIs but only directly from data site itself. That that created a bit of a roadblock for us. From our point of view, it would have been great if we could configure pure to meet data site, to mint the data, the data site DOIs through the ends back in there to mint the DOIs. But we're currently in discussions with ANZ and OSEVIA and we do have manual workarounds for this. So what we've done when a researcher is submitting their data set, they will have an option to send it for validation or keep it aside so that they can work on it later. So what we've included in that step for our staff is as we're looking through the data set to validate it, we will then go to ANZ and manually create a DOI and put that into their submission for them. Of course, that's not an automatically generated DOI where they don't have to wait for it, but it's the next best thing at the moment. So as we speak, we're testing the data sets in the development portal site for pure. And this is the data sets browse page. And we've just got a couple of test data sets there. Once this is complete, we will move this to production and begin the rollout to our researchers. If we click on the data sets in the left hand menu, now this will be what the public will see if we click on the data sets, the full list of data sets would appear here and you could sort them by title, created date or modified date. This is an image of the data set metadata record in the front facing portal and there are four tabs across the top. The overview tab shows the full metadata record, including the openly accessible files that are on the right with the DOIs. We have an internal and external creator in this example and the internal creator links to the researchers profile. And this particular data set can be linked or all data sets can be linked to grants, projects in this. That's what we've called them in pure projects. Related links such as websites are on this page. And if we scroll down that screen, you'll see that we've got links and related content such as other data sets that they're related to. Remember, this is the development site that we're testing all these in. And we have got prizes, activities, equipment and press and media, which we haven't enabled in production for our research pubs and theses at the moment. But it's definitely something that we're looking into currently. There is also a statistics tab for each data set. And we're just we're just having a look at what the scopus citations actually means for data sets there. We're not entirely sure we've got a we've got a grasp on that. But the plum X integration allows us to gather data set stats. And at the very bottom of that screen, there's a graph which shows the number of downloads from the pure portal itself. As this is a development site, this isn't visible if you go to our pure portal at the moment. The reference style tab generates a data site citation for the data set. And as I said, this was the front end in the admin view of our data sets. This is what pure looks like. So when a researcher would log in with their theme, they would see a more personalized view of their profile and what data sets they're linked to. On the left hand side of the menu there, you'll see that this is the admin view and this is what we see all of the 136 data sets, which we have transferred from D space, waiting for us to make public once the rollout occurs. We open up an existing data set file from within the back end. This is what it would look like when a researcher would want to upload a data set. They would answer or populate all these fields as appropriate. And we can scroll down and see that we can scroll back up. You've got the title, description, temporal coverage, geolocations and all the people that are associated with the data set and various roles that they have. And further down the screen, there's the data availability section where you upload, you can drag and drop your data sets directly in there and apply a license to them, whether you can also apply an embargo to them, make them private, restricted, public. You can also add physical data. The physical data is right at the bottom of that screen, actually, and you can associate any physical data with this data set and any links and any legal and ethical constraints. All of these items come up on the visible in the portal. And at the very bottom of the screen, when they want to save their work, they can save it, but not as validated, they save it as for validation. So in the future, or really soon, we'll be implementing the data sets module in the portal, hopefully within a few weeks. When this occurs, we're going to disable DSPACE for data set submission. So at the moment, our researchers are submitting to DSPACE still and we're going to redirect all the current handles and DOIs from DSPACE into the pure portal. A researcher pilot group will then be used to test the procedures and provide some feedback, including items, we're going to roll out the data sets, including items in our communication plan and promoting the service for the faculties via emails, website, liaison, communications, and workshops. We're investigating the equipment module because we've had some interest from some research groups here at UWA. And hopefully this will be enabled in the near future. This will be good because we'll be able to link pubs, DCs, data sets with the same grant and piece of equipment. Recent policy changes at UWA are expected to make an impact on the use of this service for data sets. The UWA Code of Contact for the Responsible Practice of Research will now ensure that this service is well used because, and it's also another reason why we're up against the clock with this project, research data related to publications must be available for discussion of other research. This must be managed through the UWA Research Repository. So I thank you for listening, and I invite any questions that you might have. Thanks, Katina. That was really interesting and a great overview of what you've already got in place. The first one is, how do you ensure quality metadata when the researchers upload the data themselves? Well, there is the validation step, and we have some procedures around that that we've developed for our staff here in the library. And there's the standard checking of the dataset record itself. Paula's also asked another question there around the CC licences. We've been giving a lot of information sessions around CC licences here at UWA with our current service as well, although it didn't have the ability to assign CC licences in our D-Space system, we have been giving them advice as to how they should apply it manually to their current dataset. So we're going to continue with those researcher workshops. They're incorporated, we call them researcher workshops, so they're incorporated with other library services and such as EndNote workshops and various other workshops that we have in the library. We incorporate them together. How easy were Pymec and Altmetrics integrated into Pure? Well, we had one of our staff members who are intimately involved in the Pymec and Altmetrics integration, and it was relatively easy to do. If you wanted any more specific information, we can send that through to you. If you just click me an email, that would be easy to do if you're interested in that. And then Jessica was pure implemented as part of a wider university-wide project involving your research as services and faculties. It was with the Office of Research Enterprise, and they were heavily involved with us when we implemented Pure. And she says, I'm interested in how the grant data and profiles were implemented, which sounds like it was outside of the scope of the library's part of the project. I don't know if I understand the question, but it was always part of the scope of the project. The Pure was bought by the university in order to create a better research or profiling system and streamline the grant data straight into that. So, Katina, I was just wondering, you talked about DOI minting and the possibility now to mint DOIs using Pure. Do you have any views or any recommendations to researchers as they're submitting their data sets on minting DOIs? Is it sort of standard procedure now that whenever they submit data, they'll automatically get a DOI, or is it rather sort of that's something they have to turn on? Do they get some advice from the library around that? Well, with Pure, we can enable it to automatically mint DOIs, but we just can't get that direct connection to data site. Data site mints DOIs in Australia via ands. And there is, Pure requires a password and username in order to automatically mint DOIs. So, that's set up differently by ands in Australia. So, we can't automatically mint DOIs in Pure from UWA. We've included it in our validation steps. So, when we're looking at a data set in the library, something that's been submitted, we will then, as one of those steps, is go to the back end of ands, mint a DOI manually for the researcher, and put it in there. If they have already a DOI from another location, let's say they've already put their data in FigShare, and they've got a DOI already in the researcher guides, the submission guides, we've told them you must insert it here, and then we won't mint a DOI on their behalf. We will use that same DOI. Okay, thanks. Antoinette's asked a question about training materials and communication. Yes, so we've already developed the guides for the researchers now, and the workshops are in the making at the moment. And in terms of the most successful channels of communication in introducing the new systems, well, we went straight to the deputy vice, the DVC of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research, and she was heavily involved, and each of the faculties and the deans, we went to them and they filtered everything down for us. And, you know, we communicated heavily with our liaison librarians, senior librarians, just so that they have a grasp on the new system as well. Is there any provision for enabling PURE to receive dataset metadata from other systems, e.g. microscopy systems, without manual entry by researchers? So that's interesting, that one, Mark, because recently we've been approached by the Centre of Microscopy, who are importing their datasets into a different system, and there has been some discussion around that. So that's a watch this space, yeah. So they sound pretty promising about that being able to happen. I think that's all of the questions. OK, well, in that case, I'd like to thank you very much for a really interesting presentation and a great overview of the work you've done at UWA, and a really interesting example of how you can use this system to capture information about research data and use it to publish. So, well, thank you all for attending and listening and asking your questions. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you.


It all happened 34 years ago on this very day. What happened? Well, me, I haven't because that's when I was born. That means that today is my birthday. Happy birthday to me. Now to celebrate, I'm going to teach you some vocabulary that you need to know when talking about birthdays. Of course, I'm Jennifer from jforsenglish.com and this channel is dedicated to helping you sound like a fluent, confident, natural English speaker. Now, before we go any further, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell notification so you're notified every time I post a new lesson. Now let's dive in with this video. Celebrate it by teaching you some birthday related vocabulary. Are you excited? So first of all, now you know when my birthday is. So I want to know when your birthday is. Let me know in the comments. Now, of course, you can say my birthdays on and then you would put the month and day. Okay. So of course, my birthday is on November 7th. And if you want, you can include the year as well. That's optional, but you can. My birthday is on November 7th, 1985. Now, if you just want to specify the month, there could be many times when you're just talking about the general month of your birthday. In that case, what preposition would you do? My birthdays in November, in November. So notice that difference when we have month and day, we need the preposition on when we just have the month, we need the preposition in. So now it's your turn to practice right in the comments. When's your birthday and practice using both on and in. Okay. So another really important thing you need to know is the verb turn to turn. And we use this in birthdays when we're talking about age. So you turn an age, turn and then a number. All right. So today's my birthday, which means I just turned 34. So when you go from one age to another age, we use the verb turn. So I went from 33 to 34, right? Now, because my birthday is today, I'm going to add just to emphasize that this just happened close to now as possible. Now, because I'm going to be 34 for the next 12 months, I'm probably going to use just for the next two, three, even four weeks. So three weeks from now, let's say somebody just asked me, oh, hey, Jennifer, how old are you? Well, because I'm closer to 34 than I am 35. Even three weeks after my birthday, I'm going to say I just turned 34. Now, when it is the middle of summer and it's been six months since my birthday, okay, so I'm 34 years old and six months, I'm not going to use just anymore. If somebody asked me how old I am, I'm just going to say I'm 34. But now, because I'm halfway there, I might say, oh, I'm turning 35 in November, remember, in November, preposition in, I'm turning 35 in November. So when you're approaching a year, we would use the present continuous. I'm turning, I'm turning 35 next week. I'm turning 34 next month. I'm turning 35 next year. Okay, so now practice that in the comments. If you recently had a birthday, you can use just. Now, maybe if it wasn't you, maybe it was your relative or a friend, a coworker recently celebrated a birthday, you could say my aunt just turned 53. Okay, so put an example in the comments to practice turn in the past simple. Now also practice the present continuous. So let me know next year. What age are you turning next year? I'm turning. Well, since I'm 34 and one day, or I guess zero days, just 34, I would say next year, even though it's 365 days away next year, I'm turning 35. All right. So now that you know how to talk about when your birthday is the age that you're turning or just turned, let's talk about birthday greetings. So here we go. Here's a birthday card. Now imagine that you want to write me a birthday message. Maybe you're going to post this on my Facebook page. You're going to send it in an email. You're going to write it in a comment on this video. I want you to write a birthday message. So take a second, pause the video and I want you to write a birthday message. Okay, so write it. I'm going to help you out. Don't worry. But first of all, I want to see what you write now. I bet if I look in the comments, I'm going to get a lot of congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. It's your birthday. Now here's the thing in North America in English, we do not congratulate someone on their birthday. It sounds really weird to me. Now I've been working as an English teacher for the past 10 years. So I get congratulations from students a lot when I shouldn't be congratulated, but I guarantee you if you say congratulations to a native English speaker on their birthday, they're going to be like, why are you congratulating me? We do not congratulate someone on their birthday. You may do that in your native language and that's great. Continue doing that in your native language. But in English and North America, we don't congratulate someone. The only time I might congratulate someone on their birthday is maybe if they turned turned maybe if they turn 100 and it's just this really amazing event, this amazing accomplishment. I might congratulate them, but that's just an exception. So in reality, you're not going to congratulate someone on their birthday. So with that said, what would you say to someone on their birthday? Here's what I would say. Here's what I would post on my friend's Facebook wall or what I would send to my friend in a text message or a WhatsApp message. I would say wishing you an amazing birthday filled with lots of love, happiness and joy. So that's probably what I would say. Wishing you, wishing, okay? Wishing you an amazing day, wishing you the best birthday ever. Wishing. So that's what we would use. So try that wish me something for my birthday. Now another way that we can write a nice birthday message with simply be with hope, okay? So I would say happy birthday. Hope you have an amazing day. Hope you have the best birthday ever. Hope this year is amazing for you. Hope all your dreams come true. Now notice I left out the subject I, which is very common. I can definitely say I hope I hope you have an amazing birthday, but it's really common to just leave it out and start with hope. Hope you have an amazing birthday. So I would say using wishing or hope are the two most common ways to write a birthday message. So now it's your turn. Wish me a happy birthday, write a message using wishing and a message using hope in the comments. All right. So now you know how to talk about birthdays. Of course, there's one more thing you need to do. You have to give me a present. It's my birthday, right? I should get presents and I really like diamonds or you could just give me cash. That works too. Just kidding. You don't need to do that. But if you want to leave me a present, the best birthday present you could leave me is simply by liking this video, sharing it with your friends and of course by subscribing. That would make my birthday amazing and until next time, I'm going to get out there and celebrate my birthday. So happy studying. All right. I have a lot of birthday celebrating to do today and I can't wait to find out when your birthday is when I read the comments. So I'll talk to you next time and remember if you haven't already subscribe and write me that birthday wish in the comments as well. I can't wait to read them. Bye.


look like we're in the United States like I don't know you just don't think of these you know giant sand dudes you know it's crazy and I'm Nick and we're here in Glamis California to ride some sand rails get some epic footage and bring me along for the journey. My wife and I Jen rent out UTV vehicles do production assistance, production transport, start driving. Why are they called sand rails? because it's caged so the rail is and I think I think what an old school would say is the rail is because you're putting lines out there. Gotcha. So it's kind of like being on rails. It's kind of like being on rails it really is. K&M I'm gonna put you guys in the K&M X3 XRS the max it's got a 172 horse one more thing that we actually do out here we got the Glamis Black Bag project my wife and I started the program we cleaned up trash we were at one point going out every week and cleaning up trash now it's to the point to where we have sponsors come in we have thousands of dollars of prizes that were given to the youngsters and the parents that bring us in a bag of doing trash it's got to be doing trash but it's it's working. That's so cool. Do you guys take donations on that? Absolutely. Link in the description I think that's an awesome thing that they're doing out here great way to keep this place that you guys get to enjoy so much clean that future generations can enjoy it. Absolutely. That's what we're trying to get into the youngsters we got the parents now at the point to where the youngsters are getting excited about it and that's I think that's what's really making the difference out here. I hope you guys will check it out and help support this because this is a beautiful beautiful place and you know you guys are lucky to get to enjoy and we're lucky to get to enjoy it today. We'll type back here. You know I struggle when other people are driving. No I don't and I trust you I know I like know you're responsible person it's just like I got to get in an Indy car with Gabby Chavez and go for a lap and even though he's like a professional I was freaking out it's just when other people are in control like if I was driving I'd be fine.  I believe you. This doesn't even look like United States right now we look like we're in a different country it's absolutely beautiful like I said the Jumanji was shot in this area beautiful sand dunes anywhere from 50 to 100 feet in elevation and these machines are amazing got 300 horsepower 200 horsepower they're gonna go faster than we're gonna be comfortable sitting in and I can't wait to get some epic footage. He's just in it for a minute and then and then it took off.  That's real life. Oh yeah Thanks man. Since the 70s probably the 60s actually people have been going out there and partying they got to the point back in the 90s they got so bad during the night weekends that they actually shut it down during the night now they don't allow people to congregate there anymore because of the trash. 2020 now there's still trash we go out there and clean it two three times a year and we'll get truckloads of trash literally truckloads of trash out of there and by the next season all the sand blows and it just comes right back so we're just gonna keep on and we're just gonna keep on pushing through and keep on going. I'm gonna fly from in here but I gotta wear a helmet so the only way I can do that is to put in the goggles down then securing the helmet so I'm gonna be basically the drone till we get to the next spot and this thing while flying behind is one of the most orienting things have ever done like my stomach was like this is wrong this is absolutely wrong and then seeing from because my brain thinks I'm in the drone and then I see the vehicle going over this mound I feel it my body and this is weird disconnect that I can't quite describe it was so good what an amazing day out here on Tatooine redden the dunes definitely check out the black bag project thanks to your whole team for letting us come out here and chase these things around and this is such a beautiful environment and I I can't think of a better way to get to enjoy it so make sure to check out the Glamis black bag project so you can learn about what they're doing and how you can help keep this area as amazing as it is follow AXA off-road for amazing videos links in the description so people like y'all got one more trek back to base so I'm looking forward to getting a victory lap in thank you guys for hanging up we're gonna go take the path that I've been following that you guys that you guys just got some video on it's not gonna be nearly as fast but we're gonna go take that yeah I've heard you say not as fast before