[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Dovi: Welcome to the University of Washington Libraries Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion podcast. This podcast is a companion piece to the Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program, or DSSI and is meant to give you a greater insight to the world of digital scholarship at the UW Libraries. In each episode, we interview a UW Libraries staff member whose work impacts or intersects with digital scholarship in some way. I’m Dovi Patiño, an Online Learning and Engagement Specialist at the UW Libraries.

Elliott: I’m Elliott Stevens, the English Studies Librarian and Research Commons Librarian.

Perry: And I’m Perry Yee and I’m the Online Learning Support Manager for the UW Libraries. And we are the teaching team for the DSSI Podcast Track. For the last three years, we have offered online digital storytelling workshops using video and podcasting formats. We thought this podcast would be a great way to introduce ourselves, introduce our colleagues, and give you an idea of the breadth of digital scholarship support at the Libraries.

Our guest today is Robin Chin Roemer. Robin is a librarian and she is the Head of the Instructional Design and Outreach Services unit in the Libraries’ Learning Services department. Her unit, also known as LibID, is dedicated to serving students in fee-based degree programs offered in partnership with UW Continuum College. Robin, welcome to the show.

Robin: Thank you, good to be here.

Perry: So we’re going to start with some personal questions. Robin, what’s your favorite thing about summer?

Robin: [laughs] Who doesn’t love everything about summer? I am a big baker so definitely berries, which means pie, which means jam, which means just having a good time. That and birthdays. There’s a lot of summer birthdays in my family. Not mine, but it means I get to celebrate everyone else’s, A.K.A. with pie.

Perry: Do you have any memorable summer stories perhaps involving birthdays and pie?

Robin: Well, it was just my 3 year old’s birthday so I did just make a cake for her birthday. That was a pretty good memory, I hope down the road, too. She’s, again three so it was a Frozen birthday cake. There were princesses. There were rainbows so yeah, I think that will be a good memory for me especially since I don’t have to do it anymore.

[Perry and Dovi laugh.]

Perry: Can you explain what you do UW Libraries?

Robin: I’m the head of the LibID unit and we’re an interesting group. Our charge is to help enhance the Libraries’ existing services in support of fee-based degree programs. So those are students who are in programs where, rather than receive money from the state, it’s based entirely on student tuition and they usually lean toward lots of different professional kinds of emphases. It’s actually a lot of the programs at the masters level. Some at the undergraduate and graduate level. But a lot of online learning, a lot of like I said professional students, a lot of adult learners in kind of non-traditional contexts, and they have different needs than other parts of the university so we try to specialize in them and make sure that they are getting what they need from the Libraries. That’s what my team does and I help make it happen.

Dovi: Great, thanks Robin for sharing and for providing some more context to what your team does. Can you talk a little bit about how the work of your team relates to digital scholarship?

Robin: I can, and just to acknowledge...Dovi and Perry are on my team. So...

Perry: Ahh, transparency.

Robin: ...they can also acknowledge all of this too, but it’s really a great question because I think a lot of times we talk about digital scholarship and we lean right into the fact that, “Scholarship? What does that mean?” Part of scholarship is delivering the research in ways that people can find it, right? One part of that is online learning and also the needs of professional students. The work of my team in trying to make sure that information is accessible, that services are accessible to all these populations...it’s by nature digital. We’re really leaning into that mode as important. I know you’ve also been interviewing people like Andy Andrews and thinking about accessibility. So my team is really engaged in that, even though we’re more on the learning side of things than just the pure research side of things. That’s very much, I think, a hidden aspect of digital scholarship. We get into pedagogy and the delivery of information.

Dovi: Can you talk a little more about instructional design?

Robin: I think it’s a term that trips a lot of people up. I should say that my team has gone through a few iterations of what we’re called and I think instructional design is a great term if you understand it. What it’s about is kind of taking a systematic approach to the delivery of instruction, right? Rather than just say, “hey, I’ve got something I want to communicate to people information-wise. I’m just going to go out there and do it.” It’s sitting down and thinking more carefully about who is it I’m trying to reach, what is it I’m trying to do, what is it that I can borrow from, in terms of knowledge, systems out there, of approaches out there, put it all together and come up with a project or an approach and how can I assess that approach and improve it over time. That’s definitely something that comes up a lot in online learning, right? Usually you’re starting out with needing to deliver an online course, but what does that look like? Or again, when it comes to digital scholarship: I’m trying to design a project. I want to make sure it’s not only digital because it’s maybe cool but also it’s going to be out there for people to discover. It’s going to do all the things I want. So I can take those kinds of approaches and ways of thinking in order to make a product that is robust and that I can improve over time, too. That’s kind of what, when I think of instructional design, it’s about that continuous improvement and thinking about the different stages along the way you can go through in order to get to that assessment point more successfully.

Dovi: Say someone wanted to get more involved with instructional design or some librarians are interested in applying instructional design approaches to their work. How would they go about doing that?

Robin: That’s a really great question and I think there’s a lot of great literature out there that talks about instructional design as a general concept but also when you start to lean into the digital space. What does that look like? You can look at websites that are out there, there are blogs, there are conferences. There’s no one good place to start or end when it comes to learning about instructional design. It’s almost best to take a little bit of what it is you’re specifically trying to accomplish and to marry it with instructional design. That said, if you’re not familiar with some basic learning theory, it’s a great place to start. Literally, just kind of digging into it from whatever angle that matters to you might be the best way to get started. Or to start to an instructional designer who might be here at your university, in your department, or in the Libraries...like Perry.

Dovi: We talked a little bit about how your team supports Libraries staff. What about students and helping students become better scholars or researchers?

Robin: Yeah, so as I mentioned...the part of campus that my unit helps really represent involves a lot of online learners and professional students. And...so your question was kind of how we get to those students or how we do things for them. So you think about who is a professional student and what does that mean. These are folks who are usually very specific about what they’re here to accomplish. They already have a sense of who they are. They often are older. They have whole personal lives that are very complex. So when it comes to getting information in front of these students, we’re talking about, thinking about what is convenient to them. What works in the framework of their lives? That can also go with designing instructional experiences. Not trying to make them go out there on their own. Assuming they have hours and hours to dig up new information, how do we design experiences that makes them feel included, makes them feel like their time is valuable, gets right to the point of need that they can articulate. Those are all kinds of skills that my team thinks about. That doesn’t always mean we work directly with those students, although with workshops and programs like DSSI we get to work with them and that’s great. But it’s often helping train liaison librarians who are specialists within a subject or discipline. Or faculty often take these considerations into play which then gets those experiences into the lives of students.

Perry: Robin, outside of the team - the instructional design team - that you work on, I know that you also have expertise in altmetrics and research impact. Can you kind of describe what altmetrics and research impact is and why it’s important?

Robin: Yeah, this is something I’m really passionate about. I would say when it comes to the work that I’ll be doing with DSSI, a lot of it - while I would love to talk about online pedagogy and about instructional design - I’m equally if not perhaps more qualified in certain ways to bring up this topic of altmetrics. It’s an interesting field. It’s a term that’s been around since around 2013. It was coined by a graduate student at that time named Jason Priem. And what it’s about is this question of, two things. Number one, how do we take all this information out there, all the research out there, and filter it to the things that we really want to learn. And Jason Priem’s philosophy was that in today’s digital society, the best way to filter information is to look at metrics. Not metrics like the number of times something’s been cited. That’s traditional bibliometrics. But alternative metrics, like the number of views or who’s talking about them on social media. And use that as a way to better understand the scholarly landscape and some other ways we might want to find out more about what people are researching in the world. The other approach I think that’s really cool about that is that it brings up the idea about public scholarship or why does our scholarship matter? How do we want to be known? And for a long time when we talked about impact, it’s really about the idea that quality research will make a bigger impact in the world. And I think we’ve learned in today’s Internet-driven society that it’s not always about the best research that’s getting the most impact. In fact, some of the really great research that’s out there isn’t really getting used by all the audiences it could. So that’s a problem that has a lot of different components to it. But the idea of looking at what research is circulating digitally and how do we know? Is that what we want to have happen? That’s all really wrapped up in the idea of altmetrics so we’re really talking digital metrics for attention to ensure that people are paying attention or sharing and interacting with research either to discover new research or information, or to try and make sure your own research is getting to the places you want it to be.

Elliott: Robin, do you think podcasting could have anything to do with altmetrics? Or digital publishing platforms like Manifold or Pressbooks? Do they factor in at all?

Robin: One hundred percent. Part of the thing that I always try to encourage people to think about is...let’s say you have a message that comes from your research that you want to get out there to an audience that’s not just strictly academic. You have a public policy angle. You have a government angle. You have something about general welfare health or just kind of interest that is out there. How do you get that in front of people? I would argue that putting out articles, while that’s really great, there’s lots of issues with access there and also just values of openness in general. Whereas podcasting is a way that we know people love to get information and it encourages us to say our research, to speak it in new ways. So definitely the idea that putting something out there that is free and open. It lets people thinking about larger ways our information matters. That’s so important. And same with Manifold and Pressbooks. Putting out research so that not only is it maybe in the same terms that you would always use for an insider audience, or academic audience, but that it’s free. It’s seen in different ways. It can be interacted with. It can be seen with different types of media. It lets you think so much more broadly about scholarship and in a way that can really help compel your message forward into new arenas and to get people to, again, interact with it in ways maybe that they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re not publishers. They’re not authors by nature.

Elliott: Robin, this has been a really interesting, freewheeling conversation about LibID and digital scholarship and altmetrics. I’m really curious to know: what role do you see digital scholarship at the UW Libraries as we go into the future? How do you see digital scholarship evolving here at the University of Washington?

Robin: That’s so great. And one thing that I should say I’m really excited about is the fact that it is evolving here at the University of Washington. This is an active and vibrant topic across the university and in the Libraries, especially with an event like DSSI. So it is on the move. In terms of how it’s moving, I can only predict so much. But one thing I see is happening is this effort to centralize a lot of the pieces that come into play with digital scholarship. So the idea if you’re someone interested in digital scholarship, you have a lot of different questions. You have needs in terms of developing the idea, about producing the scholarship, about getting more people involved in it, about preserving it, about taking one output and maybe making other related outputs. All these are different components and needs and bringing together people so they can see, “Ah, these are where heard these...I can get help with this piece or here’s where I can meet other people interested in the same sort of thing.” You can recognize the same impulse across a whole university. That’s where I think we are. I think that’s what’s going to drive us toward greater quality and creativity when it comes to digital scholarship, too. That’s what I’m excited about and certainly when it comes to the pedagogy piece, the instructional design piece, that all comes from a mature standpoint from digital scholarship. It means we’re ready to start putting that information out there so say students can learn from it. From altmetrics and research impact, it comes from the idea that...okay, we want to make sure we’re going in the right places in our research. That it’s reaching our audiences. That it’s changing the world in all the ways that we envisioned it. Or if it’s not, to better understand where it is actually going and what we can and can’t do about that. So we’re right on that cusp. I think that it’s an exciting time to be at the University of Washington from a digital scholarship angle.

Elliott: It really does sound like there are definitely opportunities for our cohort members of DSSI. And speaking of these cohort members, now that we’re getting towards the end of this interview, is there anything that you think we’ve forgotten to mention? Or any last bits of advice or words to the wise for our cohort members?

Robin: You know, there’s so much that everyone here is going to learn about this week. While there’s so much that I could mention, I do just want to encourage folks to think about the fact that community and learning and openness are all really important components of digital scholarship. Once you start getting your idea in place and thinking about what you want to produce, and really having fun with that idea, I think thinking about what are the values you want to bring into your research. Can you do that now rather than later on down the line when your projects are already fully formed? So thinking about, like I said, openness: do you want your information, your research out there in the world in a way that more people can find it? What does that mean for you today? Maybe there’s more than one output of your research that could encourage that. Or if you have a certain audience like practitioners. Where do practitioners find information? How can you put that into your design process? And then from a learning standpoint, do you want this to be built upon by students or do you want to make sure that this is something you can incorporate into teaching practices that you already have strong opinions about? These are all just little questions you can do today and I think that’s going to be what makes this a really exciting experience not just now, but for the rest of your academic careers. It’s great.

[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Elliott: That’s all the time we have for today. Check out the show notes for a link to the transcript for today’s recording. And subscribe to the DSSI Podcast on iTunes and Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts.

Music for this episode is provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Their song, Peacoat, served as our intro and outro music. Check them out at www.sessions.blue for recordings that are Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial work.

Thanks to Robin Chin Roemer for chatting with us. And a big thanks to you for listening to the DSSI Podcast. Catch you on the next episode.