Podcasts about ebsco

As we close out another year of Resoundingly Human podcasts, I am joined once again by the 2024 INFORMS president Julie Swann, to share a final look back over the past year at INFORMS and reflect on Julie's time as president.

David Walker is president and CEO of EBSCO, one of America's largest family-owned private companies.  With approximately $3 billion in revenues, EBSCO traces its origins to a magazine subscription business founded by Elton B. Stephens in 1944.  David details EBSCO's business interests today, comprising information services, diversified industrial and real estate holdings.  He also shares his personal story, which includes childhood in the peach orchards of Alabama, college at Auburn and early career experience in public accounting before joining EBSCO in 2000.  One highlight:  David's discussion of the particular resonance of the word “humility” at EBSCO. 

One of the most consequential topics among independent publishers is how they can get their books into libraries. IBPA is always looking for ways to set indie publishers up for success, so we invited Becky Spratford on the podcast who has been working with the library market in multiple capacities for over two decades. Becky shares expert tips about how to collaborate with your local libraries to interest them in your books, how librarians make buying decisions, the best ways to approach a library about carrying your books, and more.PARTICIPANTSBecky Spratford [MLIS] is a Readers' Advisor in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog RA for All. She is under contract to provide content for EBSCO's NoveList database and writes reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is a 23-year locally elected Library Trustee [still serving], a former Board member for the Reaching Across Illinois Library System, and currently on the Executive Board of the Illinois Library Association. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of The Reader's Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition [ALA Editions, 2021] and the forthcoming Why I Love Horror and You Should Too [Saga Press, Sept 2025]. She is on the Shirley Jackson Award Advisory Board and is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association, currently serving as the Association's Secretary and Co-Chair of their Library Committee.Independent Book Publishers Association is the largest trade association for independent publishers in the United States. As the IBPA Director of Membership & Member Services, Christopher Locke assists the 3,600 members as they travel along their publishing journeys. Major projects include managing the member benefits to curate the most advantageous services for independent publishers and author publishers; managing the Innovative Voices Program that supports publishers from marginalized communities; and hosting the IBPA podcast, “Inside Independent Publishing (with IBPA).” He's also passionate about indie publishing, because he's an author publisher himself, having published two novels so far in his YA trilogy, The Enlightenment Adventures.LINKSLearn more about the many benefits of becoming a member of Independent Book Publishers Association here: https://www.ibpa-online.org/page/membershipLearn more about the RA for All training blog here: http://raforall.blogspot.com Follow IBPA on:Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/IBPAonlineX – https://twitter.com/ibpaInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/ibpalovesindies/Follow Becky Spratford on:X: @RAforAllBluesky: @raforall.bsky.social

The non-profit organization Pornography Is Not Education reveals concerns about explicit content in school and public libraries targeting minors. Commercial providers like EBSCO, Cengage, and Gale are criticized for embedding harmful advertising and explicit links within educational resources, bypassing internet filters. This issue has triggered legislative responses in states like Mississippi and Utah, though many struggle with enforcement and accountability.In Texas, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's support for age verification laws, the challenge persists with providers continuing to expose students to inappropriate content. Schools employ "single sign-on" systems that shield student activities from parental view, complicating oversight.There's also a troubling trend where schools partner with public libraries to share digital resources, enabling them to deny direct responsibility for the content accessed by students. This partnership model, funded significantly during the Obama Administration, is expanding nationwide, further diluting parental control over the educational content their children are exposed to.Parents are encouraged to engage directly by requesting access to their children's online school portals, communicating with district administrators, and advocating at school board meetings to ensure a safer digital environment for their children.Support the Show.DONATE TODAY!www.ParentsRightsInEducation.com

“Open source” is, of course, a technology term. But, as it turns out, when you connect tech-minded people with those who don't necessarily think of themselves as IT nerds, something magical can happen. In this case, what works in the digital world—transparency, community, collaboration—has a funny way of spilling over into the analog world. Because, well, people are people. We're wired to connect. In today's episode of *The Resonance Test,* EPAM's open source sage Chris Howard chats up two open source experts from EBSCO Information Services: Christopher Spalding, Vice President of Product, and Rachel Fadlon, Vice President of SaaS Marketing and National Conferences & Events. EBSCO is a founding member of Folio, an open source library services platform (LSP), to which EPAM contributes. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) maintains a precise definition for the term, but in broad strokes, open source refers to software containing source code that can be edited and used by anyone. We all use it every day without realizing it. Indeed, open source powers the internet as we know it. Howard asked Spalding and Fadlon to reflect on what open source has been like at EBSCO, so other companies and industries can learn from an open source project that has achieved scale. Folio has allowed developers and librarians to work together in an unprecedented way. Being part of the Folio community, says Fadlon, has dramatically transformed the way EBSCO interacts with customers across the company. The relationships that develop organically in an open source community, which are less formal and more “person to person,” says Fadlon, have influenced EBSCO to be more community-oriented in all aspects of the business. “The way that you approach someone in the library as a community member *to* a community member is very different than the way we were approaching our customers before,” she says. “We've made a lot more things more transparent and open” since joining Folio. Spalding says even the language has changed around communications more broadly. “The focus is on, ‘Well, why would that be closed? Let's make that open. Why wouldn't we talk about that?' Let's put it all on the table because we get feedback instantly, and then we know the direction that we go as a partnership with the larger community.” Of course, the trio also talked about security and artificial intelligence, the latter playing out differently in different regions. Open source made headlines recently when Linux, one of the most well-known examples of open source, narrowly avoided a cybersecurity disaster thanks to an eagle-eyed engineer. Open source comes with risks, like anything online. Spalding says security concerns might have pushed libraries away from open source a few years ago, but now, increasingly, libraries are adopting the open source adage: “More eyes, fewer bugs. And definitely, more eyes, better security.” Howard agrees. “We shouldn't be afraid of having all of those eyes on us… One of my developers calls it kind of ‘battle testing' the software, throwing it out to the world and saying, ‘Does this do what you want it to do?' And if it doesn't, at least you can tell me … and I can go and fix it or you can even fix it for me if you want to. And I think we're now finding more and more organizations that actually find that more attractive than scary.” Open yourself up to a more flexible, transparent future by listening to this engaging conversation. Host/Producer: Lisa Kocian Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Executive Producer: Ken Gordon

Pornography Is Not Education is a parent group led by our next guest, Robin Paterson.They are a non-profit organization, dedicated to ensuring that the children attending our schools and libraries are provided with a safe, nurturing learning environment. Critical to this mission, is the removal of pornographic material, images, advertisements, and videos from K -12 "research" or "homework" databases.She's been fighting school and library porn since 2016 and PINE's motto is, “They won't stop until we make them!”That goes for a lot of things in Maine…including our appointed Secretary of State who last week created a 31 page nothingburger to stay her illegal and reprehensible decision to take Trump off our ballot until the supreme court rules on it.We also do an update from AmericaFest with @BillboardChris! @CCSDConvo on Twitterhttp://www.pornographyisnoteducation.orgBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/show/mainesourceoftruth/support.

In today's episode, we're talking with Tommy Doyle, Head of Growth and Customer Success, Chassis Technologies. Tommy is interviewed by Matthew Ismail, a Conference Director and Editor in Chief of the Charleston Briefings. Tommy Doyle is a stalwart leader in the world of scholarly communication and an influential proponent for technological innovation among startups and scaleups in various fields. Tommy started his career in the field of chemical research (along with some amateur boxing!) and has since worked in both academic publishing and with major vendors such as Ebsco. Tommy is currently Head of Growth and Customer Success, Chassis Technologies, which has created an innovative product management platform, and consults with various fintech startups which are transforming the financial services landscape. In this podcast, Tommy and Matthew discuss how Tommy's experience working with transformative and disruptive technologies could help the scholarly communication industry. Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-ismail-1a6282a/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommy-anthony-doyle/ Twitter: Keywords: #Chassis, #fintech, #openresearch, #openscience, #AI, #AIservices, #Innovation, #startups, #tech, #technology, #learning, #digital, #education, #knowledge #research, #collaboration, #scholcomm, #libraries, #librarianship, #LibraryNeeds, #LibraryLove, #AcademicPublishing, #ScholarlyPublishing, #publishing, #podcasts  

Audio from the 2022 Charleston Library Conference from the session titled “It's Opener There In Wide Open Air.” This session was presented by Anne Campbell, EBSCO; Sion Romaine, University of Washington; Denise Branch, Virginia Commonwealth University;   and Dennis Bridges, FOLIO. Video of the presentation available at:  https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Title/800bbe7b-4cba-4a1c-a6c3-ad12d297600e   Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-campbell-21a98415/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/si%C3%B4n-romaine-23a0798b/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-branch-36012510/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennismbridges/

Welcome to a tool deep dive episode, where we highlight the features and the challenges of a tool we think you'll find helpful as a writer. And the tool we'll be talking about today is online archives– and more specifically, how to use online archives to engage in high quality research for your current novel project! Picks of the Week: How to Do Nothing by Jenny O'Dell Momo by Michael Ende Mentioned in the Episode: JSTOR free articles EBSCO free databases British Museum free catalogues

Our guest today is Dr. Richard Loria, physician consultant with EBSCO. Dr. Loria is one of the presenters from our recent webinar, “Using a Point-of-Care Clinical Decision Support Platform to Drive Practice Success,” and he is here to share with our listeners the ways that DynaMed can help clinicians make more efficient, accurate decisions. Resources: • Learn more about DynaMedex www.ebsco.com/dynamedex • Listen to Dr Loria's deep dive webinar on how DynaMedex can drive group practice success in the MGMA webinar brought to you by EBSCO. https://mgma.com/practice-resources/products/using-a-point-of-care-clinical-decision-support-pl Sponsors: MGMA Events: This episode is brought to you by the Medical Practice Excellence: Financial and Operations Conference 2023. During our premiere spring event, attendees will gain key insights from both disciplines and learn about topics that shape the future success of medical practice organizations. Go to mgma.com/mpe23 to learn more and to register today. DynaMedex: Empowering healthcare professionals with advanced evidence-based clinical decision support to help improve patient outcomes. Learn more at DynaMedex.com. Humana: The latest Value-Based Care Report from Humana outlines many interesting findings and highlights how some physician practices found creative paths to success. Check it out now at Humana.com/VBC. Humana is working closely with physician practices on their value-based journeys. If you would like additional tools and resources related to medical practice leadership email us at podcasts@mgma.com.

Confession time: quite a long time ago we were asked to provide a recommendation of something interesting from the EBSCO database of education literature for the Education Workforce Council's Meddwl Mawr book and journal club. Teachers registered in Wales can access anything in EBSCO for free, helping to bring education literature goodies to classroom practitioners all over the country.Finally, we've got our act together and have a discussion for you about initial teacher education reform in Wales in the form of an article by Professor John Furlong and co-authors. Despite the apparently niche subject area, there's plenty in here for anyone in the education world to chew over, so we hope you'll stick with us for the ride!If you want to read the article, look for Furlong, J., Griffiths, J., Hannigan-Davies, C., Harris, A. and Jones, M. (2021) ‘The reform of initial teacher education in Wales: from vision to reality.' Oxford Review of Education 47(1) pp. 61-78You can find the Meddwl Mawr book and journal club at https://www.ewc.wales/site/index.php/en/professional-development/ewc-book-and-journal-club.htmlThanks to our friends at the EWC for the opportunity!------------------------------------------------------Recorded at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 24th October 2022

Kyle Banerjee, Senior Implementation Consultant for EBSCO, discusses his role working for a library vendor. Kyle mentions Association for Computing Machinery during our discussion.

In this episode, I welcome Meghan McCorkell to the podcast. She is the Chief of Marketing Communications and Strategy at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, a large library system in Baltimore. She has extensive professional experience in Journalism and storytelling, has won multiple John Cotton Dana Awards, and discusses the many events she and her team have run successful campaigns for! Meghan finds inspiration from other libraries rather than books, which I totally relate to. Thank you Meghan!Curious about the JOhn Cotton Dana Awards? Check out the requirements for submission on EBSCO's website here: https://www.ebsco.com/about/scholarship-awards/john-cotton-danaThere is still time to register for the upcoming Library Marketing & Communications Conference, here: https://www.librarymarketingconference.org/Have feedback for me? Please send me questions, comments, constructive criticism, and anything else that comes to mind at info@thelibrarianmarketer.org.I've started a website! Find me online at: www.thelibrarianmarketer.org. (It's pretty basic right now).Until next time!Intro & Outro Music Credit: Royalty Free Music by MusicUnlimited from Pixabay.By accessing this Podcast, I acknowledge that the entire contents are the property of Katie Rothley, or used by Katie Rothley with permission, and are protected under U.S. and international copyright and trademark laws. Except as otherwise provided herein, users of this Podcast may save and use information contained in the Podcast only for personal or other non-commercial, educational purposes. No other use, including, without limitation, reproduction, retransmission or editing, of this Podcast may be made without the prior written permission of Katie Rothley.This podcast is for educational purposes only. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein.

Jennifer and I discuss the entities and spirits that sometimes attach, and can lead to challenges with mental health. Then Jennifer leads us in a beautiful sound healing meditation to clear any attachments or entities not part of the Divine Plan in your life!Pam's ICRT Classes: https://www.reiki.org/users/pamela-allen-leblanc#classesNewsletter: http://eepurl.com/dFm-19Reiki session:   https://squareup.com/appointments/book/7dvtqlfp939e8g/LPSC51C92BN20/servicesMonthly Reiki share:  http://eepurl.com/hWruP5Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/reikifromthefarm/Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/hiddenbrookfarmReikiHorsesOilsYoutube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW5ScR7ObSiPIpgnDkWkiQAemail: pam@reikifromthefarm.comJennifer Taylor, Holy Fire Karuna Reiki Master/Teacher, Animal Reiki Master/Teacher, and Sound Healer Website:  www.willowridgereiki.com Facebook: facebook.com/WillowRidgeReikiInstagram:  www.instagram.com/willowridgereikiRecording of Spirit Release sound healing meditation:  https://www.willowridgereiki.com/recordings Subscribe: Reiki News MagazineThe Reiki Business Book is available from tens of thousands of Retailers, Libraries, Schools, E-commerce companies, book retailers and wholesalers across North America including:  Amazon,Barnes & Noble, Independent bookstores, Walmart.com, Target.com, Chapters / Indigo (Canada)  United Kingdom & Europe from:  Adlibris, Agapea, Amazon.co.uk, Aphrohead, Blackwell, Book Depository Ltd, Books Express, Coutts Information Services Ltd, Designarta Books, Eden Interactive Ltd, Foyles, Gardners, Trust Media Distribution, Mallory International, Paperback Shop Ltd, Superbookdeals, The Book Community Ltd, Waterstones, Wrap Distribution. Australia & New Zealand:  Amazon AU, Booktopia, Fishpond, The Nile, James Bennett, ALS, Peter Pal. Ebook versions available: 24Symbols, Ainosco, Amazon*, Apple**, Barnes & Noble Nook, Bibliotheca, BibliU, Bolinda, Bookmate, Chegg, De Marque, eBooks.com, EBSCO, fable, Follett/B&T, Gardners, Glose, hoopla, Hummingbird, iGroup, ITSI, Kobo Plus, Kortex, Libreka, Libri.de, LitRes, Mackin, Odilo, OverDrive, Perlego, Perusall, ProQuest, Publica.la, RedShelf, Scribd, SpoonRead, Storytel, VitalSource, WF Howes, Wheelers, Wook, YouScribethank you to Music from Pixabay for the intro musicPam Allen-LeBlanc is a scientist, a businesswoman, and a Licensed Reiki Master Teacher with the International Center for Reiki Training.  She is the author of "The Reiki Business Book" and a co-author of ICRT Animal Reiki training.  Pam teaches Reiki, Animal Reiki, and Animal Communication online and in-person in Canada, the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Join us for our latest podcast episode featuring a conversation between Tony Zanders, Founder and CEO, Skilltype, and Matthew Ismail, Editor in Chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director. Tony and Matthew discuss the start of Tony's professional career in the entrepreneurial world of Silicon Valley, his customer-centered work at ExLibris from 2009 to 2014, and his move back home to New Orleans, where he became a part of the startup/entrepreneurship community. A few months later, EBSCO took advantage of Tony's unique expertise by hiring him to integrate their EBSCO databases into third party software platforms. In 2018, after conversations with selected library directors about underserved areas in library operations, Tony founded Skilltype, a startup that centers around creative library professional development in an era of staffing austerity. Tony is a long-time attendee of the Charleston Conference. Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zanders/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/skilltype/ Twitter: @zanders @skilltype

During the COVID pandemic, much of life and learning went virtual, and we all thought we could get by just fine doing everything on Amazon and Zoom. But more recently, we have come to find out just how important in-person connection and interaction are – for business, pleasure and especially education. While it's great we have technology to help us do things remotely, Baton Rouge entrepreneurs are helping people realize that institutions like libraries and brick-and-mortar learning spaces play an invaluable role in the learning process, for kids and adults. Baton Rouge resident Tony Zanders is founder and CEO of Skilltype, a talent management platform that Tony created in 2018 specifically to help libraries better attract, train and retain personnel so they will be better able to compete in the 21st century. Tony hit upon the idea for Skilltype several years ago, when he realized that many libraries struggle with personnel problems caused by the fact that the training and professional development programs for library employees are still structured around the 20th century model of libraries, which were largely about collections, and have failed to take into account what today's libraries really need. Skilltype is a proprietary software that helps train library personnel and then match them to library systems in need. Tony is an ed tech entrepreneur, who worked at Ex Libris and EBSCO, both large library database companies, before founding Skilltype.  Amanda Vincent is founder, owner and CEO of Studyville, which is based off the We Work shared office space concept but is an academic workspace for teens. Amanda formed the company in Baton Rouge in 2020, after fighting the homework battle from the front lines of her living room during the COVID lockdown.  She and her husband Benn tried every form of tutoring, coercion, manipulation, and textbook throwing until they realized there had to be a better way – and  Studyville was born. The venture isn't Amanda's first: she co-founded Opera Louisiane in 2007 and later started the Fur Ball, the black tie dog-friendly fundraiser that benefits the Companion Animal Alliance. She figured if she could convince people to dress in ball gowns and bring their dogs with them to a ball, she could probably also convince them that studying could be cool!  Amanda is a creative with a background in marketing and a masters degree in opera.  Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can photos from this show by Erik Otts at itsbatonrouge.la.  Check out another lunchtime conversation with Baton Rouge entrepreneurs, from old school travel to NFTs.    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this special episode of the Plano Public Library podcast, your hosts Bob and Rachel speak with Hema (Librarian) and Kanan (Library Support Supervisor) about the Holi festival, what it means to them, and how Holi is celebrated around the world. Mark your calendars: celebrate Holi with Plano Public Library on Saturday, March 5, 2022, from 2-4 pm at Haggard Library! All ages will learn about the Holi festival and South Asian culture through a variety of activities for all ages. Learn More About Holi Baby's First Holi by Dorling Kindersley Ltd. Print This classic first picture book for babies and toddlers has simple language and engaging, real-life photos that bring the joy and traditions of Holi to life. Holi Hai by Chitra Soundar Print Gauri is excited to splash colors on everyone for Holi. But when she doesn't get her favorite color, Gauri gets mad. Will she find a way to overcome her anger and join in the festivities? A Year Full of Celebrations and Festivals by Christopher Corr Print With fact-filled text accompanied by beautifully bright illustrations from the wonderfully talented Chris Corr, prepare yourself for a journey as we travel around the world celebrating and uncovering a visual feast of culture. Holi Colors by Rina Singh Print A mother expresses the beauty of Holi and the many colors that come with it to her child. Festival of Colors by Kabir Sehgal Print Siblings Chintoo and Mintoo collect flowers and press the petals into a fine powder as they prepare for Holi, the Indian springtime Festival of Colors. Hindu Festivals Cookbook by Kerena Marchant Print Students will discover the diverse backgrounds of serving these special foods during the holiday season. Step-by-step instructions, along with corresponding full-color photographs, provide the reader with complete directions for the successful completion of the recipe. Browse databases like Credo Reference and EBSCO for “Holi”, “Holi festival”, “Vishnu”, “Radha” and “Hola Mohalla” to learn more about the different topics Kanan and Hema discussed.

Jim MacLeod has spent his career helping companies design effective and goal-oriented digital experiences. He did it as a freelancer, and he does it today as the VP of Marketing for Digital Experience and Design for EBSCO. Now he is using that experience and wisdom to turn the traditional curated email newsletter on its head.We don't often think about design as an area ripe with differentiation possibilities for the curated newsletter, and yet Jim is proving that it absolutely can be.In this edition of 7-Figure Small, we dive into Jim's strategy with his Marketing Podcast Recap newsletter, and he shares some of the most important lessons about web design and digital experience that he's learned over the past two decades.We also discuss why he's going to CEX this May and what he hopes to get out of the experience.To connect with Jim, follow him on Twitter (@JimMacleod).You can subscribe to Marketing Podcast Recap newsletter here: https://jimmacleod.substack.com/To learn more about CEX and get your Early Bird tickets, go to cex.events.

Dexter Evans, Corporate Accounts Manager at EBSCO, discusses his career working in sales for library vendors.

Our children have easy access to hard core porn in our school ELECTRONIC DATABASES, also known as electronic libraries. Companies like EBSCO makes a profit from selling access to their database to our schools and public libraries. They also make a profit from publishers and advertisers. Pornography sites like PornHub have been found advertised within these databases. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-monica-cline-show/support

Jerry Hoepner, a faculty member in the department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. I am privileged to introduce today’s guest, Dr. Sarah Northcott. We are fortunate to have a conversation about her work and the application of solutions focused brief therapy and psychological supports to individuals with aphasia.  Dr. Sarah Northcott is a Senior Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy at both the University of East Anglia, UK, and City, University of London, UK. Her research interests lie in exploring ways to support the emotional and social wellbeing of people living with stroke and aphasia. In 2016 she received the UK Stroke Association Jack and Averil (Mansfield) Bradley Fellowship Award for Stroke Research, which enabled her to lead the SOFIA Trial (Solution Focused brief therapy In post-stroke Aphasia), a feasibility wait-list controlled trial. She also led the qualitative evaluation on the SUPERB Trial, investigating peer befriending for people with aphasia, also funded by the UK Stroke Association.   Take aways: Social networks are wonderful for people with aphasia after their stroke, and these social networks often predict outcomes more than the severity of the stroke. (9:30) It is crucial that speech language therapists receive training on this topic so they feel comfortable stepping into those moments when there is a need for psychosocial support, or at least recognize when they need extra support in doing so. Solution focused brief therapy is designed to help people build change. With training, it is important that speech therapists transition out of the “fixer mindset” and the thought that they need to fix everything, in order to successfully provide this psychosocial support.  Paper and pen, or objects from the individual’s environment that they are comfortable using, are the most effective visual communication methods when going into these unpredictable conversations. Always make the most of people’s strengths and talents and focus on what is already going well. The client is the expert in their own life!     Jerry: Greetings from across the pond, Sarah. I'd say good morning, but perhaps good afternoon for you. Really nice talk with you today.    Sarah: It's lovely, thank you very much to be inviting me as part of your podcast series. That was really lovely to be here.    Jerry: Absolutely, our privilege. I'm really excited to dive into this important conversation again, a topic near and dear to my heart as well. And before we get started, can you share just a little bit about your mentors and collaborators and kind of how you found your path, so to speak.   Sarah: So, I first trained as a speech therapist about 20 years ago now, and it was when I was starting to work with adults who had a stroke for the first time, I guess, I started to realize how difficult it was to, how your life can be turned upside down by having the aphasia and how isolated some of the people I was working with were as well. And it was around that time that Katerina Hilari from City University contacted me and asked me if I'd like to do an MSC looking at social support for people with chronic aphasia. And that kind of tied in well with what I was noticing in my clinical work. And I think I was really struck by that project, I found it really exciting to be working on that project. And it also felt important because I could sort of see the clinical relevance from the work I was doing. I guess I'm very grateful to Katerina, because she sort of opened that whole door for me. And it was really Katerina, who encouraged me to do the PhD. the PhD was looking, taking that work forward, looking more generally at social support after a stroke. So, for people with and without aphasia, and what social support really mattered to them, what value it had, what tends to happen to their friendships. And yeah, I feel very lucky that she was had a lot of belief in me and really encouraged me to do that. And after my PhD, she was still there for me. So, I have quite a difficult season, because when you finish your PhD to know quite what to do next. And yeah, she's always been incredibly supportive and has been really there for me sort of had a belief that the work we were doing was important and valuable, and that I had something to contribute. So that was, yes, she's like, I really respect her academic judgments. And she's been a really big part of my life, I guess, the 15 years that we've done some lovely work together. And that's been really rewarding. And I guess more recently with the SOFIA fellowship project I've had, as well as Katerina, three other supervisors, so a mental health nurse, and two psychologists and I think, I there was real value for me and being supervised by people who weren't speech therapists. So, I really learned from those with different perspectives and what they were bringing to it. So, one of them Shirley Thomas, who sort of is leading the column base trial campaign for activation therapy for people with aphasia. So of course, she brought a huge wealth of knowledge about running trials with people with aphasia, which is not the easiest thing to do, assessing him for his knowledge about mental health nursing. And I found that really helpful to get those perspectives and put that into the research. And so, many lovely people to work with. I don't think I've ever felt alone with it. And if anyone out there is a speech therapist or speech therapy student and wondering about research, I would say, it's really important to have a team around you because it's not always the easiest thing. There are not backs when you get rejections and then things don't go to plan. So, have people around you who believe in you, and will support you through that and support you not just for the academic side, but sort of quite holistically as well. So, I think I've been, I've been very lucky with the support I've had around. And I've certainly I've not done any of this work alone, it's always been a very much a team thing. And I'm very grateful for the team I've had around me. So, if anyone of my supervisors have happened to listen to this, a big thank you to all of them.   Jerry: That's really well said in terms of the importance of just having that team that work around you, for sure. And really a powerful story about Katerina reaching out to you, that must have just been really a great moment and ongoing moments to encourage you with your PhD and beyond. So, I agree some definitely lovely work that two of you and others have done together regarding psychosocial effects following aphasia. So, I just love that whole body of work.    Sarah: Yeah, and I feel very grateful to the school that everyone has given me with that. And I would say that again, I guess that's another thing to pull out of that if someone's thinking about whether to go into research, it is so important to do research in an area that you're quite passionate about, and you really believe in because it's tough doing research. So, I think you have to have a real motivation. And I think that's kind of going as well as that as a support team to have a kind of belief in the projects.   Jerry: Absolutely. And it's really evident in the work that you do and the connections that you have to real individuals with aphasia. So, it definitely shows through, and again, those interdisciplinary connections you mentioned, Shirley Thomas, and she's done so much work in this area. And that's been powerful.   Sarah: You know and I think I think it's been really interesting to work with a psychologist coming from a different background and a different perspective on research. And I've definitely learned loads from them, it's been really helpful.   Jerry: But an excellent place to start. Just to kind of roll back the clocks a little bit, I think many of our listeners are familiar with your work on the stroke social network scale, and the social networks and supports for people with chronic aphasia that you've done with Katerina Hilari. So, I think that is a really nice place to start in terms of just thinking of where you've come from. In the 2018 article in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, you identified several barriers to accessing appropriate psychological support for individuals with aphasia. And likewise, in your 2017 article, in that same journal, you found that most speech language pathologists or in the UK, speech language therapists, lack the confidence to implement the appropriate psychological supports for people with aphasia. Of course, that's really been shown by --- and colleagues all around the world, but it's just such a prominent issue. Can you talk a little bit about how all of this kind of led into your current research regarding solution focus brief therapy?   Sarah: Of course, and thank you for reading these papers.   Jerry: Absolutely.   Sarah: So yeah, do you want me to take it back from the beginning for the sort of social support stroke social network scale and then work from there?    Jerry: Sure, that'd be fine. That'd be great.    Sarah: Yes, in my PhD I was looking at social support, and one of the outputs of that was the stroke social network scale. And it is something that Katerina's done recently is set up a repository of different resources from City University, so just if people are interested in some of the work we've done at City to go to the current website. And you'll find it there, you'll find that scale there, you'll find her cycle 39 scale, and we're trying to build up that repository. So, that's just a nice resource for anyone in the world to tap into. And I think, yes, in my PhD reverb, we're looking at what happens over time. And it was one of the themes that came through was that social networks are quite wonderful after a stroke. And they seem to be particularly vulnerable for people with aphasia. And that seems to be a really predictive factor of who's going to maintain a strong social network, a stronger factor, even then stroke severity or disabilities. So, that was a quite striking finding. And I think I felt very privileged in my PhD because part of it was doing questionnaires of people over time, but then also doing qualitative interviews of people around about a year post stroke, so I had a year of my life walking around London doing these interviews of people and listening to people's stories. People are very generous with their times to share how they found the stroke, what was important to them? And yeah, and exploring with them all the value of connection and what that meant to them after the stroke. And also, we could see from the quantitative data that people were losing friends. We didn't mean, there was a chance to explore with people what's happening, what does this mean to you? And it was, you know, so many reasons that people gave of why they were seeing their friends less, you know, they weren't going to same activities that they used to. So, they didn't see those friends in those contexts anymore. They were exhausted, and they didn't have the energy to initiate contact. With a disability, they were housebound, and how you host and your lack of reciprocity there. And of course, the phase, you're in a phase of disrupting the dynamics of friendships, and a big theme that came through as well, there was the close link between this sense of feeling a little bit withdrawn and cutting us off a little bit. So, the link between mood and friendship loss, and it's like a vicious cycle, I guess, of becoming withdrawn, not going out, and then getting low in mood and then becoming even more withdrawn. And I think some of those stories affected me quite a lot. And at the end of my PhD, I was wanting to say, well, what intervention could we have that could break that vicious cycle and make it more of a virtuous cycle? To encourage people to, or what do people need to be able to feel they can start to reengage again and start to live the life they want to live with the stroke and aphasia? So, I think that was the motivation for me at the end of the PhD to think it's quite a big thing to go from observation research into intervention research. I don't think I've quite realized actually how big a thing it was and how much I was undertaking it as a way of learning. But I think that was my motivation to start thinking about interventions. And so, this was five years ago. And at that point, there was very little in terms of the research evidence base for effective psychological therapy for people with aphasia. And Shirley's lovely studies, comm study, I wasn't the basis to her lovely systematic review quite recently. And yes, its basis is still pretty thin and has some really nice research coming through. So, there's all the lovely stuff in Australia and in the world, but it's still, I would say, I was surprised how many psychological stroke research studies were excluding people with aphasia on the grounds of their language disability. So that was quite motivating for me to think, as a speech language therapist, what can be our role? What therapies might work well, so that was nice to start playing. And then as you say, before I went into doing the solution focused brief therapy trial, I did some work, listening to speech therapists. So, we did an online survey, and then we did some focus group analysis and had an experience trusting the psychological well-being of people with aphasia. And, yeah, that was, so it was really striking that speech therapists, they really want to do their best. And they were doing some lovely listening, and they're setting up groups, and they were telling us all the things that they were doing. But there was a sense of, actually, this is not an area where you feel confident. And this is not an area that we feel particularly more trained or supported in. And we have this sort of unease that if we spend a session listening to someone’s distress, should we spend that session, doing language goals, you know, was that the right use of our time. And that particularly felt uneasy when they felt that it was all on their shoulders. And if they got out of that debt, they had nowhere to turn to for extra support, when they felt that the management and their team have to be valuing that work, supporting them in that work, where they didn't feel they had the training. They were time pressured, and conversely, in teams where they felt that there was that sense of holistic team culture, and it was valid, it was easier if they had some training. And particularly they had such a support. So, I think what might work particularly nicely was whether there was a mental health professional psychologist within the team, with a kind of opened door policy who they felt they could knock on the door of and ask them for advice as they went along. And if they started to go down to their desk, they could do joint work together or handover. And where they felt they could get informed advice and support with it. That seems quite enabling to speech therapists to feel that this is something that they could address and feel comfortable addressing.    Jerry: Wow, that's terrific. I want to go back to just a couple of things that you said. That idea that social networks predict outcomes more than stroke severity, and then that cycle between changes in mood and withdrawal and how that kind of feeds itself. And I think that last point, when you were talking about Speech Language therapists, that training, right, just not feeling comfortable, but when they get that training, they feel more comfortable and are able to step into those moments when there's a need for that psychosocial support, or at least recognize when they need outside help as well. So.   Sarah: Yes, I think it was quite interesting for people was just saying one of the things that they got from training and experience was, when they complete it, when they were newly qualified, they had the sense that they needed to fix everything, there needed to be solution and quite anxious with situations where they couldn't fix it. And with training they kind of reversed this around to thinking sometimes it's really very good just to be there with someone or just to listen and that's valuable in itself. And they thought they had some skills to sit back on enabling them to do that. So, listening and being there with someone when they’re distracted, they felt more comfortable out on their own.    Jerry: Yeah, I agree. And making that shift out of that fixer mindset I think is a really important part of providing that type of support, for sure. Absolutely. So terrific introduction to this. Can you talk a little bit about why speech language therapists should consider the psychosocial impact of living with aphasia and kind of what their roles are in terms of addressing psychological well-being, psychosocial well- being?   Sarah: Sure. So, what came through in the focus group project was the sense that often people with aphasia, that speech therapists are meeting, have sort of been trapped in this world of aphasia, and they got a real value from having a speech therapist facilitate them, explaining what it was like to be them, what it was like to live with the aphasia. And the speech therapists have skills of listening and facilitation, and that's really valuable. So, I would say that for someone with aphasia who has more severe distress, more severe mental health issues, I think speech therapists have a role in facilitating and accessing mental health professionals as well. And what we found in the focus group project was speech therapists we spoke to were concerned that people with more severe aphasia, it was very hard for them to access psychological health and mental health professionals who understandably found it very challenging to adjust their psychological therapies for someone with more severe aphasia. And I think also what we found in the UK, and I don't know if this translates to the US, but in UK near the stroke, so in your acute stage, just post discharge from hospital, psychologists working in those teams more like, sometimes like it was just like in ASD so there was quite spectrum where the speech therapist was very disappointed that those people with aphasia aren't suitable candidates for therapy because of their language disability. But there are also psychologists in this stroke special services who are skilled working with aphasia, we're happy to be joint working with the speech therapists, we're happy to work with the family members around the person with aphasia. But when the people with aphasia went into the mainstream mental health services, then there were more issues around mental health professionals struggling with the aphasia. So, I think in that situation, the speech therapists have a real role in supporting someone with aphasia and accessing those services. So, I can completely see that as a speech therapist listening here thinking like not really wanting to go and get lots of specialist training and delivering pre psychological therapies is not that I see my world what I want to do, but I would say that it is important for speech therapists to not undervalue their own skills of listening and what that can be for someone with aphasia, or underestimate that we can have a sort of bridging role and helping people access psychological services. And another thing I'd add to that is that, you know, really listening to someone who is having a hard time, it's not easy, and I have some sympathy with speech therapists who are starting to learn to project, and starting to feel anxious. And I would say that it's important to feel supported in that work and so there's someone that you can go to, and people talk about peer support a lot and how valuable that was. But to find some way of feeling reassured that you're doing the right thing, sometimes as well, that it is the right thing to sit there with someone who are distressed. I would say, I'm a really big believer on making sure you've got support systems for the therapists as well.   Jerry: Absolutely. Just to touch on a couple of those points. I completely agree that speech language pathologists, speech language therapists, have a real unique skill set that allows us to facilitate, to support that communication and hopefully support expression of, you know, those psychosocial kind of needs and concerns. And I also think that we're really positioned well, to facilitate and support those interactions, as you said, with psychologists, and perhaps, you know, training, collaboration, kind of mutual bidirectional training in terms of giving them the skills to support communication and expression. And certainly vice versa, them kind of sharing their knowledge, those psychosocial and psychological supports as well. So…   Sarah: I think that joint working is a really lovely model and way of thinking about structures, isn't it? I mean, if you haven't got the psychologist to sit next to them, it's much easier. And there were definitely people who spoke about psychologist is in a different team, it's much harder to get a hold of them. And there just work pushes. I mean, not all stroke services in the UK at all have access to a psychologist and some of them are very thinly spread. And speech therapists are very thinly spread as well. So then, yeah, there's logistical difficulties there too.   Jerry: Yeah, absolutely. And we definitely have the same kind of issues in the states as well. In terms of access to those services, just so many means at this point across the entire population, so…   Sarah: Yes, this current situation is particularly extreme as well. Yes.   Jerry: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of making those psychological, psychosocial therapies accessible, when someone has aphasia? Kind of the adaptations and types of communication supports you need to kind of weave in?   Sarah: Yeah, that's a really good question. The psychological therapy is traditionally they're language based on the kind of skills that you will be taught in a counseling training, of open questions and don't always work so well, when someone has aphasia. So, speaking, psychologists have to say, well, you need a little bit more skill, that some of the tools that you have don't work so well. So, I think there's a little bit of thinking there. And, yes, I think it's helpful to talk about my fellowship project. So that's the SOFIA Trial. And that's looking at adapting the solution focused brief therapy, so that it is successful for people with aphasia. With that trial, we had an aphasia advisory groups, and it was a lovely group of people with aphasia to advise us on it, and they were very, they advised us very strongly that we should see if we could make it accessible for people with severe aphasia. And I remember the time being a little anxious about this, but I couldn't really argue them, they had a point and was saying people with severe aphasic probably need psychological support more than anybody else, and so often excluded, even in the face of your trials. So, see what you can do, you're a speech therapist, you've got training in psychological therapies, we'll see what you can do. So, we ran a little pilot with people with very severe aphasia. And it was challenging, it was really challenging. Adapting solution focused brief therapy for people with severe aphasia. So, they had receptive and comprehension difficulties. And at the end of this pilot, we got a big thumbs up, though, they said, "this therapy does work, you shouldn't leave people with severe aphasia." So, we did. So, we did include people with severe disabilities. And in fact, I think it's 43% of our participants at securities union. So, we thought about this a lot, for three years now. I'm very happy to share my thinking with you on how we adapt solution focused brief therapy for people with severe aphasia if you'd like me to keep talking.   Jerry: I would love that. That would be terrific. And before you go on, I just wanted to make a couple of notes. You have a 2016 paper about that trial, excuse me, the pilot of that approach.   Sarah: Yes, I mean, this came as quite a surprise to me as a clinician, all the different stages of intervention. So, we've initially did a very tiny proof of concept study with five people who had mild to moderate aphasia. And I think the aim of that trial was just "does it work at all?" And perhaps a more personal level, "Do I like this therapy approach?" And then the little pilot has talked about the severe things yet that's not been published. That's internal pilot within the SOFIA project. I should really write that up at some point, but that's not been published. So yes, that was current work with people with severe aphasia before we do the trial. So yeah, there's been quite a lot of stages before we went into a feasibility trial. And as something that I'm particularly proud of is that we did include people with severe aphasia. And I can add that one of the things we're looking at is do the other different patterns in results in people with severe aphasia or mild aphasia, and we don't think that there particularly are. We think people with severe aphasia also benefited from the therapy. So we're really pleased. It is a different sort of therapy though I would say. So solution focused brief therapy is as traditionally, really linguistically quite complex. So there's cognitively complex as well, there's a lot of question forms, which are sort of hypothetical, conditional features and the other person's perspective. And if you go on a training course, I think most of the questions will seem like they're not really going to work that well with someone with aphasia. And a lot of the tools seem very based in language and very inaccessible, to be honest. So it was, I think what we did with SOFIA was we stretched back to think what are the core assumptions underpinning this approach? And then can we build up in a way that's more linguistically accessible? So, there was quite a lot of taking out solution focused questions and thinking, how can we make this simpler, and then sort of the other way of building up from assumptions? So that sounds really abstract. So, if I sort of give some examples. So, an assumption might be, a solution focused assumption might be that everybody has strengths and talents and skills, even though they're not yet quite aware of them. There are lots of solution focused tools to help elicit people really start to notice those strengths and skills and talents. And one of the things you might do to start a follow up session is say, you know well what have you been pleased to notice about yourself in the last week, so it starts to help people notice what's going well, what can they be pleased about, and I think what I would quite often do with someone with severe aphasia, as a follow up session I might, is have some way, visual way of representing the time. So, they knew the timeframes or looking at their calendar together. And I'll just say, "What are you proud of?" And we'd write down proud, maybe the gesture, and then we would just list five things they were proud of. And that was conceptually, quite straightforward. And then it was easy in speech therapy skills to facilitate them coming back with them, what they've been proud of. So, and it might take a whole, it was super exciting that, you know, if someone was linguistic, didn't have aphasia, that kind of little bit of conversation might take three minutes, five minutes, but for someone with aphasia, it might take an entire session to think of well what are five things that they've been proud of since I last saw you? And I remember one gentleman, he had very severe aphasia, not very much language at all. And he, he went off and he came back with this little wooden stool that he bought. And he, through gesture, he explained that he used this tool to help with his, and he was gardening with his tomato plants on his tiny little balcony. And it was explained with no language that it was just right, because he stopped getting backache, he didn't have to bend over. And then he explained through gesturing and looking at the stool that it was it was a peaceful story. I mean, it was it was a tiny stool. And he explained that he bought it from the local market. And he explained with his purse that he bartered it down, and it was actually only cost him 10 pounds, which is not very much money. And it was functional, it was light, it was the perfect height to stop getting backaches when he gardened his tomato plants. And it was beautiful. It was a really beautiful item. And if you got anyone else to just come down to the local pawn shop, and bought a little plastic stool, he had the kind of, it was just this lovely story that he did something about him that he'd been able to share with me, this little tiny incident in his life of buying this stool that he'd done over the last week, his gardening. And I think it was giving him that space to expand on these little details of his life that he felt proud of, and it was making a space. So, there wasn't very much language involved in that conversation at all. He didn't, there wasn't very much language in terms of my questions, there wasn't very much language in terms of how he answered them. And it probably took him, I don't know, 15 minutes to explain to me about this stool and what it meant to him. Maybe he didn't have very many chances, the rest of his life to expand on those little details of who he was and why this was important to him. So, sometimes I used to think, gosh, it's quite a watered down version of solution focused brief therapy, I'm doing, but there's some quite sophisticated questions and tools that I'm not able to use. And we would tear it back down to sort of this quite essential things. But somehow, it seemed to be quite empowering to have people feel that someone had noticed them, and that these conversations help people feel that someone had noticed what was special about them. And that helped them perhaps notice for themselves what was special about them. Sorry, that was a quite long winded answer.   Jerry: No, absolutely. I just think that's a fabulous illustration of, you know, the support that speech language therapists can provide in that context to facilitate all of that communication. So, you said this is a guy with very little verbal communication. And yet, that's a really complex story that you were able to elicit and really speaks to why, you know, we're well positioned, so to speak, to provide these kinds of supports as well, I just want to make a couple of notes. Referring back to that 2016 pilot, you have some examples of the language that typical solutions, focused therapy would use, you know, the best analogy I could give was, you know, some of those questions are a paragraph long, so to speak, and you've kind of pared that down to a single, you know, less syntactically complex sentence that allows those types of responses and that certainly all of the communication supports to get there in terms of expression.   Sarah: Yes, so at City University, there's a clinical linguist called Lucy Dipper. I do remember having a lovely session with her. And I said, look, I've got these questions, they don't work at all, and then that was quite nice to tap into kind of a linguist's attitude and she was sort of talking through how we could simplify. So that was, and that's kind of what I like about research, sometimes there's all these different angles. So, there's the kind of interpersonal sort of meeting with participants, but then there's the kind of more intellectual thing of how do we simplify this language when you first meet someone. And you might typically say in the first session, you know, this is really quite posing, I'm with your best friend, what would they say, which would tell you that these sessions have been a useful concept they see and know these questions go on, as you say, for a very long time. And we went through question by question thinking how to make them a bit simpler. So, in that case, the very first session, very sort of an opening out trying to explore what's into someone, what do they want to focus on in the sessions? I might write down, you know, we're having six sessions and write down six, six visits. Say, what, what are you hoping for? And then write down hopes as a gesture. And that's a much simpler way of asking someone than some of the typical solution focused. And then what we did when if that was, that's still a very open question, and quite hard for someone with very severe aphasia to answer so, we then we borrowed, like, highlights from everything we could find. So, we borrowed from talking maps. So, I don't know how much talking maps are used in the US, but this is where you, okay? So, he literally goes like here's a doormat, and you have all these cuts. So, we took the doormat idea, and we borrowed from all the research across the world about what it means to live well with aphasia, we got about 12 constructs, things like family, friends, competence, going out. And we thought we would do a scaling that was the sort of not to 10 at the top. Then we would ask people to place these different constructs on the scaling map so how they felt things were going and mostly people even with very severe aphasia were able to do this relatively okay. And then we were to say, what's important to move up from that? And that was relatively, it was very visual, you know, it was literally taking a card and saying, well, the card that I really want to move is this card. I want this card to move up. And it was a surprise, sometimes you'd expect to be sometimes in terms of a card that was already quite high, that was the thing they wanted. And that was I mean, that was just a real start point for the conversation. And I spent hours creating pictures to support these conversations. And what I actually found was most useful when I went along was just paper and pen, because it's so fluid and flexible. And if you don't know where the conversation is going to go, which you don't really with solution focused brief therapy, so very much following on from what I still recommend what they say. So, you can't really know in advance what the session is going to look like. Paper and pens and objects in the environment and just sort of being creative. So, making sure they have their own paper and pen, so there was a sort of an equality there. I did a lot of drawing and terrible drawing, I did a lot of drawing and sessions, and then making use of whatever they had that they were comfortable using. So especially these days, with smartphones just being amazing, and there was this gentleman who prior to his stroke, he used to go to art galleries, but it was only after a stroke that he learned to paint. And we had some lovely sessions with him putting up various paintings on his phone and showing me. Although there was a lady with severe aphasia, where during the week, she would take photos and things that she wanted to share with me because she was pleased about. So, she would take photos of the various meals she'd cook during the week, and she would show me on her smartphone. So, we kind of, again, that's free speech therapy isn't it, that's what speech therapists do all over the world, you make the most of the skills that the person with aphasia has. And it just goes, I just love it when you get to a stage where you don't actually notice that someone has aphasia anymore, you are just having a conversation, and it just happens to look slightly different from the conversation if they didn't have aphasia. But yeah, and that's a part of solution focusing as well, to make the most of it, to capitalize on people's strengths and what's going on.   Jerry: Absolutely, what a great description. I just want to highlight some of those things that you talked about just a, you know, a toolbox for facilitating or supporting that communication within that solutions focused intervention. So, you talked about the talking maps, just a fabulous tool, and you even mentioned personal modifications in photos that you added, the rating scales, obviously really powerful written choice. You mentioned earlier, writing down those key words, doing some great drawings of your own. Yeah, and then phones are just so powerful, you know, so easy to pull out and just shoot. So that really speaks to how you get at all of that language exchange when you are talking with someone with severe aphasia or with, you know, difficulty expressing.   Sarah: And I guess we kind of, we pulled on the bits of solution focused brief therapy, which are more visual. So, scales are often used in traditional therapy. So, as solution focused therapy would have, say, if someone really established that what they really were hoping to focus on was confidence, then for a scale you might have, ten would be they're feeling really confident, and zero is the opposite. So, solution focused, you would tend to invite someone to place themself on that scale. So, if someone doesn't have aphasia, you tend to do all this scaling work verbally. But I would reach for my scale and I would do all you know, write one to 10 on the scale, and then I would tend to write confidence as a key word at the top of the scale and then they would, after they place themselves on whatever is true. What I quite like about solution focused therapy with rating scales is that use that then as a tool to help elicit what's already working well. So, you would spend quite a lot of time then, "well how come you're a three and not a two?" So what score, and then listing is lovely, because it's quite conceptually easy. And it's a quite a natural way of writing down key words. So, I tend to spend quite a lot of time looking at what's already going well. And then it's very nice and visual to just then have a little area again, one step up to four. So, what does four look like? Again, these are very open questions. And sometimes, you know, you have to really scaffold much more than you would do if someone didn't have aphasia, might try different options with a partner as well. You know you get to know what people want, and what works for them, and some people found these very open questions hard to see how to scaffold it. But I still think that there's something quite nice about these visual scales, what does this look like when you start to scale?   Jerry: Absolutely, really powerful tool. And like you said, those comparisons of, "why weren't you a three? Why are you a four? What would it take to get to a five?" Open ended, but gives them the direction to say what they want to say, rather than us constraining that. So just to kind of follow that track of kind of delivering focused brief therapy, and then maybe some of the challenges that you encountered? Can you share a little about that, your experience?   Sarah: Would it help if I talked a little bit about what is solution focused brief therapy?    Jerry: Yeah, why don't we start there? Yeah.    Sarah: It's just one of many psychological therapies. And I have to say, I think my start point for the project was, was probably just, I want to show that it's possible to adapt psychological therapy, and I want to look at the role of speech and language therapists, and I've happened to do it through solution focused brief therapy. I think solution focused brief therapy aligns quite well with my speech therapists’ sort of values of what they want from their work. And it's, in the UK is already quite used by speech therapists. And I think they find it's an approach that they can integrate with other language therapy work, they quite like it. So that was one of my reasons. And also, I had a little bit of training in it before I started my PhD. So, it was sort of on my mind, a therapy approach that I liked. So, to tell you a little bit about it, it originated in America, a family psychological therapies, and it started with Steve De Shazer observing, was one of the originators of the approach, observing family therapy sessions. And he noticed that most of the time these sessions were spent looking at the problem. And just occasionally a bit of therapy time is spent looking at exceptions to the problem. And his observation was that when session time was looking at these exceptions, it seemed to be associated with more progress. And that was kind of the seed of the therapy approach. So, there's a strong part of the therapy approach that says, well, whatever the problem is, there are usually times when the problem is less bad or not even there, and if we look at those times, what's happening then, perhaps that can be the building blocks to help people move forward. So, I would say as an approach, it's less interested in diagnosing problems and looking at problems, and it's more interested in noticing where people want to move towards, where they're wanting to get to. And it's less interested in problem solving and looking at what's going well, what's already going in the right direction that we can capitalize on. And I think, for me, a quite an important part of the approach is this idea that the client is the expert in their own life, not us as therapists, but it's for the client to know what's important to them, what matters to them, where they want to get to. And it's our role to help them work at how they want to move forward. So, that sounds quite straightforward. But actually, it's really quite hard to sort of sit on your hands and not give people advice and not stop to give people advice and tell people what to do. We'll not give people suggestions, but just to, to trust that they will have the resources within them to find their own way forward, so it's our role perhaps to facilitate that happening. And I think there's quite, there's a slight misconception, I think about solution focused brief therapy, that it's a very half glass full approach, and it's not really noticing, not giving space to the problems. And to be fair, sometimes that is how it's applied. And I think I felt really strongly in SOFIA that wasn't what I wanted. From my experience of delivering the approach, I think when someone's had a stroke, and you're a speech therapist, often, sometimes you're the first person ever really had the chance to really talk through what that's like. And I think that type of acknowledgement was always an important part of the approach for me. So, there's a sense of, some people have described those particular solution focused writer who does talks about one particular acknowledgement and one certain possibility, but I've always really liked that as the kind of metaphor for a sense of spending session time really listening to the person and being there with the person and then sort of shifting away when you feel it's right to think about possibility, and helping them to work out how they can live with it. And having belief and hope that it is possible to live with it too. So, there's sort of oscillating between the acknowledgement and possibility and I think that's been, well for me that's an important part of the therapy that we delivered in the trial. This sense of giving people space to talk about what's hard. And I think unless someone's feeling that you're really listening to that, it's quite hard for them, perhaps to want to trust you to make, to talk about how they're going to move forwards. Jerry: Yeah, terrific. Just to highlight some of those key points, that idea that client is the expert in their life and how they live their life. And we really need to inhibit giving our own solutions because they have the capability of coming up with their own. And I just love those two frames, acknowledgement and possibility. So, yeah, terrific. What kind of challenges have you run into in terms of delivering that? Sarah: So, there were three therapists delivering the therapy in the project and I was actually just reading through the interviews quite recently with the other two therapists. So yeah, I had lots of different hats on in this project, which is quite interesting. I think what was positive was that they found a very enjoyable therapy approach, delivering a rewarding and I thought it was feasible for speech therapist to deliver it. I think that where it was more challenging was, I think I found couples work more challenging when I was working with the couples. And I think for me myself, because I have had high quality training in solution focused brief therapy and psychological therapy. And I think for me, I really benefited from that additional training. I think it is you know, we're not couples’ therapists. I think you can feel uneasy going into a session working with a couple where there is a sort of disharmony. So, I think maybe I sort of extra support for therapists in that situation. I think the therapy approach can work quite well, while I think it is challenging. I think the other thing that's challenging is when there's more severe distress. So, in the fellowship project, people could take part whether or not, whatever their skills and developing skills. So, there was a lot of people actually in the project who had a very high developing skills when we started the project, which is quite interesting because the therapy approach is really designed for people with high, you know it was designed helping to make change in other people who didn't really want to make the change happen to everyone which had its own challenges. But the people who were very distressed, I think there was a sense that they needed some real time support to help them to handle that and feel reassured that if someone was really that concerned about their mental health, that they have somebody to turn to. And I think that's really important that we're speech therapists, were not mental health professionals. And if you're working with someone, you think that, yeah, he's got mental health issues that you're concerned about to know that you've got back up somehow and you've got someone that you, it's just not all on your shoulders. So, I think that was a challenge. As I said, this is a challenge that we hadn't anticipated, that there would be people in the project who were really content in themselves, that they found a way to live with their life and they're taking part in the project because they were curious and wanted to contribute to research. And so, they did the therapy with us. And the therapy is designed to help people build change. And these are people who felt a way to live. They didn't really want to be making change. But there was one lady I worked with, a lovely, lovely, lovely lady and by the end of therapy, her first therapy session said, you know what, you seem to be, you know, you found this lovely way of living. Do you want me to come back to do the other five sessions? And she was very keen that I did. And she'd taken part in the project, it was her right to have these sessions. So, she had all six sessions. And then I guess, well, they were very special sessions. We very much sort of more future focus, looking at how you want to be shifting your life going forward wasn't really that much of a thing for her because she didn't. She was very frail and elderly, but she found a way to live with her things in her life. And so, we did a lot of time noticing everything that she was later a very special person. And I remember those were quite profound sessions really, I felt there was a real connection that she wasn't looking to make change. And whether it's quite hard in terms of the project, talking to people in the project who don't want to make change. This clinical trial is all about making change. But I think sometimes there is a value in conversations which don't necessarily lead to change, but there is something about the connection there that's important. Jerry: Absolutely. Just kind of affirming the path that you're on. And like you said yourself, that human connection definitely may not measure the same way, but definitely important. When you were talking about that idea of people that have clinician’s kind of having that back up, it just kind of reminded me of Ian Kneebone's stepped care model and how that is to know, you know, when you're kind of, when you need to hand it off or at least collaborate with someone else for those higher level needs for sure. Can we talk a little bit about the SOFIA trial and kind of where that played in? Sarah: Yes, of course. So, the SOFIA trial was the feasibility randomized control trial and so is underpowered to definitively answer, is this therapy approach effective? So, the questions instead that we're asking from is, is this going to be feasible to scale up into a definitive full scale trial. So, we look at can the approach do this okay? Can we retain people within the project, if we do the assessments right, if we've got the training and support for the clinicians right? Is the therapy approach acceptable? Is it acceptable to deliver this as speech therapists? So, these are the sort of questions. And we recruited 32 people, half of them were randomized into the immediate intervention group. And we had to weight this design so half of them receive the intervention at six months. So, this is a group of 32 people. And in the end, two people withdrew. So, we have 30 people stay to the end of the trial and received therapy. And it was mixed methods. So, we interviewed all 30 of them. So it was, it was very interesting. And it's not so much about you know, have do people with aphasia experience receiving a psychological intervention. So that was a really interesting interview to read and it's quite an exciting stage. We've finished the trial and we were very lucky in the sense that we did our final assessment visits before COVID. And it's a bit poignant reading the interviews because it makes you wonder how people are over the last few months. But yes, so we're at the stage where we've pretty much finished all the analysis now. So, we're just about to start submitting. I don't know if you'd like me to share some of the... Jerry: I was going to say, can we get a little sneak peek maybe before those papers come out? Sarah: Yeah, that would be my pleasure. So, in terms of feasibility outcomes, since it's a feasibility trial, we were really pleased that the primary comparison point, the six months randomization and at that point we collected outcome measures from 30 to 32 people. So, 97 percent, which has really exceeded our expectations. And in terms of people adhering to therapy, so two people withdrew, and so out of 30 people who received the therapy, 29 of them received all six sessions, and one person received five. And to adhere, researchers said they needed to receive at least two, so all good. We recruited on time and on target. And I think there was, we were lucky, and we had a nice buy in from our sights, and I'm so grateful to our sights. And I think they kind of, the speech therapists I they were just really pleased to have a project that they could refer in people with severe aphasia. So, they were very supportive. And, yes, in terms of sort of any outcome measures, primary outcome measures, it seems to work fine. We have minimal missing data. So, thumbs up in terms of the feasibility outcomes, which is so lovely. In terms of the qualitative data, yeah, overwhelmingly the participants liked it. So, I think we can say it was a highly acceptable therapy. There were some kind of things that came through in terms of what they valued about the therapy; they valued having someone notice their achievements and what was their successes, they valued being able to have someone listen to them talk about their hopes and what they were hoping for, for in the future, they valued being able to share their experiences and their distress and have someone listen to them, and they valued connection and companionship. Some of them said one of the best things in it was having fun, having a laugh with a therapist. And that's something I really liked and that's what I really valued. And it came through as this really big thing, their relationship with the therapist, and how that was important when you're going to be a part of therapy for them. In terms of changes, not everyone was wanting to make change. But people talked about you know we have some nice things in terms of feeling better in themselves, in terms of sort of being more able to talk to family and friends, going out a little more. And then we sort of sectored people into four groups in terms of how they respond to therapy. So, they were one group we said was the changed group. So, these are the group of people who the therapy came at a really good time for them. Just constantly it had come at a time when they were in need of some kind of, not a need, but it really benefited them having this therapy approach. It led to sort of meaningful impact for them in their lives. And that was about a third of the group. And then there were two small groups of about five people in each group. There was one group where they called the complementary group, where they were on an upward trajectory, they were making a lot of progress, And the therapy, the research project therapy, was one small part that and I knew that they probably would make an upward projection anyway, but it was a positive thing and it helped them on their way. But we called it complemental. And then there was another little group of about five people that we called discordance. So, they were people who the therapy was misaligned, they liked the therapy and they like their therapist generally, but the therapy was misaligned of what they were looking for. So, they wanted language therapy. They wanted empowerment work. They wanted someone. We weren't at the end of the day psychologists, we were speech therapists, we could have done many therapies with them and that's what they wanted. We did solution focused brief therapy. So, there was a sort of mismatch and they were a bit you know, they wanted exercise. And it's frustrating to kind of think in clinical services, you could have given them that and done solution focused brief therapy around the edges perhaps, would have perhaps part of it for some of them is coming to terms with what they could and couldn't do with the aphasia and that. And then there was another group. It was about a third of the group who we called the connected group, and they weren't looking to make changes from the therapy. They weren't coming into the project trying to, with the idea, and our whole concept of change to come from us as researchers really. They came out of curiosity of contribution and what they really valued was this connection with the therapist, and we called them the connected group. They really liked therapy, the highly valued it, but it was about the connection of the therapist rather than wanting to shift or make changes. And to be fair, I think we found the ending of therapy the hardest. And it made me feel that there's the duty of some kind of ongoing support, which wasn't part of the trial protocol. But I think for them it was, yeah, if I had to run this trial again and if we had people in that sort of connected group, I would think, what kind of, is this important that a part of this is looking at? So that's qualitative. And in terms of the clinical outcomes, as my statistician keeps telling me, he is very much on feasibility trial and the power, but the primary outcome measure, the primary comparison point, which is six months post randomization, it seems to be going in the right direction. But, as my statistician keeps telling me it is the small groups and we can't ever extrapolate from the statistics, but it does seem to be promising. Jerry: Well, that sounds great. I was going to ask you a little bit about the implications of these findings to everyday practice. I think you kind of touched on that. Any kind of takeaways or thoughts on that piece? Sarah: Like I said, it is really encouraging that the speech therapists on the trial found it a positive therapy to deliver. So, it does suggest that speech therapists, who have an interest in this area, if they get training in a kind of brief psychological therapy, it is a possibility. And I would say that sort of the therapists in this trial did have monthly clinical supervision as well as quite a lot of initial training, and they had real time support when they needed it too. So, they had that sense that they felt quite nurtured, I think, within the project. And that was important. I would say the theme of feeling connected just speaks to value that the participants placed in being able to share how they were experiences to suggest that that kind of active listening and being there with someone and sort of listening to how someone is, that's of real value. And if a speech therapist has done that in a session, they should probably come away from that session feeling really proud that they have done something important. And I suppose my other thing is I'm a believer in this joint work between mental health professionals and speech language therapists. And I think going forwards, I know I've personally really valued from it, having mental health professionals in my supervisory team of EBSCO, I urge them for advice and having a kind of clinical support as well. And when you're feeling someone is very, very distressed in recognizing that as a speech therapist, that's fine. And that much of our role is working with mental health professionals. Jerry: That's terrific. I'm looking forward to reading those papers when they come out. Sarah: Thank you. Jerry: I'm on the edge of my seat for sure, it is really important work. In the meantime, is it okay if we share, you have a severe trial resource page, is it okay if we share that link with our listeners? Sarah: Absolutely. Yeah, thank you. Jerry: Excellent. Well, I could continue this conversation all day long, so probably better wind it up. I'm wondering, I just want to give a nod to this as a little bonus. Would you be able to share kind of a nutshell little version of your work on befriending in the SUPERB trial? Sarah: Yes, of course. So, the SUPERB trial has also just come to an end and they're also just writing up papers and yeah. So, that's where people with aphasia, where Mastrov befriended people who have recently come out of hospital with aphasia and the feasibility outcomes, again very, very good and strong in terms of the clinical outcomes. Really encouraging again, the statistician saying we can't over play these. But it is looking very encouraging in terms of the primary outcome measure, which is marriage, and preventing people becoming depressed. So, within SUPERB it was only people who scored as not depressed who were eligible to take part. And in terms of follow up, a 10 month follow up, it does seem that there's a difference between groups in terms of how many people results, in terms of the clinical outcomes and in terms of the qualitative side which is the side I've been most involved in. Encouraging. Yeah, there seems to be something special about an intervention delivered by people with aphasia. And at the end of the day, they can offer something that me as a health professional I can't offer. And yeah, a unique understanding and ability to empathize from having lived with the aphasia, some sort of sense of role modeling as well. This is, it's possible to live with this particular guilt, with the part of the data of experience of the defenders. And I would say that I found it a very challenging intervention to deliver, all of the logistics of organizing appointments and organizing the travel, and it can be quite challenging in terms of if the friend, the person receiving the befriending is upset or changes their mind about wanting intervention. I think that's quite hard, but they found it a very rewarding intervention to deliver and I found it very satisfying that something that was really painful in their life, but being able to use to help other people. And I think that was quite powerful. And I think they felt very pleased to be involved with the trial. And I think what they would highlight is that they were very it was very satisfying experience for them. And they thought it was making a difference, that the supervision and training was really important. And I think the real time support, as well as if they were feeling a bit stuck, that they knew they had someone and they got peer support so they supervision in the group, and I think that was really valuable. I sat in with the person doing the supervision, and I think she was wonderful. So, I think it was a lovely intervention. Jerry: Wow, that's terrific. Again, waiting for that one, too. Well, this has been a fabulous conversation. So, on behalf of Aphasia Access, we thank you for listening to this episode of the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast. For more information on Aphasia Access and to access our growing library of materials, go to www.aphasiaaccess.org. If you have an idea for a future podcast series or topic, email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org. Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.     Resources:  SOFIA trial resource page: https://city.figshare.com/collections/SOlution_Focused_brief_therapy_In_post-stroke_Aphasia_SOFIA_feasibility_trial/4491122    On behalf of Aphasia Access, we thank you for listening to this episode of the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast. For more information on Aphasia Access and to access our growing library of materials go to www.aphasiaaccess.org If you have an idea for a future podcast series or topic email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.

Is data governance making you more productive? Or is it a pain that you just have to deal with for the good of the company? If you’ve got data issues, it may be time for a therapy session. Join resident psychologists Tim, Juan, and Ashleigh Faith, EBSCO’s Director of Knowledge Graph and Semantic Search, as we explore the people and culture sides of data governance. We may not be able to treat all your symptoms, but we can change the way you feel about data governance. This episode will feature ways to transform data governance from knowledge barrier to knowledge bridge, suggestions for consultative approaches to governance, and a discussion of who has started playing chess after watching The Queen’s Gambit.

Host Duncan Smith is joined by Daisy Magnus-Aryitey of NC IDEA, an organization dedicated to strengthening North Carolina’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Their conversation focuses on why libraries are perfectly poised to support economic development in their communities and how they must be intentional when developing services for entrepreneurs.Learn how EBSCO’s Entrepreneurial Mindset Training Course can support library programming for entrepreneurs.

Becky Spratford is a Readers' Advisor in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog RA for All. She is under contract to provide content for EBSCO's NoveList database and writes reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is a 20 year locally elected Library Trustee [still serving] and a Board member for the Reaching Across Illinois Library System. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of The Reader's Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition [ALA Editions, 2012] and is currently hard at work on the 3rd Edition. She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association and currently serves as the Association's Secretary and organizer of their annual Librarians' Day. You can follow Becky on Twitter @RAforAll.   Recommended in this episode: Ladies of the Fright podcast (episode 36), Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, Into the Forest and All the Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo, and Doll Bones by Holly Black  Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.  Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini (used with permission). 

This week, we feature a fascinating interview with Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian, Internet Archive, recorded on November 6, 2019 in Charleston SC during the annual Charleston Library Conference. The interview was conducted by Nancy Herther, Sociology/Anthropology Librarian, University of Minnesota and Courtney McAllister, Electronic Resources Librarian, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University. Nancy has recently retired, and Courtney has moved to a new job as a Library Services Engineer at EBSCO since the interview was recorded. We’d like to thank all three of the participants for the wonderful interview, and we hope you enjoy this week’s episode. ----------------------------------------------------------- As a reminder, the Charleston Conference 2020 Call for Papers is now open. Submit your proposals before July 8. https://charlestonlibraryconference.com/call-for-papers/ Visit the Charleston Conference website to discover how we are responding to Covid-19. charlestonlibraryconference.com Video of the Penthouse Suite Interview with Brewster Kahle https://youtu.be/GcENZMi-HnM

Rob Herndon, president of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative, joins Duncan Smith, founder of NoveList and EBSCO's chief strategist for public libraries, to debunk several myths about entrepreneurs and share how all people can become more entrepreneurial in their thoughts and actions.Learn More about the Entrepreneurial Mindset Training Course discussed in this podcast.

The AI Eye: IBM (NYSE: $IBM) Watson Health Collaborating with EBSCO for Clinical Decision Support and Draganfly Selected by Windfall Geotek for AI-Driven UAS

The AI Eye: IBM (NYSE: $IBM) Watson Health Collaborating with EBSCO for Clinical Decision Support and Draganfly Selected by Windfall Geotek for AI-Driven UAS

Neil Scully is the IT Director and Adam Snook is the former Project Manager at OpenAthens.Our conversation today will focus on several prevalent concerns libraries have around data security and user privacy and how OpenAthens enables libraries to manage authentication more securely.Guest hosted by Amanda Ferrante, Sales Authentication Specialist at EBSCO Information Services.

Marianne Castano Bishop, Ed.D., Platform Product ManagerMian Bishop has been passionate about accessibility and internationalization since she was a young girl growing up with neighbors from different countries and a few with disabilities. She has been a steadfast advocate for people with disabilities while serving as manager, administrator, trainer, faculty member, researcher and as a doctoral student at Harvard. She prefers to use the term “diverse abilities” as she believes each individual has a set of gifts that makes him or her unique. Diversity and inclusion have always been part of her personal and professional life. She echoes the World Wide Web Consortium’s message that web accessibility is essential for some and useful for all. Quoting Tim Berners-Lee, she agrees that “the power of the Web is in its universality.” Everyone should have access to the Web. She can be reached at mbishop@ebsco.com.In this episode, we discuss the usability of library resources and accessibility (A11y) for all.

This episode features a Charleston Conference Penthouse Suite Interview with Ashley Bailey (Dir, Collection Development & Workflow Solutions, Central US, GOBI Library Solutions from EBSCO) and Doug Way (Associate University Librarian for Collections and Research Services, University of Wisconsin, Madison). They are interviewed by Matthew Ismael (Dir, Collection Development, Central Michigan University Library; Editor, Charleston Voices) about the impact of automation on the future of collections development. https://youtu.be/giHX7tBU9k4 Doug Way & Ashley Bailey Video This is the last episode the summer! We look forward to returning for the Fall season, where we will be looking ahead to 2019’s Charleston Conference with a series of episodes that offer a sneak peak at some of the offerings of the conference. That season begins on September 9, 2019. ****************************************  Remember that you can still take advantage of the early bird discount if you register for The Charleston Conference before September 14th. You can find all of the info about the conference at charlestonlibraryconference.com We are also in the open nominations phase of the Charleston Fast Pitch Competition. Do you know of a project in a library or publishing entity that deserves attention? Perhaps one that could be adapted/expanded by others to generate influence in the wider community? We are particularly interested in scholarly communication and publishing as well as academic and research library initiatives but we are not limited exclusively to those areas. More information is available at charlestonlibraryconference.com/fastpitch. Charleston Fast Pitch Competition Webinar: https://charlestonlibraryconference.com/video/webinars/fast-pitch-bootcamp/  

We are happy to announce our newest session for The Library is Open Podcast! Today's session features an interview with Lisa Sjögren, Librarian at Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Communication and Learning in Science. Lisa pours her energy into why their Library has chosen the FOLIO Open Source Platform for their new LSP. Chalmers University of Technology was named the first FOLIO Beta Partner for EBSCO Information Services. https://www.folio.org/about/news-events/article/chalmers-university-of-technology-named-first-folio-beta-partner-for-ebsco-information-services/ You can read more about the Chalmers implementation on the FOLIO wiki at: https://wiki.folio.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14461407. They plan to go live in Autumn of 2019. Chalmers Library has a wonderful blog where they discuss journeys of a FOLIO early implementer, a new library system built from scratch and more at https://blog.lib.chalmers.se/tag/folio/. About Lisa Sjögren Lisa is a systems and metadata librarian. She works to ensure the visibility, retrievability and accessibility of their collections, through data quality and the smooth operations of their ILS and discovery system. Currently, within the framework of Chalmers' beta partnership with EBSCO, Lisa is working with the implementation at Chalmers of open source, community driven, library service platform FOLIO. As a core member of the Chalmers FOLIO implementation team, she works closely with EBSCO and the FOLIO community to ascertain that FOLIO will provide a seamless and intuitive user experience for library staff and patrons. Read more about Lisa here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisamsjogren/ About Chalmers University of Technology | Department of Communication and Learning in Science Chalmers University of Technology is researching and educating in technology, science, shipping and architecture, with a sustainable future as a comprehensive vision. Chalmers is known for its efficient innovation environment and has 13 institutions. Graphene Flagship, one of the European Commission's first research initiatives within Future Emerging Technologies, is coordinated by Chalmers. Located in Gothenburg, Chalmers has about 10,300 full-time students and 3,100 employees. Read more at: http://www.lib.chalmers.se/ About FOLIO FOLIO is a collaboration of libraries, developers and vendors building an open source library services platform. It supports traditional resource management functionality and can be extended into other institutional areas. Read more at: https://www.folio.org/about/

Episode 39 features David Walker with EBSCO Industries. David is a graduate of Auburn University where he earned a B.S. in Accounting.   He started his career as a CPA with Ernst and Young and later worked for PJ America as VP and Corporate Controller until joining EBSCO Industries in 2000.   David has served EBSCO in a variety of capacities over the past 19 years and currently serves as its President and CEO.  EBSCO is a global company with businesses in a range of industries including Information Services, Outdoor Products, Real Estate, Manufacturing and Distribution, and Business Services.  EBSCO is consistently ranked in the top 3 of Alabama based privately held firms.   David is active in community affairs and currently serves on the boards of Auburn University, Harbert College of Business, Junior Achievement, City of Vestavia Hills, Mayor Financial Advisory Committee, The Distribution Point, and McKinney Capital. David is an outdoor enthusiast, avid reader, and enjoys travel with his wife, Lindy, and their three children. 000006ED 000006E7 0000D417 0000D417 000F2B0F 000F2B0F 0000811B 000080F1 00135B82 0005C9D6

Nelson Brooke, a Birmingham native, graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with an anthropology degree. Nelson is an Eagle Scout and outdoor enthusiast who has enjoyed fishing and hunting along the banks of the Black Warrior River since he was seven years old. Nelson has been Black Warrior Riverkeeper’s staff Riverkeeper since January of 2004. He also served as Executive Director from August 2007 through December 2009. Nelson was named “2010 Alabama River Hero” by the Alabama Rivers Alliance. As Riverkeeper, Nelson patrols and photographs the Black Warrior River and its tributaries from the land, water, and air, looks for pollution problems, responds to citizen complaints, researches and analyzes polluters’ permits, collects pollution samples for laboratory analysis, educates the public about the beauty of the river and threats to it, works to empower stakeholders throughout the watershed, advocates compliance with environmental laws, works on finding solutions to pollution problems, and is a spokesman for the Black Warrior River watershed. Nelson runs our Riverkeeper Patrol Program and coordinates with our Legal Program when appropriate. Nelson is available to give educational presentations to your school, civic organization, or club. Topics discussed: environmental responsibility, legacy, Eagle Scouts, water filtration, healthy living, water wars, how to educate the public, why bottled water isn't regulated or healthy, EBSCO and more.

Do you struggle setting up efficient systems so you can get things done? Do you have a hard time establishing and building a culture in your office or within yourself? Are you uncertain on how you best function in the workforce? Then you probably want to listen to today's interview with Kyle Dobbs, who owns Compound Performance in Saint Louis, Missouri and this is his thing. Aside from being an awesome coach, he focuses with personal trainers, coaches, physical therapists, as well as gyms on building exactly what I just said: establishing the culture, making sure that leaders are in place in managing people effectively, making systems efficient so we can maximize revenue streams and results. And he talks a lot about personality archetyping as well in this very long but very awesome interview. I hope that you like it, I hope you get as much out of it as I did. And without further ado, let's give Kyle Dobbs a shot. For more information on Kyle, he can be found Instagram: @compoundperformance_ Facebook: kyledobbs4 and Compound Performance Website: compoundperformance.com Here are the links mentioned in the show: Inside Tracker Lucy Hendricks DISC Personality test Google Drive Bill Hartman Google Forms Evernote How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You Ben House Human Matrix Enjoy the video and modified transcript Modified Transcript Zac: You have an incredibly unique skill set that you are offering to folks like us in the industry in regards to setting up system building, organization, creating a healthy culture within companies and businesses, and I think that that's something that is vastly underappreciated within our field. You can have a wonderful idea, but if your execution is lackluster, whether its business in-person or online, you're likely going to fail. And I think a lot of people fail because they just don't have those systems in place. So that's why I wanted to bring you into this show. Tell me though, how the heck did you get into this? How does Kyle Dobbs, a yoked bro with a better beard and better hair than I, get into building systems, building culture, with people? What's your story? Kyle Dobbs: I started as a trainer, just like a lot of other people out there. And as I grew with that, I got really passionate into development. Mostly from the training and physiological side of things. That development and education did eventually lead me into leadership and management and with that I started building a lot of the organizational skills and general communication skills that I try to use now. As I got into upper management, and managing managers and directing departments and things of that nature, I got into a position in my last job where I was consulting with not only trainers and fitness facilities, but high-level executive teams within the finance community, which within large real estate companies and the New York market. I was working with a behavioral psychologist at the time on interoffice relationships and communication to decrease, essentially, autonomic stress. So locating environmental coherence within both the office space and their home lives and trying to also integrate an intelligence training into that. We took a ninety day blood work with people, looking at stress markers, looking at endogenous sex hormones, micronutrient deficiencies, whatever, all that good stuff. And then we were also measuring HRV on a daily basis, so looking at autonomic hyperactivity and HPA access hyperactivity, within the client base themselves. Those were  the diagnostics we were testing from a physiological standpoint. At the same time, we were running personality archetypes on them and seeing what their actual environmental and communication preferences were. And with that, developing the tools and awareness within the individuals themselves first; understanding how they prefer to be communicated with and how they perceive other archetypes. [caption id="attachment_9609" align="aligncenter" width="810"] I like to perceive my archetypes bold...and highlighted[/caption] A lot of this stuff is very subconsciously driven. It's very subcortical. You're not necessarily aware of what those preferences are. We find that people, instead of working within environments that they're more acclimated to. Instead, they acclimate and adapt to work environments and work demands that drive money. And finance, and all those things that we want from a social construct stand point. And that's fine, humans are the great improvisers. We adapt better than anything else, ever. Even though we have the ability to adapt and to do so very well, we were finding that those adaptations still drove high levels of autonomic stress and sympathetic tone. So, people are running around all day -- and night, if they're not regulating at home -- with higher blood pressure, higher heart rate, higher core body temperature. And then looking at higher cortisol levels, higher adrenaline levels, lower testosterone levels, especially in men, and also decreased cognitive function. There were overly sympathetic. From a work productivity standpoint, that was also suffering. So that's how we got the buy-in from the corporate institutions themselves. First, bringing out the self-awareness and then working with them in groups as teams on building out communication strategies with one another, peer to peer, and then with management to employee. Finding out how to actually speak to one another in a way that was both efficient and effective given their archetype and also setting an environment that is conducive to those archetypes working well together with one another. And then also leveraging people's unique skill sets based on those archetypes for the success of the whole, giving them more purpose within the team but doing so in a way that really leveraged their individual strengths rather than maybe what their job demands might have been. So  doing a little bit of reorganization from that standpoint as well. And for me that was incredibly intriguing and satisfying. When I left that company and did my journey back to the midwest, I essentially started a consulting company. I work now with the strength and conditioning facilities, personal training facilities, and then individuals within the mentorship program where I use a lot of the same tools to help them with their teams and their client basis on a smaller scale which is great for me because it blends fitness with the actual leadership and community building of what I was doing before. Zac: I like that you were very scientific about making the changes with your previous job. With your clients  now, are you still tracking some of those variables? Are you having them measure HRV? Kyle: If they want to, I make that an optional thing. What I work with the most, with the people I work with now, is just looking at work performance. Especially being in fitness, a lot of them are tracking autonomics somehow anyway. It's something that more so where they're actually doing the tracking because they're excited about it. I offer the blood work as a third party option, I work with Inside Tracker based out of Austin, so I offer that as a third party at cost for them. Just to look at beginning, middle, and end numbers and I look for improvements over time there. But it is a pretty hefty expense and not everybody takes advantage of it. The majority of them do measure their own HRV or at the very least measure morning heart rate and look for changes off of baseline. They know that if they're plus ten to fifteen beats per minute, for a week, that they're probably going under some  systemic stress. So we look for just trends going lower with that. Same thing with HRV, we don't look at it that acutely, it's always looking at trends and looking at maybe environmental changes we can make prior to changes in the way they're training because all these individuals are also knowingly and willingly, , proactively accruing stress on a daily basis as well. So you have to differentiate at that point the physical and mechanical stress of training to the psychological and cognitive stress of incoherence from a lifestyle standpoint. There's a lot of reading data and then asking a lot of questions, looking at what their lifestyle is going through at that point rather than looking at maybe increase training demands or things of that nature acute-ly. Zac: As long you track some type of key performance indicator (KPI), in this case, work performance, everything else is gravy. Kyle: That's what it all boils down to. , HRV and the physiological metrics with people that are in fitness are so multifactorial. That, one, I don't want to get a false positive, but I also don't want to get a false negative based on some of those other things. At the end of the day, they're coming to me for work performance, not for improved HRV. So that's what I'm going to be looking at and we do that through a series of objective key results (OKRs) and some other principles that we'll talk about in a little bit but that's really what I'm looking at. Why personality testing? Zac: In terms of you getting into change or establishing these archetypes within the people you worked with in the past and having that be the intervention that you did at work, what led you to thinking that that was the big change that needed to be made in order to positively impact both work performance and these variables? For example, did you notice a difference in terms of the HRV measures when they were at the office or at work days versus just days they had off if it was the weekends or vacation? And if so, how did that lead you to going with communication as your primary intervention? Kyle: It was a little bit of both.  we definitely saw that over weekends, systemic stress really wasn't going down. A lot of it was because these people also had terrible lifestyle habits and they also, especially being in New York, they didn't leave work at work. Their weekends were still stress filled, they're still answering emails, they're still thinking about work all the time. A lot of them actually dreaded weekends because of the work they might lose once we started actually talking about that process. But we did notice when people weren't on vacations we'd see a little change early on but the longer the vacation went on, the more it would go back to normal because they'd start getting stressed about missing work. Their lives were being determined and dictated by their work rather than the other way around. From a communication standpoint, a lot of that information came from the behavioral psychologist I was working with. She'd been doing a little bit of work on this prior to working with me, she was already consulting with a few other companies and really taught me a lot about that process. As I was learning it, it was also really becoming applicable to the training that I was seeing from managing trainers and managing managers and looking at what makes a trainer successful from a professional basis. A lot of it, that I notice throughout the years, had more to do with how they interacted with their clients, how they engaged with them, and how they set that environment, rather than the amount of technical expertise they actually possessed. This is something that's always frustrating to trainers that always value education, and we have a bias towards education because that's our interest. This is something that's always frustrated people and, to be truthful, frustrated me in the past as a trainer. , I'm a very introverted individual, and communication has been something that I always had to really work at as far as being able to speak to different people. Especially to different people of different personality types and interest than that of myself. A lot of trainers are so highly focused on the aspect of training and not the aspect of the other 165 hours a week that their clients go through that they speak to them as if they might be trainers themselves. Trainers that maybe were missing or lacking of education that maybe were extrovert in personality, I noticed were talking to these clients about their lives. , about their communities, about their relationships, things that we might think are trivial from a training perspective, but are actually really important in setting the tone for lifestyle coherence and recovery and just purposefulness. We're having all this success in setting the environment for training. They're making it an anticipatory event rather than an obligation for the clients. It was something they were looking for and coming to. And it was all based on the relationship they were forming. As I was learning more about the archetypes, more about environmental coherence, it really started a lightbulb that  went off in my head that these principles are the same thing. Whether you're in an office building or whether you're an executive or whether you're a trainer is really irrelevant when you start talking about relationships. It's still people to people. Social norms play a role. At the end of the day, people want to be communicated with in a language and on terms that they understand. If you can get people to do that, and make them aware of that process and educate them on strategies to do so, they're going to be more successful in any endeavor they're in. The process for myself has made me a better husband and father, has made me a better friend, which for me is way more tactful than being a better trainer or manager in a sense. But it all crosses over, its principle-based so it applies to everything. Zac: Yeah, and I think one thing that most everyone is lacking in some degree is connection and I think especially to with technology and how we're always glued to phones. No one's ever taught the soft skills of how to have a conversation or how to build connection or rapport or anything. I mean, you've trained countless people, Kyle, and it eventually comes to the point where you're doing the same shit but the reason why they're with you is because they think you're a good person and that is their one time they get to hang out with someone that they enjoy. [caption id="attachment_9610" align="alignnone" width="810"] Or as I prefer, a "bruh"[/caption] Kyle: Yeah, I mean, what's adherence? From a contextual standpoint, the vast majority of the clients I've trained over the years have no knowledge of program design, or periodization, or anatomy and physiology but they do know what a good experience looks like. They do know what engagement looks like, they do know what communication looks like, and they know if they're enjoying themselves or not. That's what gets people coming back and if the trainer can combine technical expertise with those soft skills, they're going to crush it. That's what it comes out to be and the downside of that is I've seen way more people become successful with soft skills and little to none technical expertise than I have the other way around. We really might be fooling ourselves with what's actually the most important for the client. We feed that bias of educational law and we justify a lot of our actions by it. I've invested a lot of money in education and I value education, I've been an educator, but you also have to think outside the box and how you approach a demographic that is not fitness based. If they were fitness based, they wouldn't need you. If they understood anatomy and physiology and training and periodization and the required ownership to get to their goals from a physical standpoint, they wouldn't be paying you to train them. And I think that's something that trainers have to understand, that training is a choice for their client base. And they have to enjoy the experience. You're not necessarily educating them on how to become a trainer, you're not teaching them Latin with all the anatomy and physiology that you may know, you're providing them a path to fitness that they actually enjoy so you can build habit change within their lives and they're no longer intimidated or scared by fitness or physical activity, but they actually look forward to it and start integrating it into the other parts of their lives as well. Zac: Yeah, I can't agree more, and hearing that as a trainer should excite you because I think we do spend so much time, effort, energy, learning the training side of things to the nth degree of depth. No one gives a shit about that if they don't like you, so that's why I think what you offer is so essential in that regard. I think that the personality tests that you utilize is probably an easy barrier to entry for someone who wants to expand on their communication skills with others. The DISC Personality Test So why don't you talk to us a little bit about the DISC. I know that's one of your initial intake things that you utilize. Tell me a little bit about what the letters are about, how you use that to inform your decision making in terms of what people need to speed up their systems and how that's useful to help someone from a communication standpoint. Kyle: Yeah, in a broad sense the DISC is definitely my weapon of choice and most people, once they get their report back, are extremely surprised at just how accurate it is. There are four archetypes: D: Dominance I: Influence S: Steadiness C: Conscientiousness The D and the I are more extroverted archetypes and the S and the C are more introverted. The D and the C are more analytical archetypes and the I and the S are more novelty-based. Based off of those two things, I actually don't dive super deep into it with trainers because a lot of them aren't going to be running the DISC itself on their client bases. It's more so, if we can get even a fairly superficial view of what the archetypes prefer from a communication and environmental standpoint, and how to identify them and the people just through how they interact with their own environments. They're going to have enough strategies at that point to have a more efficient and effective conversation. I don't think everyone who takes this needs to become a psychologist. I'm definitely not one but I do think it's very similar to a movement assessment. We go to a movement assessment and we start analyzing gait and then we're walking down the street and everybody in front of us, everybody we see, has a hip shift or internal rotation or their pronating, There's a winged scap here, an elevated shoulder blade here and we're just picking all these things out and we really can't turn it off. With that, there's going to be a lot of different interventions that we might be able to use. The DISC is very similar. You can go into a room and see where people are positioned within that room and how their interacting with the other people in that room and have a pretty good idea of what archetype they are. From there you can start building out communication strategies if that is somebody that you want to communicate with. [caption id="attachment_9611" align="alignnone" width="810"] Tell me again about that time you couldn't bench press the bar.[/caption] “D” archetypes are usually found in leadership positions because they're naturally drawn to leadership and not everybody is. They are very analytical, but they're also fairly dopaminergic in the fact that they want challenge and they want to win a lot of the time. They sometimes push and rush through things in order to get to the end of the project. You can find them in a room fairly easy because they're extroverted and they'll usually be in the middle of the room, dominating conversation. They like to challenge ideas but they are people that you really have to provide evidence to if you've got ideas or something to bring up. They are people that like to win more than be right a lot of the times, so arguing with them is typically not something that is going to yield return for any of the other archetypes. “I” archetypes are very novelty-based, they're very extroverted. They're usually the life of the party. They like to be the center of attention and they like to be entertained and they like to entertain, in that respect. And if you're training an I, a linear program where they're isolated in a corner of a room, using maybe one modality for an extended period of time, is not going to be something that works well for them. They're going to get bored very quickly so you can set up your programming and your periodization around that archetype and that personality type to keep them engaged with the program. They're a little harder to train because you have to look at their needs based on the assessment and look at their goals. You have to implement enough exercise selection variation while still trying to accommodate the same outcomes throughout their programming to keep them entertained and keep them happy, which is not always an easy task to do because we're trainers. , reps are everything. If you want to get good at something, you have to practice, you have to repeat it, you have to be able to scale it with progressions and regressions while you got somebody who gets really bored really easily, you might never get to all the reps needed to actually see the outcomes you want because they're off doing boutique fitness or spin class. The way you also approach the different archetypes with praise and feedback is very important because everybody likes feedback but not everybody likes public praise. Some people get very embarrassed by it so you also want to make sure that people are very comfortable with how you're communicating with them from that respect. An “I” wants you to throw a parade for them every time they accomplish a new metric or hit a new goal of some sort. They want everybody in the room to know it and that's great. An “S”, the next one down the line, they just want a fist bump and to move on. They're more novelty-based, but they're also more introverted so they want to be engaged, they want a little bit of structure, little bit of uniformity, but they also want room to work within that structure, a little bit of autonomy. Again, you're going to program an “S” different, you're going to manage them differently from a management leadership standpoint because they love feedback but they have a hard time asking for it. If they feel like they are appreciated within a company or within a client-trainer relationship, they're going to work as hard as they can to make everybody happy. They're very much pleasers, they're people that usually work in service. A lot of trainers are “S's” and if they didn't love fitness, they would probably be teachers or nurses or something of that nature because that's what their archetype is typically drawn to outside of fitness. If they're not getting the feedback and the appreciation, they really withdraw within a company. They're not going to cause conflict or friction within a company, they're just going to become disengaged and apathetic which is just as bad. I think we've all seen that happen in clients before, if they're not getting the feedback and they just become disengaged and apathetic to not only the program but maybe the trainer. They move on, they're either moving on to a new trainer or maybe they're just out of fitness. They had a bad experience and now they're intimidated by it and they're done with it. Then you've got your “C's”. “C's” are very analytical. They're the people that come to every conversation or every Facebook thread with five Pubmed articles ready to cut and paste into a conversation and link to. , they're the science-based. They want everything backed up, but the problem is sometimes they don't get anything done because they're too busy researching. There's never enough information, so they end up paralysis by analysis. They're also a very introverted and analytical archetype, and when you're talking about training them, that's where a linear program works really well. They have the patience to look at change over time and they don't want to skew the variables. They think novelty is distracting and chaotic and frustrating. So they're the people that, yeah, we're going to do barbell workouts for the next eight weeks and we're going to look at your percentage maxes, and we're going to look at bar speed. You can bring data and analytics anywhere into a session, they're the people that are actually going to be interested in it. There's definitely different communication strategies and different ways that you can implement environment and communication into training when you're working with those people as well. From a manager perspective it's all about utilizing their strengths and putting them in positions to succeed and then offering support in the way that they actually want support. Because what might feel like a nice structured environment for a “C” or an “S” is going to feel like micromanaging to an “I.” So  when to push the gas and pull the brakes a little bit for a lot of these people. And then how to get the feedback that's actually going to promote progress rather than maybe too much reflection and frustration. It's definitely something that I use a lot and that I think the people that I work with find very applicable to the demographics that they work either as a manager with their employees or a trainer with their client base. Using Personality Testing to Build Systems Zac: It sounds like the DISC allows you to stratify how you want to interact and manage specific people, and just the little bit that I have learned from yourself and just some of the stuff that Lucy has told me has been very informative about just why people are the way they are, and it is pretty crazy how accurate it is. Let's say that we have the fam. The fam is listening, they fill out the DISC, and they find out which archetype they are or the mix of these specific archetypes. If they're looking at maximizing communication with others, but also they want to make themselves more organized and efficient, where do you see common pitfalls in system building? Let's say you are the one who's guiding them into becoming organized AF, where would you start with each of these people in terms of designing a system for them? Kyle: From a system perspective and from an organizational standpoint, obviously they all approach that a little differently and they all have unique pitfalls. With your “D's”, they typically are so hard-charging that they don't weigh all their options ahead of time, they don't look at return, and they don't look at cost as much as maybe they should. They have a little bit of the shiny object syndrome that you also see with “I's”, but they will drive harder for it and they will be more focused on it. They'll leave everything else on the back burner, they're very prone to specificity and thought. A lot of that with them is making sure from an organizational standpoint that they dedicate enough times to the other things to keep them on track and don't just let those things fall behind. None of us live in a specific environment where, from a demand standpoint, we can chase one thing over all others without incurring a cost of some sort. [caption id="attachment_9612" align="alignnone" width="810"] Put that shit on front burner, fam[/caption] From a systems perspective, we do a lot of OKRs with everybody, but how they interpret those strategies are going to be different given calendar work, making things automated, which works well for “D's”. Automation is a good way to make sure that things get sent out, whether it's newsletters or whether it's reminders, calendar events, things of that nature. Those are going to be very effective for programs potentially for their clients from a trainer perspective. Those are going to be good ways to keep them on track without having to always lose their focus as well. The positive aspects of a “D” are that they are so hyper-focused. If something is important, they'll get it done and they'll work really hard towards that. You also don't want to take away that driver, you want to find ways to accommodate it and support it with other means so automation works really well for them. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Zac: Quick question, you mentioned OKR, I don't think we defined what that is. What is an OKR? Kyle: Objectives and key results. Simultaneously, we're learning about the DISC when we're working with people. They're also filling out OKRs, which I usually keep it to three objectives. I tend to find that if there's more than three, they're not necessarily big rocks anymore. So people will have two to three main primary objectives that they want to work on either from a professional or from an individual lifestyle standpoint. People I work with will put things that relate to obviously their business, and their finances, and their professional accomplishment but they'll also put how to free up more time for their families. They'll put fitness goals on there and that's fine. I'm not judging what your objectives are, I just want to make sure that we actually set up an intelligent strategy or system to get there. So we identify the objectives and then we identify three key results from each of those objectives. The key results are the outcomes and how I work with outcomes of people is identifying what their definition of success for those objectives actually is on an individual standpoint. So we look at it, if it's quantitative, we look at metrics. If it's qualitative, we look at it emotionally. How do you want to feel, ? What's this going to lead to? What's this going to free time up for? From a quantitative standpoint, it could be anything. It could be money, it could be weight, pounds lost, it could be whatever. Metrics are super easy to work with, qualitative aspects are a little harder. So we have to be really honest and dig deep into those. Within these, most people will fill them out and they'll inherently be very vague or very general about their key results so I always have the question that just get as detailed as possible. Like, we'll talk about them and people will break into more detail and conversation. One of my big cues for people is to literally talk it out and then write down what you say. Speak it because you're inherently going to tell a story rather than having to write something down, and you're going to have more detail in the way you explain it than how you write it typically. That's usually how I get people to dig deeper and actually define success in a way that we might be able to measure. Then we set up strategies for all of those key results. The strategies are going to match the archetypes in a way because there's probably going to be things that those people naturally tend to lack. From a system standpoint, it's great because I usually don't have to identify systems for people, they can really look at what they're doing and what they're not doing and they identify them themselves which tends to lead to much more adherence than me telling them what to do. From another standpoint, it's a lot of me helping them understand and come to that realization themselves. “Oh, maybe I should start automating things or putting more things into my calendar, setting up backend sales leads or formals or whatever, building up more spreadsheets for tracking and automating my payroll!” There's a lot of things that as we're going through this and they're looking at strategies, like, “Oh yeah, I'm not sure why I ever thought about that,” but it is. Think about it because, from a coherent standpoint, they're usually looking in the other direction. There's a lot of realization typically with that and then we try to map it out, we look at it what actions they can take from a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual standpoint to get these things done and how the best way to track them is. Whether it's through channels regarding organization or structuring within their company or business if they're trainers. Zac: If someone comes to the conclusion themselves, they're more likely to execute it as opposed to being told what to do. Can you just give me an example of a typical objective and then the key results you might get from someone, from one of your clients. And let's keep it from an organizational standpoint. Kyle: If I'm looking at trainers, it's increasing their client base, say getting two new clients. From a key results standpoint, that's going to lead to X amount more money. That's maybe even going to lead to upping your price and dropping a lower paying client in some cases. That's going to lead to some financial goal of moving —  for people, the key results will differ a lot — that might lead to being able to live in a different apartment if you're in New York city or living in a different neighborhood where you no longer have to commute thirty or forty-five minutes into the city. [caption id="attachment_9613" align="alignnone" width="810"] While cool to visit, these problems are another reason I'm thankful I didn't move to the city.[/caption] The key results are very individualistic. If you want to make more money, how much more money? We're going to identify what clients are going to bring in. Maybe, fifteen hundred dollars a month? That's how we're going to track it so if we're going to look at strategies, what's the timeline we're going to put on this? Two new clients by when? Two months, so we're looking at a client a month. What steps are we going to take from a marketing perspective, are we going to look at referrals? Are we going to look at communicating with other scopes of practice for referrals? You can look at client streams and you can look at, maybe  a physical therapy team in the city that you can go and talk to and look at as being their third-party outlet for training after someone is done rehabbing. Maybe you can talk to a massage therapist and look at them or a nutritionist, same thing, and build an actual team of practitioners that you might be able to be a part of where you can share clients and build referral networks and things of that nature. There's a lot of different avenues from a strategy perspective that we can start looking at. Maybe you're going to email all of your old clients that you've lost or call them. Depending on the trainer there's going to be different avenues there. Another thing that I get with a lot of people is building up additional streams of revenue. Not everybody wants to take on more clients because that's more time training, you want something that might be more passive, so we work on building up their remote business or we work on building semi-private training channels where they can train more people with one hour and work more efficiently. Then we set up the strategies to utilize that to lower price points. So who can we reach out to that maybe fell off one on one training because they either moved or the price point was no longer agreeable with their budget? Are there options for them? Can we start reaching out to those people? How do you market yourself? Are you looking through social media? Are you building up newsletters? There's a lot of different options from that perspective but we start looking at things that would actually fit their skill set and options they may have. Then we start setting timelines and scheduling out those things from an organizational standpoint. Zac: Essentially what you're doing is you use the objectives and key results as your skeleton, and then you are helping your clients build the rest of that out by having them figure out what type of systems need to be employed, and then taking into account their personality in terms of potential pitfalls they may have in building the system so they ultimately get the outcome that they want. Kyle: Yeah. If you look at OKRs, it's very conceptual and then the individual looks at it very contextual from a key result standpoint. Then strategies are going to be all your applications, so it really goes conceptually, contextually, and then applicably down the line. The objectives are usually pretty broad and then the key results we try to individualize as much as possible like I said, either qualitatively or quantitatively, depending on what that objective is. Then from a strategy standpoint, then it's all application based on their environment, their past, their unique circumstance, and their archetype, how can we build out strategies that are going to be beneficial for you and not have a high cost but a high return instead. Zac: Sounds very systematic, Kyle. Kyle: That's the idea. The pitfalls of personality types Zac: Let's go back to the four personality types and pitfalls. We went through “D,” which is dominant. The big thing they probably need to focus on is automation as well as looking at problems more in-depth so they don't do something with a huge cost. I got like a little hint of “D,” and the automation thing has been huge for me. I mean I automate just about everything from a blog perspective, emails, everything because it takes too much time if you don't do that. But what about, say, someone who's an “I” and then “S” and “C?” Let's go into the pitfalls of those three would have. Kyle: An “I” is usually the archetype that has the most trouble with any organization at all. They're sometimes described as chaotic in nature, where they thrive in environment with a lot of novelties. So because of that, familiarity becomes boring and organization is a way to increase familiarity with your environment. An “I” is typically are a little organizationally adverse. I work with them on minimal effective dose. How can we implement just enough organization within your life that you're able to get things done when you need to get them done but not overwhelm you into an adaptive quality. We don't want to turn you into a “C.” Automation also works really well with them, but it's also prioritizing what they actually need to organize. For them, developing hierarchies within their lives is very important. Like what are we going to prioritize based on your needs and wants from a lifestyle professional standpoint. A lot of it with them is laying out an awareness perspective: What is going to have the highest return? What is the most important? And what to focus on because focus is limited, it's a limited individual quality for them. Then we're going to automate the rest as much as possible. We're going to set alerts on everything that's important from a calendar standpoint, or a note standpoint, whatever. We're going to set deadlines for people, as they don't do well without a structured deadline. They won't create a deadline for themselves usually. They're people that need more ownership and accountability within their own personal frames. As I'm looking in OKRs and strategies, the way it works out on the form that I use is you essentially have three objectives and within each objective you have three key results potentially. Within each key result, you have three unique strategies that you might be able to employ. So you got an option of 27 different strategies at the end of this thing. I may be going to be doing one or two of those at any given time effectively. So it's looking at which strategies can we even implement that are going to have the biggest bang for buck. Can we find strategies that are going to positively affect any of the other outcomes that we're looking at? It's either, you're looking at low hanging fruit things that are easy depending on the person's lifestyle or you're looking at more of a bang for buck strategy that might positively impact additional strategies. The reason is especially we're looking at objectives and some of those key results for just a little bit of crossover within the process for people. Zac: Setting up a lot of the exact systems that you're talking about has been essential for myself as an “I”. So then, what about the “S” and the “C” in terms of their common pitfalls and where you work with those types of people? Kyle: “C's” need a lot of structure. They're pleasers by nature and they tend to put their own needs behind the needs of others, and they'll let a lot of their own personal growth go to the wayside a lot of the times and be over accommodating to the people they're working with or to the clients they're working with. It's, again, a lot of structure. They do well typically with full calendar setups with task lists, things of that nature, but you also want to give them a little bit autonomy, so there has to be some flexibility in there as well. So doing a very good job of balancing the needs and the wants works very well for them. [caption id="attachment_9614" align="alignnone" width="810"] Such a delicate balance indeed.[/caption] With them from an objective standpoint, I always try to have at least one lifestyle objective that  coheres with their professional objectives as well and making sure that those things both professionally and lifestyle wise, respectively, have a lot of coherence and alignment. If they're not aligned, neither one of them is going to get done and that's going to lead to a lot of frustration and withdrawal within the systems. From a communication standpoint as well, because they're so accommodating, try to also, again, prioritize their personal needs and make sure that they feel heard throughout the process and throughout whatever environment they're in relationship wise either with clients or their employers or employees or peers. , working on getting them a voice within that community as well in an outlet of sorts. Zac: It seems like the common trend is you're still getting all of them, and we haven't even talked about “S” yet so maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the trend with all these is you're still getting them to a similar point of having a goal in mind or an outcome they desire and then setting up systems whether its automated or whether it's a calendar of some sort to help them keep them on task essentially. Kyle: What you find is “D's” and “I's” have no problem outlining outcomes and key results but they typically try to go into action without setting strategies. And then you've got “C's” and “S's” will typically strategize quite a bit but it's hard to push them into actual action. So you prioritize those things differently depending on what side of the line they are from an archetype standpoint. Zac: Gotcha. So ”D's” and “I's” are great at figuring out what the outcome is, but take a terrible, inefficient path to get there. Kyle: Sometimes, yeah. Zac: Yeah, “S's” and “C's” take a beautiful path but to where? Who knows. Kyle: Yeah, they might just be spinning in circles. Zac: Tell me about the “S” then. What are some of the pitfalls that they have in terms of building out those systems? Kyle: ”C's” and “S's” are very similar in the fact that they have no problem building out strategies and building out systems. I'm the one who's the “CS” hybrid, so speaking about myself is a good example. I have excel sheets that I've created that I'll never use like it's a hobby of mine to build out systems that aren't really needed in any way. It's sometimes as a distraction of actually going to work and doing things, of being in action. From a strategy standpoint, a lot of “C's” and “S's” lump together, and “S's” especially must cut down on the strategies and figuring out which ones are going to be the most important for them because rather than getting distracted by all the potential outcomes, they're getting distracted by the strategies themselves. That's where that whole analysis by paralysis comes about with is. They're just going to keep doing research, keep building out models, and some of these things but they never actually take action. So they must set timelines. Once a system with an objective is built, let's put a timeline on it. How do we keep you accountable to a timeline? Because otherwise they will stall themselves by doing more research or building out more spreadsheets so it's when can we take action? It's then more of a time push than anything else. How to navigate going off task Zac: Then as you progress and work with these people, because it seems like you have to instill new habits with everyone and, as we all know, old habits die hard, sometimes we falter back into our own, I don't want to say bad habits but maybe, habits that aren't going to push you towards your goals. How do you instill coming back to these when someone does falter? So me for example, I'm pretty good at staying on task for most things but I definitely do find myself sometimes procrastinating or doing something that's going to be more ineffective towards me getting my stuff completed, so what things do you use to cue them back into getting back into the system when they do fall off the wagon? Kyle: Well the good thing is as we go through the DISC itself, is it's usually creates enough self-awareness that they know when they're fallen off the wagon. They're very aware of that fact. With both the consulting I do and the mentorship that I do, I'm on the phone or I'm on a Zoom video with them every week so we're always rehashing what their weaknesses would look like, what their OKR and development progress looks like. We also build out models, like actual business and training models, how that's going? I share everything through Google Drive so I can see live what's being worked on, when it's being worked on. If I see that their OKRs haven't been touched in two weeks or three weeks, we're going to go back and ask why. That's the good thing about some of those shared documents, is there's built in accountability within that. They know what I'm going to ask when we're on the phone. They know the structure of the conversation is going to be. We spend a lot of time talking about the DISC upfront then we eventually move into OKRs and auto-development and anything else that might've pop up within their lives or work environment that they want to talk about. I don't necessarily have to pull them back on track because within the first few weeks, they have enough self-awareness within their archetype, within their organizational needs and structural needs that they know if they fall off track and they'll usually actually bring that up before I get a chance to. Then we just talk about why. And the biggest thing that I work with all of the archetypes, regardless of who they are, is letting know that that's okay. At the end of the day, these are all tools that are going to be used to help them and we're all going to go about it in different ways. Whether we're talking about weekly progress or monthly progress, it's still progress. They're still doing things much differently than they would've done in the past and they're having good positive outcomes based on that. Some of the archetypes like a little more accountability from me. Particularly usually the “D's” and the “C's” prefer that I hold them a little more accountable. Whereas the “I's” and the “S's”, I need to handle a little differently with my communication and make sure that they understand that I'm empathic to what's going on within their lives and within their work environments. From a time perspective, they might not have gotten it done, so we decide to set up ways that we can work through the next week a little more efficiently. We look at what those pitfalls were in the prior week and we try to find out ways to work around them in the week upcoming. Were those pitfalls novel and acute? Was something where you got sick or you had to take your dog to the vet or your kid had multiple school events or sports events? Or was it something that's going to be more global that's going to be happening every single week that we really have to be adjusting for within our strategy? Identifying whether or not it was a one off thing or whether it's going to be continuous is also a big part of that conversation. Zac: Essentially what you're acting as when you're setting this up is some form of social support. Kyle:There's a lot of that. [caption id="attachment_9615" align="alignnone" width="810"] Team work makes the dream work.[/caption] Zac: You're lauded if you are someone who is considered self-made and really, no one is self-made. I mean, people think that I'm doing fairly good things, but we wouldn't even be having this conversation, Kyle, if it weren't for someone like Bill Hartman in my life or other people in my life who have pushed me into such a high esteem and high level and high drive. I think that even someone maybe on the “D” and “I” side of things, they tend to think of pushing others by the wayside because sometimes I do that. I think that having someone not necessarily to hold you accountable but just to be there with you as you're going through the process and keep you on track is just absolutely critical. And I think it's awesome that you're doing that. Kyle: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that, and the good thing about my career path with a lot of the people I work with is, I've been in a role that they're in or a very similar to for most of them as far as being a trainer, being a manager, being a multi-location manager to being a department head to being in a national level position. There's a lot of things that I've done in that respect where I can sympathize and empathize a lot with the needs that they're seeing and give them some usually pretty good real world advice with that as well, especially from a management leadership perspective if they're a gym owner. I haven't owned my own gym but I do know the things that go into running a space and managing a team and handling the daily operations. From a trainer, same thing, I've done two hundred sessions a month as a trainer. I've lived that seven-day-a-week life and the three thirty alarm going off in the morning and working till eight pm at night. I've lived a lot of the struggles that they're going through. And can look back on it  with a hindsight eye of understanding the things that might help them that I never had access to when I was in those roles and work with them from both from an archetype standpoint but also from an experiential standpoint. Organizational tools Zac: Now, we've discussed overarching principles on how you build out these systems, you have your OKRs, and building their systems in such a manner that you can get the outcomes that they want. Let's get into some specifics, what type of things and I mean we can get into software, we can talk if you're using paper, what type of things have you found most successful? It can be apps, it can be anything from organizational standpoint that you tried to employ with the people that you work with? Do you use google calendar, do you use iPhone calendar? What we got? Kyle: With a lot of my clients, I try not to task them with a lot of apps. I try to keep everything as a one stop shop, so I just use Google Drive for the majority of them. For one, it's a free service and that's something that I think is important for a lot of my clients. A lot of them don't actually understand all the functions that Drive has. Like, if you have the Gmail, you have a calendar, you have spreadsheets, you have Word Docs, you have Google Forms, you have things that you can set up and send to clients. You've got Keynote and some of those other aspects as far as setting presentations. You've got a lot of tools that you would need already at your fingertips, you just haven't started using them yet. What I usually work with them on is first making sure their calendar is always up to date, that they have as many things recurring as possible within that calendar. They have alerts set if needed. They're added the event participants respective to the event. From there they can identify what might be flexible and what might be inflexible from an event perspective. What can I move and how can I move it? Then we can also add all of the one-off things that go throughout the continuous events. If you've got new clients coming in, if you've got different meeting being set up you could start identifying where you can put those within your calendar as it stands on a weekly basis. Then from a Drive perspective, it's all about building out folders, it might be built around your objectives or it might be built around other things, but you're segmenting your business through revenue streams or departments, whatever it may be. And making sure that you have all the materials needed set up within those folders and you have the ability to share them with employees or with clients. If you're a trainer, it might be all your training templates. It might be all the data that you record from a biometric standpoint. Your folders might all just be your client names, you've got your templates, you've got your materials in there. I use the google forms a lot, my intake forms are all on them as well because I can send them via email so that's another thing from an intake perspective. You can build out PAR-Q's and intake forms on there to send to your clients ahead of time. You can build out feedback forms and daily questionnaires for clients. If I'm doing consulting within a staff, I can also look at analytics based on the questions that I'm asking. Within those forms, I use a lot of numbered rating systems so I can actually look at analytics based on a number scale or numerical scale as well over an entire staff. If we're talking about culture or leadership or things of that nature. A lot of what I use with people is Google. Instead of Survey Chimp, I use Google Forms. They'll have some app within their system that somehow matches the needs of whoever I'm working with and it does it for free. It does it all in one spot. If you have the Google Suite, it's even that much easier to utilize. From an app perspective, that's how I set up all my materials. I build out the majority of my own and it's all just shareable at that point so I can copy and share and create for all the people I'm working with. Zac: In terms of automation on Google, say you have client so and so, can you automate it in a manner that all your intakes and all of that will automatically go to a folder on Google? Specifically to that person or do they have to fill out the form and you're transposing it into that? Kyle: You can do it one of two ways, you can automate towards where the forms actually will go into that client's folder or you can keep all the forms together in one spot to look at analytics. So you can do it a couple different ways and that's different people are going to have different preferences and different purposes regarding that. When I look at my intake form, I will basically have just an original copy that I'll copy and create another one for the individual themselves that will live inside their folder once I send it and they fill it out. For a lot of my consulting and feedback forms, I'll keep them all together as one form where I can keep multiple responses at once and then look at analytics based on answers. So depending on the purpose, you can do either one of them. Zac: I'm transitioning over to Google because I've had too many steps with transmitting information from one place to the next. I'll give you an example of my current set up. Someone sends a Google Form to me and they want to work with me. They will go into the form and it's just the whole analytical side of things where you can compare answers and whatnot, I'll have my virtual assistant send that person an inquiry via email but it's the answer via email as opposed to a Google Form. Then what I have to do is take those answers, because I can't read it on Excel, because Excel is just atrocious for that. I have to put it in Evernote, read it on Evernote, and then I will summarize within the Excel. It's just too many steps but it sounds as though, if you keep things in one place, you can keep things automated as much as possible and under one platform, it just tends to make life that much simpler. Kyle: Yeah, it's just less tabs. It's less copy and pasting, it's less transfiguring and reconfiguring from a data standpoint. And you've got everything in one hand especially when you look at different archetypes. The more you can keep things together and the less different avenues they have to continuously click on, the better off they're going to be from a distraction standpoint. It also keeps everything on top aligned, to keep it all together in that manner. Zac: Yeah, that's really cool. I think you've officially sold me. I'm making the transition to the Google so thank you. Kyle: They're going to send me some money when they see this. It's going to be great. Zac: Yeah, they already put it into our brains somehow that we were going to transfer all things. Kyle: You're going to see a bunch of Facebook ads for Google and all kinds of things. [caption id="attachment_9616" align="alignnone" width="810"] Once Google changes their name to Skynet that's when you'll know.[/caption] Zac: Google and Compound Performance that's all it's going to be. Interesting side note, did you know on your phone there's an option that they will mark advertising for you automatically, and you can eliminate that. Yeah, I'll link this in the show notes too but I don't know if you went to check out that whole set up your phone for success thing. Kyle: No, I haven't read it yet. It is sitting in my inbox though. Zac: Man, life changing. Kyle: I'm on your newsletter, believe me. Zac: I know, I know you are, Kyle. But I'll link that. But there is an option somewhere in the settings in the iPhone where it says, “Yes, you can advertise to..” or “I can take your data and advertise it to whatever sites.” So you have to wonder, why is it that I look up leg lamps to buy someone for Christmas and all of a sudden I see leg lamps all over Facebook and Google and everything? And that's why. Kyle: Well, my wife and I will have conversations about something verbally. Like we might start talking about rugs, something like super boring in that regard, and I'll start looking on my Facebook and Instagram. I'll literally get rug adverts after advert for the next two weeks. It's like this is insane. Especially if you talk about that brand, that brand is going to be there. You don't even have to type it or look it up, you can just talk about it. That microphone is always on. You need a tin foil hat. Zac: A tin foil hat and move out into the wilderness. That's the only way you can circumvent Facebook and Google and all of them. Kyle: Live that Ben House lifestyle, except cut off the phone too. Build your model Zac: Are there any other systems or nitty gritty tech that you like to use before I go into another follow up question? Kyle: Yeah, the thing that I think I actually like a lot more and has been more meaningful for a lot of my clients is developing a model that's based more so on experience, both the client and the trainers rather than methodologies. Especially for a training perspective is identifying what you want that client to feel and experience through each part of your training or their training life, their training program rather than just identifying how you're going to train them. Methodologies are going to change. We're all doing X now, but we were all doing something differently two or three years ago. It's pretty naive to think that we're still going to be doing the same thing we're doing now in the next six months even. The industry and the information changes so quickly. When I'm working with trainers, a lot of them tend to be very biased to one methodology or ideology over another and they like to talk in those terms. They have a hard time relating things to terms that clients will understand but they also have a hard time understand what that client preference might be and what they want their experience to be during session. I look at everything from a consult intake to the actual training session itself, movement prep, neural prep, strength training, accessory training, to aerobics and cool down to the macro-cycling of anaerobic and aerobic training and then to their lifestyle coherence and communication. What do you want that client to feel from an emotional perspective? What's your outcome for each of those things and then what are the outcomes that you're looking for as a trainer? Can we get alignment between those two things? If we can get alignment between those two things, you're going to have a client that's pretty happy. Or a client base or demographic that's pretty happy. That's the other big thing, the other big rock, that starts people off once we start getting comfortable with the OKRs, we start talking about the actual model itself and it can be easily modified into a company thing. What is your business model? How do you want your entire demographic to look like from a training perspective? To a personal training model and looking at the individual experience for clients as well. That's also the big thing that I think has been eye opening to a lot of the people that I'm working with, is not deciding how you're going to train people but also identifying how you're going to treat people and how you want them to perceive what that training actually is. What's that outcome? Not just talking about increasing internal rotation to a femur, we're talking about their actual enjoyment of the process itself. Zac: Just me setting up Human Matrix has given me an idea in terms of setting up models. I think in some of that other areas that you've mentioned in terms of creating a good experience or just giving a business model. Those are areas that I haven't done but I think would be incredibly impactful. When you're having people set up these models, is there a preference? Or are you using this in organization in anyway of using the good old paper? Kyle: Well, I've got a template that I created that I help people set up. I've got, again, a base skeleton of the things I consider important but they have the option as well of adding additional columns or rows off of that template based on things that might apply to them individually and their businesses individually. I've got a base template that they all have their own copies, we share and we look at it. They can also modify it or I can modify it for them based on any changes or things that they want to prioritize within their own business. In addition, my columns are methodology kind experience and trainer outcomes. Different people are going to add an additional column or add additional rows based on how they communicate with people whether it's both in person and you're looking at actual like how are you communication, how are you greeting people, how are you greeting them at the door, how are you communicating with them, how are you cueing them, internal and external cues, hands-on and hands-off cuing, and then how are you communicating with them from a newsletter standpoint, from an educational standpoint, and then from an email, texting standpoint, calling standpoint, feedback forms, whatever. There're also ways that we can start including those within that process as well from an experiential standpoint. Zac: Essentially automating everything within the model just like you did with making processes. Kyle: Yeah, and identifying what that actually means. If you're sending feedback forms, what do you want that client to think? What's the reaction that you want them to have? Are they going to just discard it? Or are they going to feel like you're trusting them and valuing their opinion to improve the actual culture of the company? So what actual emotional outcome are you looking for and how can we generate that outcome through the process? Or through the environment itself as a whole? The To-do list Zac: To-do lists. Yay or nay? Kyle: It depends, as everything does. Zac: Always a default answer. Kyle: I think they can become very valuable but I think they can also become very encapsulating. In that sense, if you're a “C” that already lives on to-do lists, you probably don't need to make anymore. You probably just need to prioritize and act on the top two or three things on that list. If you're an “I” and there's really not a lot of rhyme or reason to what you're doing and then you're just chasing novelty all day long then the to do list is going to be very important for you. That might help you obtain a singular focus on the things that you actually need to be doing on a daily basis or weekly basis. Depending on who the person is, I think those are going to be great. If somebody is already super analytical, you're just getting one more thing to feed on that's going to delay the actual action and outcome that they're seeking. So it might be a deterrent at that point, depending on who they are. Zac: I think one thing I found for myself for the to do list is if you don't prioritize the right things and there's no temporal component, it's pretty much a useless piece of... [caption id="attachment_9617" align="alignnone" width="810"] I'm biased, but I loathe these things.[/caption] Kyle: You'll get this inception moment where you've got to-do lists on top of other to-do lists. That's like what a “C” would do and it's sometimes even a “D.” You've got a to-do list that lists out doing another to do list. It's like the guy looking at himself in the mi

Today's guest is Ashleigh Faith, who is the Director of Data and Semantic Enrichment in EBSCO Information Services. Ashleigh specializes in multilingual search and annotation optimization strategies focused on semantics, interoperability, natural language and realized through ontologies. Her domain focus is STEM subject matter -particularly in transportation, mechanical, medical, and electrical engineering technology. Ashleigh's novel techniques for machine learning have resulted in an F-measure of 89% based on STEM vernacular and she is also well versed in managing technical IP as well as leveraging data intelligence to its highest potential. In the episode, Ashleigh will tell you about: Interesting research into auto linguistics on words and languages Advice on making the move from academia to industry How to influence the key decision makers The importance of creating opportunities and building relationships Her work in semantic enrichment at EBSCO The future of AI and Machine Learning on IoT and Cybersecurity

Today’s guest is Ashleigh Faith, who is the Director of Data and Semantic Enrichment in EBSCO Information Services. Ashleigh specializes in multilingual search and annotation optimization strategies focused on semantics, interoperability, natural language and realized through ontologies. Her domain focus is STEM subject matter -particularly in transportation, mechanical, medical, and electrical engineering technology. Ashleigh’s novel … Continue reading "E12 Ashleigh Faith, Director of Data & Semantic Enrichment at EBSCO Information Services"

Welcome to episode 12 of AI Mentors, the podcast that helps you pave the way for a successful career in the world of Data Science and AI. Powered by Alldus International the premium AI Workforce Solutions, our top consultant’s interview AI Leaders and Data Scientists from around the world about their personal journey to becoming … Continue reading "E12 Ashleigh Faith, Director of Data and Semantic Enrichment at EBSCO Information Services"

Vee Rogacheva is the User Experience Designer at OpenAthens.Our discussion today is on the differences between UX and UI design and how the user experiences drives design decisions.

It’s no secret college kids love their alcohol. We will find any excuse to drink and if we don’t have one, we drink anyway. Parties, darties, athletic events, nights-in, nights-out, anytime is an opportunity to drink. However, we know the fun doesn’t last forever. Most college kids would agree that they know what it feels like to get hit by a train. Today I have on Dr. James H Fredrich to discuss what alcohol is, the effects of alcohol, and how they can best be avoided, if at all, when drinking. Enjoy!https://twitter.com/thecollegeologyhttps://www.instagram.com/thecollegeologypodcast/https://www.facebook.com/thecollegeologypodcast/https://www.instagram.com/bonde_jr/Studies:1. Alcohol and fat mass – https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/doi/full/10.1111/acer.131592. Alcohol and muscle mass - http://resolver.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/openurl?sid=EBSCO%3arzh&genre=article&issn=10648011&ISBN=&volume=31&issue=1&date=20170101&spage=54&pages=54-61&title=Journal+of+Strength+&atitle=EFFECT+OF+ACUTE+ALCOHOL+INGESTION+ON+RESISTANCE+EXERCISE-INDUCED+MTORCI+SIGNALING+IN+HUMAN+MUSCLE.&aulast=BUDNAR%2c+RONALD+G.&id=DOI%3a&site=ftf-live3. Alcohol and the blackout - https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/186-196.htm See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Harry Kaplanian of EBSCO joins the show to talk about the FOLIO project: a community collaboration to develop an open source Library Services Platform (LSP) designed for innovation. He discusses the why behind the the decision made to embark on this project, the benefits it brings to the market, and what makes it different from current offerings and other open source projects. Harry also shares where he sees FOLIO going in the future, challenging and unexpected outcomes of making the choice to go open source, and advice for other businesses that are considering embarking on a similar journey today. Do you have opinions on this show? Want to hear about a specific topic in the future? Reach out to us at contact@frontside.io or on Twitter at @thefrontside. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 102. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a founder and developer here at The Frontside and I'm going to be today's host. So today, we're going to be talking about the business of open source with Harry Kaplanian. Harry's someone that we've had the pleasure of working with over the past year and collaborating with on a very unique project, which we are going to get into later. With me is Robert DeLuca. Hey, Robert. ROBERT: Hello. CHARLES: And before we start out today, we just wanted to take care of some quick news. Just so you know, we released BigTest React. This is actually something that grew out of the work that we've been doing with Harry. It's a set of React helpers to acceptance test your React applications so that you can make sure that you know that your application is actually working on actual browsers in actual life. So, that's exciting. You can go check it out at BigTestJS.io. And with that said, let's get on with the project. So first if all, welcome, Harry. HARRY: Thank you. CHARLES: I teased this in the intro, but we'll go ahead and say it outright. The project that we've been working on with you and with EBSCO is a project called FOLIO. And it's one of the more unique projects we've ever had the pleasure of working on. So, maybe you could just give us a brief overview of what exactly FOLIO is and how it came to be. HARRY: Sure. So, FOLIO I think can best be described as an open source platform for services. Our focus has always been the library market and so, currently this platform exists in the library space. That said, there's nothing about this platform that is library-specific. It can actually be used anywhere, anytime, for anything. The platform itself, all communication occurs basically via HTTP. It's microservice-based. It's language-agnostic. And it is really the core of what we're building. However of course, a platform on its own is not very useful. And at least for right now, libraries are overall expecting to get to a point in terms of features, functionality, apps, and services that are being built. So FOLIO can actually take over the enterprise-wide day-to-day operations of what it takes to actually run a library. CHARLES: And these are libraries like university libraries, the Library of Congress, the library at Alexandria. I mean really, when you think of library, like library [3:00 inaudible]. HARRY: Yes. However, we decided to focus on a particular market, at least initially or I guess a subset of the library market. And so, that subset we've actually chosen to focus on is the academic library market. And so, really mainly colleges and universities all around the world. That said, there is no reason why others can't use this software. And it is all open source. So, if any changes are ever needed, modifications or additional applications are needed to support those additional markets, that can certainly happen at any time. CHARLES: Historically, it's a very complex problem, right? There is a lot that goes on at these libraries. But historically, the software that's driving it has not been open source. HARRY: That is correct. So, it's sort of an interesting history. And I guess you're leading into what I think was maybe your second question [Chuckles] which was: What are the circumstances or the thinking that lead to the creation of a project such as this? And really, libraries have been pretty much operating the same way, to be honest, for probably about the last 40 years. And I'm sure we either all know or have heard, most libraries are facing shrinking budgets. They're really challenged in terms of space and storage requirements. And just in general, users have changed dramatically in the last 40 years, the last 20 years, maybe even the last 10 years. Most people don't really ever expect to walk into a library and actually conduct research anymore. They expect that to happen elsewhere. And so, in many ways, they're really facing what amounts to Google and others, because that's where people expect to go. The vendors that typically created the systems and software that supported these libraries, the day-to-day operations over the years, many of them have consolidated. And there are just actually very few options left. These are really old, monolithic systems. They were built initially with the best intent. And for the first couple of years, many features and functionalities were added. But over time, these systems grew to be so large. There really was never any one person anymore that fully understood it. They find themselves in situations where if they add a little feature here or modify something there, it breaks something somewhere else within the system. And so really, they've gotten to a point where libraries have generated lists of features and functionality that they need that are frankly years long. And the vendors just can't deliver any of it. They just don't have the ability anymore. The systems are too old. In addition, really they're sort of building these walled gardens where they really try to take over all the day-to-day operations of the library but are actually starting to try and expand out in other areas of the university as well. And as they do this, they really tend to lock the system down. They're not really open to integration with other systems or other vendors. And they really see it as they are the one company you should go to that can completely manage and operate everything that goes on in your library. And when we talk about innovation in these systems, really they've been operating the same way, as I mentioned earlier, for the last 40 years. Really, the only major, major innovations is there's maybe one company now that's offering these services on the cloud. One size fits all. And the real issue there is, all of these libraries we talked to, all of them see themselves as being unique in some certain and specific way or sometimes multiple ways. All of them believe they're bringing something special to the world in terms of knowledge, research, understanding and learning. And they tend to cater or specialize often to the institution they're a part of. And so for example, if a library belongs to a medical school, of course their collections are tailored that way. A lot of their workflows and operations tailor to students that conduct research in that field. And oftentimes, even to a hospital that may be associated as well. And this will oftentimes be very different from what might exist for example in an engineering library. And so, for most of them, they look around at what's available to them. Not only has nothing changed, not only has there been no innovation, but on top of it, they're forced to choose essentially a single system. And that's not really getting them what they want or where they want to be. So I, as well as some others, spent quite a bit of time looking around at the market and trying to assess and understand all of this. And one of the things we felt was, as we look at all of this, really we're living in a world, these libraries are living in a world of closed systems, lack of transparency, lack of change, lack of innovation. How do we change that? How do we spark that innovation? And it seemed like what we really need is some sort of an ecosystem, a sustainable ecosystem or really, openness and transparency. And it seems like the only way to get that really is open source. And in fact, we actually conducted a survey and out of that survey, 100% of the libraries we spoke to really believe in open source. And when you think about it… ROBERT: Whoa. HARRY: Open source really in many ways aligns itself really nicely with the mission of the library, right? The library is there to not only promote learning but to make sure information and knowledge that normally you may not have access to is accessible to everyone. They're really leveling the playing field. And that really is a really nice analogy for what open source is doing in the marketplace as well. And so, this seemed like really, and at least, an initial ideal path to head down. And so, we did. CHARLES: Yeah. And so, you did. And I'm curious to explore more about that decisions. Because – now this is a little bit of a dated quote – but Steve Balmer, when he was the head of Microsoft, called open source communistic and un-American, then how do you reconcile that? Because obviously you represent a business that ultimately needs to be profitable and is engaging in this in order to make a profit. And so, where does the balance lie and how do you reconcile that? And obviously you all perceive this as a strong business move. And so, yeah, how do you balance those two concerns? HARRY: I think from our perspective, we looked at it as if a single vendor or maybe a group of two or three vendors end up locking up the entire market with systems that operate the entire library that are not open and they're not willing to integrate with other systems and services that exist out there, in essence that's an attack on what is the basis of our business as a company. We provide services and we provide content that libraries use and ingest and make available to their users. And essentially, it looks like they're trying to lock us out. And how does that really help in terms of creating an open and fair marketplace where people get to make choice? It doesn't. And so, what can we do to disrupt that? And building a system that allows everyone to play at least puts us on a level playing field where if an organization or a library chooses to adopt it, we're now back in a very competitive situation where really, the vendor or the organization or the individual that provides the services that best fit that library's needs wins. And that's what we really want to happen. And so, that's in essence how we win. We believe we offer better services than most others in the industry, if not everyone else in the industry. We think there's a sizable percentage of the market that truly believes that. And we just need to make sure that the mechanisms or the systems are in place that allow us to compete in that manner. And in the end, if what we end up with is a platform that allows 3, 5, 10, or 20 companies to actually compete in a reasonable manner fairly, really it's the customer in the end that wins. It's these libraries and it's the users and everyone else conducting research. ROBERT: So, I'm still kind of reeling from 100% of libraries said that they would like to have an open source platform. How many did you survey? HARRY: So to be truthful, it wasn't a large number. ROBERT: That's still insane to me. [Laughs] HARRY: Right. We focused on, however, surveying different segments of I guess really representation within the library. So, the people that do the work, the middle managers, and then really, the folks at the director level that are really responsible for running and organizing a library. ROBERT: The ones that will experience that pain of being locked in, right? HARRY: Right, right. And trying to get decision-makers at many different levels. And we tried to also cover both very small libraries to very large, enormous libraries as well. And all of them saw a benefit. One of the pieces where things sort of maybe went in the other direction as far as the statistics are concerned, if you ask them though “How many are willing to adopt open source?” the numbers aren't quite the same. In fact, they're rather dramatic. And so, at that point it's roughly about 33% said they'd be willing to adopt. CHARLES: So, why is that? HARRY: So, we asked. And interesting question. And what most of them came back and stated was, “Well, we love the idea of open source. We fully support it. We're willing to do what we can to help it and make sure this happens. However, we ourselves don't believe we've got the staffing, the resourcing, or the knowledge to host this ourselves.” And so, this leads to another really interesting thought or idea as far as open source is concerned, is so this really implies that there really needs to be sort of an ecosystem of organizations that are providing these types of services. And to be honest, the faster we can make that happen, the better off the market is. Libraries are now getting to choose vendors that they get to get their services from, which is rather interesting. Because for the first time, not only do they get to choose the vendor but if they're not happy with the vendor, they should be able to switch vendors but keep the software and the data the same. Today, in the library market, if a library chooses to switch vendors, that means essentially they're completely starting over in their library. They completely have to migrate to a fully new system which means enormous amounts of training, enormous amounts of data transfer, and all the pain that goes along with it. I had a librarian tell me once, “The next time we migrate to a fully new system, I either want to die or retire.” I just want [14:30 inaudible]. ROBERT: Man, that sounds painful. HARRY: That's how painful it was. CHARLES: Yeah, wow. Because the complexity intrinsic to these systems, it does, it boggles the mind sometimes. Just even the little slices of the ecosystem in which we're operating, there's just a lot at play there. ROBERT: Yeah. Like trying to work with other vendors and be agnostic so anybody can adopt these things that we're building. And since we had that vendor lock-in, it's hard for you to adapt the two systems, because they were built in complete silos. So, trying to merge that is an interesting challenge. HARRY: And I think everything I'm saying here, I'm talking about it from the library perspective. But if you look at other industries, I don't think it's really any different. If you look at any of the enterprise-wide management systems that are used in corporate organizations today, most of these corporate entities will stick with the system they chose for a very long time. Because it's incredibly painful, it's disruptive, and it's expensive to switch from one system to another. And so, the idea of you're not happy with a vendor and hey, I can go to somewhere else and maybe keep the system I have in place is really kind of interesting. And even better, if the vendor's not able to provide some of those features that I need but for the most part I like the system, wouldn't it be great if I can hire someone to do that work and to have those pieces built for me? And those are some of the things that open source offers. CHARLES: Right, right. So now, I understand that for example to kind of put a concrete bow on this, [Chuckles] to move away from abstraction of what it means and provide an example, so we have this open source platform, this FOLIO platform. Which if I'm a library, I could in-house, I could either use it on premises on my own servers or I could run them on AWS or I could run them on Google Cloud – there are all these different deployment options and some libraries are doing that, but that's something that they might not want to do. So, I understand that EBSCO is actually going to be for example one of the services that y'all are going to be offering around FOLIO, is actually hosting the platform so that the overhead of managing all of the servers and provisioning accounts and doing all that stuff is going to be taken care of for you. So, I can just sign up. HARRY: Yes. So, that really fed into the results of the survey. For those libraries or organizations that felt they couldn't do it themselves, where would they go? And who could provide those services? So, we're absolutely going into the business of providing these services for libraries that choose to. But at the same time, we're really strongly encouraging other vendors and organizations to provide these services as well. Because for instance, you may represent a series of libraries in let's say Hungary. You may have a vendor there you enjoy working with in the past. It's provided great services for you. There really ought to be no reason why you should not choose that vendor to provide those services for you. And again, it's an open system. There's nothing there that's excluding me and the organization I work for to provide additional services, to provide content or what have you. It's an open system. And so, we should strongly encourage that. And the reality is, if we're going to have a disruption in the market, it seems we can either have one organization or one company trying to usher this disruption along. But what if we could get 10? Or what if we could get 20? Or more companies out there ushering this disruption along simultaneously worldwide. It feels like we've got a lot more of a disruption happening in that case. And so, that's what we're strongly encouraging. CHARLES: Right. But at the same time, I can see it from if I were considering making a play like this, one of the things that would worry me is, “Okay, so we're going to disrupt the market by allowing a large tent where lots of vendors could compete.” But then, I immediately experience fear of, “Well then, how do I differentiate myself?” Because ultimately I want to be competitive. How do I make it so that I'm not a commodity in this new market? HARRY: So really, I think that's key for any vendor that chooses to compete in a market like this. Do you believe as an organization you have not only what's needed to compete but those key differentiators that at least a certain segment of the market would be interested in you and the services you offer? We believe we do. Another company that just recently announced that they're going to be supporting FOLIO and providing services around it is a company called ByWater Solutions. They've actually been in another segment of the library market for many years providing services to libraries as well. Longstanding, actually, with open source codebases. And so, this very much appeals to them. They believe… ROBERT: Oh, interesting. HARRY: They have a niche that they can provide and they are going to be doing that. And we strongly encourage it. What's again great about it is if they set up a library with FOLIO, they're not building the walled garden. They're building or providing the open platform that we can connect our services to. So in many ways, yeah there are some areas we're going to compete. But there are actually many areas that we're also going to be complementary. And I think that's what's really, really interesting to us. CHARLES: So, it sounds like you're also counting on just by having the ecosystem in place and having this sea as it were filling the ocean to enable trade, one of the bets too is that you're going to open lines of business that weren't even possible before. HARRY: Correct. So, another way to look at it – we've got our iPhones or Android devices. Apple built a platform is really what that phone is. When it was released, you could make voice calls. You could do some simple text messaging, some basic email, and I'm sure there are a couple other of things in there that I've forgotten. I do not believe that Apple had any idea that they'd actually be able to create a marketplace that had hundreds of thousands of people and vendors providing features and functionality for that platform. I am pretty sure no one at Apple had ever imagined the guitar tuner would be released. I don't know, a compass app, flashlight apps, whatever. You name it. And not only that, as a user of that platform, you're not happy with the standard email app? Well you know what? I can get a different one. In fact, I've got a choice of many and I can find the one that suits me best. And that's fine. It's an open marketplace. And so, with FOLIO today, we're in early stages. We're building out that platform. We're building out some of the basic functionality for that library that they need to operate as a library. But once this gets released, it's at that point when we believe the more interesting things are going to happen where we build a cataloging app for FOLIO. Well, we know already that there's other organizations that are starting to look at and think about, “You know what? We've got a whole other way or a whole other interest in terms of how we'd like to support those workflows on the FOLIO platform.” Or even better, librarians starting to think about, “Hey, if I've got this open platform just like Apple does, this means I now have the option to build features and functionality that take me where I want to be five years from now, 10 years from now. And I've never had that ability on the existing systems that we use today.” And so, one of the other I think advantages or benefits that something like FOLIO or a platform like this brings to the market is the ability to create that marketplace very much like Apple has done and Google has done with Android as well. ROBERT: So, we're pretty far in, but you mentioned FOLIO a couple of times. Do we want to unpack what FOLIO actually means? HARRY: Yes. FOLIO actually stands for the Future Of Libraries Is Open. ROBERT: Right there in the name. I love it. HARRY: Absolutely. CHARLES: So, we've talked about this platform. We've talked about this marketplace. We've talked about the business incentive of why you would want to do this, why it makes a lot of sense. Clearly, this takes an enormous investment. So, we think, I think, a lot of people think of open source as a bunch of wild developers running around. ROBERT: Pushing commits wherever they want. CHARLES: Pushing out code and doing stuff. And then it kind of organically grows into something that someone then picks up. ROBERT: And then you burn out. CHARLES: Yeah. [Chuckles] But that's I think a lot of people's experience with open source. But an initiative like this takes a staggering investment both in terms of capital resources but also in terms of will, in terms of management, and putting all these enormous forces in motion. There's developing the software, developing the awareness, and I think right now there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on this right now. How do you even go from zero to 6,000 like that? And I'm not talking about people. I'm talking about velocity. [Laughs] HARRY: Right. Early on, when we were conducting research, market research, one of the things we did, we spent some time looking at what we believed were successful open source projects. And I think what was interesting was in many cases it took a single individual or a company to actually create what amounts to that first piece, that first core building block that others could start to expand upon. And very often, they literally just created it themselves, made it available out there as open source, and basically told the world, “Here. Have at it. Have fun. Do with this whatever you wish.” So, we actually thought we'd like to do that. However, building a system on this scale is not that easy. Understanding the operations of a library day-to-day is not that simple. We need help. And so, what we decided early on was: could we kick off and start this project while at the same time [25:42 inaudible] that community as early as possible? To get people excited, interested, and to get this project in a place where we're not the only contributors, where there are many others contributing as well. And when I say ‘contribute' I don't necessarily mean software developers. But that is certainly one aspect of it. But one of the key pieces of building software is gaining access to subject matter experts as well. And it's absolutely key and critical. And so, our goal of course was to build this community, have that community start to provide that in-depth knowledge, those subject matter experts that we need so we can determine what it is we need to build, how we need to build it, and really go from there. And by including those people as early as possible, I think one of the things we find that happens with this project which is really sort of incredible is the excitement that starts to build. The word of mouth advertising, marketing, as librarians, libraries, vendors and individuals start to talk to others and really spread the word about this project. In many ways, it starts to compound or snowball and build on itself. But that was really challenging. And it was really actually kind of slow going in the beginning. Because we started with nothing. And one of the issues you face is, “Well, you want me to contribute my time to this project, yet I see nothing.” Right now it's just a dream. And so, one of those early, early issues was, “Can we build a team small enough, focused enough, where we can start to build some of the basic, basic, basic core pieces, to really prove to the world that this project is real? This project is actually moving forward and this project is actually delivering.” And now that we're in a state where people can actually see working software, the excitement is just starting to expand and compound rapidly. And we see it everywhere. CHARLES: So, do you find libraries or people in the target market, there's that key point where they start to feel empowered? It's real and then the thing that I think that you're going for is to have the realization dawn that not only is it real, I can put my hands on the wheel and I could control my destiny. And I can contribute now because there's this critical mass. ROBERT: You have the power to make change, which never existed in the library world before. HARRY: Or at least, not in this specific area. Because to be truthful, I think libraries as a whole believe they're making change around the world all the time. But it's really related to content. But this is actually making changes in the actual operations of the library. And they are actually empowered to get involved, to contribute, and to help us get this done. And it seems to really resonate with folks. Because it's something they haven't been able to do previously. And it seems genuinely exciting. And we announced this really, well the market learned that this was happening I'd say a little over two years ago. Maybe more like two and a half years ago. And it was sort of a gentle drip in terms of a roll out. People started to learn because we started talking to them. There was no real active marketing going on. But of course, those people started to talk to other people. And so, it happened. And when we were able to provide those first demonstrations, no matter how rudimentary it was, that's when things seemed to really kick into a much higher gear where people started talking to each other. Librarians started talking to each other and say, “Hey, this is real. This is exciting.” ROBERT: It's not vaporware. HARRY: And this is happening. Right. It's not vaporware. And we need to get involved. And so, they have. CHARLES: Yeah. And the energy and involvement just in the course of the time that we've been a part of the project is apparent. Every kind of gathering is larger and the diversity of topics that are discussed is increasing. And yeah, the conversations have burned from “What can we do with it?” to the last time the project got together as a group, it had much more of a conference-y feel. And the topics being discussed were like, “How do we actually deploy this to our real systems?” Which has been fantastic to see. And so, just to actually feel the traction is just, it's so gratifying. So, I guess one of the questions that is on my mind is – so you mentioned that you had been at this for about two and a half years. What is in your mind the most pleasant, unexpected outcome of this project that you didn't foresee two and a half years ago that you're experiencing now? HARRY: So, I think one of the one's that's surprising is I've never actually personally been involved in an open source project before. And I think one of the fears constantly working for organizations that really have been closed source – in fact, I've been that my adult working life – and you sort of walk into this with some [trepidation]. Because oh my gosh, everything I'm doing, everything I say, everything that gets documented is going to be out in the open for everyone to see? Including competition and everyone else? And I have to say, one of the most interesting things, or one of my favorite pieces here, is: it is so freeing. It's a release. It's actually amazing to not care about what your competition or anyone is doing or thinking. And it's even more amazing whenever you've got a question and someone's out there asking you for access to documentation, you can simply point them to the website, to the URL and say, “It's there. It's all there. Anything you want is there. Go take a look.” I think that's pretty amazing. The other one of course are the relationships between many, many different people who I've just never really been – or I never would have had the chance to work with before. And really hearing all these different perspectives and points of view as far as what people think are right, correct, or what we should be doing – it's great to see. And it's great to see this wildfire word of mouth message that seems to be moving everywhere. We're hearing back from people not just in North America, not just from the EU, but from the Middle East, from South and Central America. There's really just people interested everywhere. And it's amazing to me, because I don't think I spoke to anyone over there. So, it's happening. And that's just an exciting thing to see. CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. ROBERT: It's really cool that open source can connect you with the rest of the world like that. It's just so powerful. HARRY: It does. And it's an amazing thing. ROBERT: And the amount of collaboration that happens, I've never experienced it in any other way. It's really cool. [Chuckles] I don't know how else to put it. It's just, it's almost mind-blowing that you are able to across timezones, across the world, collaborate with somebody on something that you both feel passionate about and you're pushing it forward in an open manner. HARRY: Right. And it's also amazing when you have these meetings and there's people you've been collaborating with for months if not a year or more. And getting to meet them face-to-face for the first time. That's really a pretty amazing experience. ROBERT: Yeah. And it's pretty awesome. At our last gathering that we had at WolfCon, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting up a bunch of different librarians. And hearing their experiences and what they're looking for out of an experience, it's just really cool to be able to talk to those people and see how they work and help build this into the platform that they're wanting to use. HARRY: Right, right. CHARLES: Yeah. I would say on the whole, there's been a lot of those wonderful, unexpected outcomes. Were there any that presented a particular challenge or wasn't quite so much a walk along the path of roses? HARRY: So, you know I think the biggest one is – I mentioned earlier we embarked on this project a little differently versus what we saw as normally successful open source projects, right? We did not have that core, beautiful, shiny object to unleash onto the world and let them know, “Hey, have at it.” And so, it wasn't so hard in terms of getting interest. But what's been hard is the amount of interest has generated enormous numbers of organizations that are interested in contributing to the project. Which also implies then that now, not only are they coming to us asking us, “Hey, how can we help? What can we do here?” but then there's a certain aspect, because this is a first version of, “How do you manage the building and construction of that very first version of this software project when the reality of the matter is, you're not really responsible for most everyone working on the project?” And how do you get everyone aligned and organized? How do you get everyone onto that same path along with those same milestones that we've all agreed on? And even worse, how do you get agreement on those milestones so we can all walk that same path and deliver that first version? And so, I get asked sometimes by folks that are involved in other open source projects, “How do you handle this situation? Or how do you manage all the work that goes on?” And when we tell them, it's kind of surprising because it's not what they're used to seeing. And a lot of it is because of the way we started, the interest that was generated early on, and the fact that we did not have an initial version. And I don't want that to sound like, “Oh, this is a huge problem,” or, “If I were to do it again, I would not do it this way again.” I in fact would do it this way again. I think there are a lot of benefits and it's been a great and interesting way to go. It's just the management aspects of it are definitely challenging. And I think more than maybe we had initially anticipated. Going into this next time, though, I definitely know what I'm facing and I'll be prepared. CHARLES: Yeah. So with that in mind, given that you've been through this, do you have any advice to offer someone who might be considering embarking on a similar journey? And undertaking a similar Herculean task. HARRY: Well, I think you'll find it's harder than you think. And be sure to plan for that. But I guess at the same time, I think my biggest advice or my best advice would be: you need to keep an open mind. And when I mean an open mind, you need to be open to other thoughts and ideas. And I think you need to put yourself in the perspective of what if you were one of these other people that are working on the project or trying to contribute to this project? What are the things that you're doing or rather the things that you're doing now, the way you're acting, the way you're reacting, how does that look to others on the project? Because you're not the only one contributing. You're not the only organization contributing. And are the things you're doing reflecting badly in terms of others' perception or optics as to what this looks like as an open source project? And I think for me and others, there was a huge learning experience. Because your first thought is, “I'm going to tackle this like any other software project,” and it's not. It's not like that at all. CHARLES: I think that's… ROBERT: That makes sense. CHARLES: Yes, that makes sense. That's excellent. That's excellent advice. And I think that's one of the things that makes open source so powerful, is because there's that aspect just baked into it from the get go, you have to be mindful of a bunch of different perspectives. And that ultimately results in a solution that's going to be workable for a bunch of different perspectives, that's going to be flexible to accommodate for all the different use cases that all the different participants in the community might bring to the table. HARRY: And you have to be very mindful of how your actions are perceived. Because normally, your actions are perceived by the company you work for, what tends to have a particular culture. But on an open source project, you're actually dealing with many different cultures. CHARLES: Yes. HARRY: And so, that's a tight line that you have to walk. CHARLES: That was a powerful note to end on. Thank you everybody for listening. We are The Frontside and we build software that you can stake your future on. If you want to get in touch with us, continue the conversation, you can reach out to us on Twitter at @TheFrontside or drop us an email at contact@frontside.io. Thank you so much Harry, for being on the show today and talking to us about FOLIO. HARRY: And thank you very much for having me. This has been great. CHARLES: And if you want to, if there's something that you want to learn about or a topic that you want to discuss, please, please let us know. We always are open for your feedback, especially when it comes for things that you would want to hear. And if you want to get involved or learn more about the FOLIO platform, you can just head on over to FOLIO.org. There are resources for librarians, developers, and anyone who is curious about becoming a community member. Thanks as always to Mandy, our producer. And we've got a really great podcast coming up on the 14th of June. We're going to have Michael Jackson on the podcast to talk about separations of concerns in React. So again, thank you Robert. Thank you Harry. And we'll see you all next time.

Updated 5/2019 with Captain Cache’s Curiosities Podcast episode Ahoy there! ‘Tis I, Capt’n Cache, here to tell ye about a new digital resource available at yer Library District. Our mateys over at the Front Range Community College have gone ahead and added a new database from EBSCO to the Answer Cache eResources so it be […]

Welcome to episode 36 of ATG: The Podcast.  We have a short episode this week, but still packed with lots of good stuff. First off, do you know a rising star in the library and information world?  Would you like to see them recognized for their promising achievements?  Look no further!  ATG Media is thrilled to announce the first ever round of nominations for Up and Comers.  Who exactly is an “Up and Comer”, you ask?  They are librarians, library staff, vendors, publishers, MLIS students, instructors, consultants, and researchers who are new to their field or are in the early years of the profession.  An Up and Comer can be someone you work with, someone you’ve presented with or shaken hands with at a conference, or someone whose accomplishments and potential you admire.  Up and Comers are passionate about the future of libraries.  They innovate, inspire, collaborate, and take risks.  They are future library leaders and change makers.  And they all have one thing in common: they deserve to be celebrated.  The 2017 Up and Comers will be recognized in the December/January issue of Against the Grain, and 20 of these brilliant rising stars will be profiled in the same issue.  In addition, they will be featured in a series of scheduled podcast interviews that will be posted on the ATGthePodcast.com website. Nominations for the inaugural round of Up and Comers is open through September 1.  Don’t wait!   Spread the good news, tell your friends and colleagues, and nominate your favorite Up and Comer at the link provided below. https://www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/up-comer-nominations-now-open/ There are several scholarships available for this year’s Charleston Conference. Springer Nature is proud to honor the legacy of Cynthia Graham Hurd by awarding a $1,500 travel grant to a librarian that has not had an opportunity to attend the Charleston Library Conference due to lack of institutional funding. To apply, librarians are asked to submit a project or initiative developed at their library to enhance diversity and inclusion. Topics can include diversity in selection of resources, providing services to support the research and learning needs of all segments of the academic community, improving educational outcomes, addressing issues including racial disparities, racial equity, income inequality, gender inequality and more. The application deadline is October 2. EBSCO is providing a scholarship of up to $1,000 for applicants who currently work as a librarian or para-professional. You can apply by sending one professional recommendation,, your CV, and a short essay on the following topic: A 2015 article in Entrepreneur declared that the One Certainty about the Future is the Pace of Change will Only Quicken. To be prepared for what the future holds, what are the top three juggernauts that librarians need to address to position libraries to succeed and to expand their position within their institutions? The application deadline has been extended to September 15. In an ongoing effort to help librarians grow professionally and increase their understanding of the changing state of knowledge resources, IGI Global is proud to continue the Academic Librarian Sponsorship Program, which sponsors librarians’ attendance of the industry’s most important events. 2017 application information will be posted the first week of September. We’d like to congratulate the scholarship winners who’ve already been announced for this year: Christian Burris from Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, won the Harrasowitz Charleston Conference Scholarship, and Molly J. Mulligan, an Electronic Resources Acquisitions Professional at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) Kraemer Family Library is the grand prize winner for the SAGE Publishing photo contest. Links to Christian’s winning essay and Molly’s winning photo are available on the Conference website at the link below. https://www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/scholarships/ Taylor & Francis have put together a great series of videos titled “Why Charleston?” showing clips of attendees from the 2016 conference that have been added to our YouTube channel. There are some shorter clips, each around a certain theme of the conference, and one full length video showing all of them together. Thank you to the team at Taylor & Francis for creating and sharing them with us. https://www.youtube.com/user/CharlestonConference/ A reminder that the Charleston Fast Pitch is still accepting proposals that pitch a winning idea to improve service at an academic or research library through September 15.  The proposal should describe a project or venture that is innovative, useful and better or different than what has been done in the past or done currently. Selected proposers will have five minutes to pitch their idea before a Charleston Conference audience on Wednesday, November 8, and a panel of judges who will determine the finalists. The Goodall Family Charitable Foundation will sponsor two $2,500 awards for the finalists.    Last year's winners were Syracuse University for their Blackstone LaunchPad for student entrepreneurship, and St. John Fisher College, for their Coordinated Collection Development API Project. A write up of the session is available on the conference blog, and an ATG Special Report on all the winners, runners up, and honorable mentions is available on the Against the Grain website. https://www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/fastpitch/ http://www.against-the-grain.com/2016/11/charleston-fast-pitch-competition/ http://www.against-the-grain.com/2017/01/atg-special-report-the-charleston-library-conference-fast-pitch-2016/ The program is coming together nicely, and we should have something to share with you in the next few weeks. Confirmed plenary speakers include Loretta Parham, CEO and Director of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Robert W. Woodruff Library, Georgios Papadopoulos, Founder and CEO of Atypon, Jim O’Donnell of Arizona State University, and  Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. We’re also excited to welcome back the “Long Arm of the Law” panel, organized and moderated by Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor to CRL. This year’s talk includes Charleston favorite William Hannay, Partner at Schiff Hardin LLP, and Ruth L. Okediji, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. https://www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/speakers/ Now, Katina has some additions to her “If Rumors Were Horses” column in ATG. Thanks Katina! Hello everyone! The ATG and Charleston Conference teams are all fine in Charleston. We have heard from several of you after the shooting at Virginia’s Restaurant on King Street on Thursday, August 24. Thanks for everyone’s concern.  The hard-working and focused Rolf Janke has recently moved to Raleigh, NC and he says it’s great to be back East again! Rolf has already had lunch with Beth Bernhardt in Greensboro. He is planning to drive to Charleston this November for the Conference. Rolf is founder and publisher of Mission Bell Media which publishes print and digital media for the library market with a focus on leadership.Titles from thePeak Series represent contemporary topics for academic librarian career development. http://www.missionbellmedia.com/ While we are talking about books, did you see the article in the Wall Street Journal about Sue Grafton (August 25, p. M3). Sue’s father was a novelist  himself. Both parents were alcoholics though apparently her father was a successful lawyer and wrote detective fiction at night. Her mother was  “vivacious, outgoing, pretty and friendly” when she was sober. Sue talks about being afraid of water in the basement of their huge house because of big rains and sitting at home with a butcher knife because she was afraid of “bad guys”. The stuff of fiction. Fascinating and wonderful article. Highly recommended. https://www.wsj.com/articles/author-sue-graftons-scary-childhood-home-1503413068 While we are talking about books, we have been spending a lot of time in our new place on Sullivan’s Island and my son Raymond, the real bookman, discovered sullivans-trade-a-book-mount-pleasant. It’s a delightful bookstore with wonderful inventory (we bought many new additions for our personal libraries). Between the Edgar Allan Poe Branch of the Charleston County Library on Sullivan’s and Trade a Book in Mt.Pleasant, I think we will have plenty to keep us reading! An aside, Poe was stationed on Sullivan’s as a private in the US Army in 1827 and 1828  and he used the island setting as the background of his story “The Gold Bug.” http://www.ccpl.org/content.asp?id=14637&action=detail& https://www.yelp.com/biz/sullivans-trade-a-book-mount-pleasant Was excited to learn that the great debater Alison Scott has been appointed associate university librarian for collection management and scholarly communication by the UCLA Library. She will assume her role on Oct. 2. “I am pleased to welcome Alison to the UCLA Library,” said Ginny Steel, Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian. “Her extensive, varied experience with collection development, licensing, budgetary constraints and statewide and national consortial initiatives will enable us to continue to build, preserve, and provide access to a rich, deep collection of physical and digital materials that support UCLA's fundamental mission of teaching, research and public service.” The associate university librarian has leadership, management, strategic policy and planning responsibilities for collection management functions and the library’s comprehensive scholarly communication program. The position oversees five major departments: cataloging and metadata, preservation, print acquisitions, scholarly communication and licensing and the Southern Regional Library Facility.  Alison comes to UCLA from UC Riverside, where she has been associate university librarian for collections and scholarly communication since 2014. While there she has focused in particular on enhancing the library’s approach to collection development, crafting a curation strategy that views general and special collections materials as combined into distinctive collecting areas and incorporating faculty involvement into the review process. Prior to working at Riverside, Alison served as head of collection development at George Washington University and in a number of collection development roles at Harvard University’s Widener Library. She earned her doctorate in American and New England studies at Boston University, master’s degrees in library science and in religion from theUniversity of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Whitman College. I remember the Hyde Park Debate at the 2016 Charleston Conference  between Alison Scott and Michael Levine-Clark  on the topicResolved: APC-Funded Open Access is Antithetical to the Values of Librarianship In Favor: Alison Scott and Opposed: Michael Levine-Clark. The debate was conducted in general accordance with Oxford Union rules. All in the audience voted their opinion on the resolution before the debate began using text message voting, and the vote totals were recorded. Each speaker offered a formal opening statement, followed by a response to each other's statements, and then the floor was open for  discussion. At the conclusion of the debate, another vote was taken. The winner of the debate was the one who caused the most audience members to change their votes. Members of the audience had an opportunity to make comments and pose questions as well. I remember voting for Alison because I thought she did a great debating job! No hard feelings please, Michael! Plus, I think I was once again against the grain of the group. www.against-the-grain.com www.charlestonlibraryconference.com Moving right along, we decided to take the debate online as a Webinar this year and we had a huge registration (363) on the debate topic of Resolved: The Journal Impact Factor does more harm than good. Debating were Ann Beynon (Clarivate Analytics) and Sara Rouhi(Altmetric).  I have to give big kudos to Rick Anderson. The debates are his creation. Rick acts as the moderator for each debate.  We are planning for more debates this year. Please send suggestions of possible resolutions! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=567UeNLKJx8 Several months ago, Tom Gilson and I were able to interview Andrea Michalek, Managing Director of Plum Analytics, to discuss its acquisition by Elsevier. Recently  we learned that Elsevier is integrating PlumX Metrics into its leading products, expanding access to these tools to the wider academic community. We are updating the interview even as we speak. Watch for it on the ATG NewsChannel and in the print issues of ATG. Speaking of which, shocking us all, Elsevier has just acquired another US-based business, bepress. WOW! Here is some of the press release. -- Elsevier, today acquired bepress, a Berkeley, California-based business that helps academic libraries showcase and share their institutions’ research for maximum impact. Founded by three University of California, Berkeley professors in 1999, bepress allows institutions to collect, organize, preserve and disseminate their intellectual output, including pre-prints, working papers, journals or specific articles, dissertations, theses, conference proceedings and a wide variety of other data. “Academic institutions want to help researchers share their work, showcase their capabilities and measure how well they’re performing,” said Jean-Gabriel Bankier, bepress CEO. “Now with Elsevier we’ll be stronger and better by applying more technologies and data and analytics capabilities to help more institutions achieve their research goals.”  The bepress model is unlimited, cloud-based, and fully hosted, and includes dedicated consulting and support. bepress offers Digital Commons, the leading hosted institutional repository software platform and a comprehensive showcase for everything produced on campus. It is also the only repository that seamlessly integrates with the Expert Gallery Suite, a solution for highlighting faculty and research expertise. The bepress CEO and employees will continue working with the company in Berkeley, California. The acquisition is effective immediately and terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. That’s it for this week! If you have comments or questions, you can click the “Contact” button on the podcast website, or you can email me directly at leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com. Thanks for listening, and I hope to hear from you soon!  

Welcome to episode 29 of ATG: The Podcast. This week, we’re continuing our previews of upcoming preconferences at the 2017 Charleston Conference. We have a great set of sessions on a wide range of topics that are designed for several different segments of the Charleston audience. Registration for all preconference sessions is included on the main conference registration page at the link in the show notes. Session details, including descriptions, speaker lists, and bios are available on the conference schedule, also linked in the show notes. LINKS: Preconference schedule with session details   Registration for the Charleston Conference, including preconferences: Product Development Forums: Charleston Premiers:  Charleston Fast Pitch Competition:  The applications for Juried Product Development Forums and the Charleston Premiers are now open on the conference website. These are both opportunities for publishers and vendors to connect with the Charleston community. The Juried Product Development Forums are designed to allow publishers and vendors to get feedback from librarian about new products in development, or improvements to existing products. The Premiers are designed to showcase new products and innovations already in the marketplace but that may not be widely known yet. The call for proposals is also open for the Charleston Fast Pitch Competition. This contest is designed to recognize and reward new innovation in academic library and information management. We’re looking for proposals that pitch a winning idea to improve service at an academic or research library. The proposal should describe a project or venture that is innovative, useful and better or different than what has been done in the past or done currently. The Goodall Family Charitable Foundation will sponsor two $2,500 awards for the finalists. Last year's winners were Syracuse University for their Blackstone LaunchPad for student entrepreneurship, and St. John Fisher College, for their Coordinated Collection Development API Project. A write up of the session is available on the conference blog, and an ATG Special Report on all the winners, runners up, and honorable mentions is available on the Against the Grain website. A big welcome first to Jackie Ricords and John Lavender, two of the session organizers and presenters for “Publishers are Not the Enemy: A practical workshop showing how publishers and libraries are cooperating with eBooks for the benefit of both.” This preconference is scheduled for Tuesday, November 7, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. Lavender-Consulting is run by John Lavender, a publisher with almost 40 years' experience in academic and scientific publishing. John has worked with books, databases and journals, and in editorial, sales, marketing, electronic content and delivery, business development and in negotiating. John is also a Senior Associate with Maverick Publishing Specialists who provide strategic consulting and operational outsource services for the publishing industry. Jackie Ricords leads IGI Global’s e-resources and consortia outreach efforts. Prior to joining the STM publisher, she worked in higher education for more than a decade teaching and directing professional development programs for educators. Jackie has expertise in digital resources, with special interest in e-publishing and online learning. In collaboration with industry leaders, she facilitated the development of a series of information and digital literacy products and award-winning learning experiences for the academic and school markets. Next up, we talk with Jeff Bailey, Linda Creibaum, and Star Holloway about their session titled “Developing a Weighted Collection Development Allocation Formula.” This preconference will be held on Tuesday, November 7, from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. A native of Dayton, Ohio, Jeff Bailey was appointed Director of the Dean B. Ellis Library of Arkansas State University in 2012 after leading the library for three years in an interim capacity. In his academic library career, Jeff has held positions in both public and technical services, including several years leading collection development at Arkansas State. Jeff received his MSLS from Clarion University of Pennsylvania when online searching was essentially just Dialog and BRS. He has presented at Charleston Conference since 2008. Linda Creibaum is Acquisitions and Serials Librarian at Arkansas State University, where for the last 15 years she has been fascinated at the change in library resource formats and the nature of the “problems” she solves in her work day. Linda has worked in a variety of library positions, including Solo Librarian and Instructional Services Librarian. Star Holloway is the Serials Access Librarian at the Dean B. Ellis Library. She also does collection development for the Media and Theatre departments and spends some time at the information desk. She received her M.S. in Information Science from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and her Bachelor’s Degree in Finance with an emphasis in banking at Arkansas State University. And, saving the best for last, we have Buzzy Basch to tell us about the preconference sessions that he’s organizing. Buzzy Basch heads Basch Associates. He previously had a career as President of Basch Subscriptions, and Turner Subscriptions, and Vice President of EBSCO and F W Faxon. Buzzy is an active member of ALA, SLA, NASIG, and MLA. He has been an association treasurer, award recipient, and member of publishing and finance committees. Buzzy has been attending and presenting at Charleston for years. He's an institution! This year, he is putting together a whopping three preconferences, all on important topics. The first one we talk about is Understanding the Library Market, which will held on Monday, November 6, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. It’ll also be co-presented by Michael Gruenberg, with Gruenberg Consulting, and Erin Gallagher, from Reed College. The second preconference on the schedule is Electronic Resources Management, on Tuesday, November 7, from 9:00 am – 12:00 pm. They've got an impressive roster of co-presenters here! They have a knack for putting together a great team to talk about the different aspects of the issue, and present their experiences. And the third and final preconference is Negotiating with Vendors, on Tuesday, November 7, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. This was one of the largest preconferences last year – we ended up having to move them to a different room at the last minute because there were so many people! Just shows what an important topic this is – everyone has to negotiate at some point! ————————————————————— Katina Strauch has some additions to her “If Rumors Were Horses” column from Against the Grain. Just over the July 4 holiday. Great food and fun and no rain which made it even better! Even had a great golf cart parade! Got a message the other day from one of my favorite people, the amazing Scott Plutchak! Scott says that he is retiring from UAB, but not from the rest of his life. He and Lynn moved into Lynn's dream house 17 years ago; it's stuffed with artwork and books, perched up above a pretty little lake with swans and great blue herons. Scott is still on the editorial boards of several journals. He will be able to spend more time on the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI), a global collaborative effort between all major stakeholders in scholarly publishing to improve the future of how research information gets published, shared and accessed. There's also the steering committee for Metadata 2020, a group effort to advocate for richer shared metadata. Scott says he will keep pushing for open data and a more open, affordable and transparent scholarly communication ecosystem. He’s not going to go looking for consulting gigs, but if some interesting projects came up, who knows? Scott plans to do some professional and personal writing, he is doing a lot of exercising and even cooking several dinner several nights a week. It’s also great that Scott will have more time for guitar and harmonica. Last but not least, Scott will be in Charleston in November! http://osinitiative.org/ https://twitter.com/metadata2020 Guess all good things must transition! The innovative Derk Haank will retire from his role as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Springer Nature by the end of 2017. Derk will be succeeded by Daniel Ropers, currently CEO of bol.com, who will join Springer Nature on October 1 and work with Derk until December to ensure a smooth transition. Derk has thirty years of experience in the academic publishing industry, almost half of which have been with Springer. He joined Springer Science+Business Media in 2004 as its CEO and drove the migration of content from print to digital, re-inventing the academic book market in the process. Throughout his career, Derk championed new business models and in 2008, led the acquisition of BioMed Central which together with Springer’s own open products led Springer Science+Business Media to become the leading open access publisher in the world. The culmination of his career was the merger of Springer Science+Business Media with the majority of Macmillan Science and Education in 2015. He became CEO of the newly created Springer Nature and for the past two years led the integration of the businesses. Derk Haank, CEO, Springer Nature, commented: “I’m at the stage in my career when I’d like to step back from a CEO role and try something a little different and a little less all consuming. The fact that we have found a great successor in Daniel makes this now possible. I am very proud of all that we’ve achieved together at Springer Nature over the past two years. Whilst I will certainly miss the company and the people that I’ve worked with, this feels like a good time to hand over the reins to someone new. The critical merger related activities are behind us and our growth strategy is bearing fruit. I will be leaving Springer Nature in the capable hands of a strong and highly experienced Management Board and in Daniel, a new CEO who will no doubt bring fresh insight and passion to a business that will remain close to my heart”. Daniel Ropers is an experienced CEO with a proven track record of building successful B2C businesses that led the market. He joins Springer Nature from the digital sector where he co-founded online retailer bol.com in 1999, becoming CEO in 2000. During his 17 years as CEO, Daniel created the leading retail brand in Benelux with a reputation for excellent personalized shopping, reliability and customer service. After two consecutive periods under Private Equity ownership, he steered the sale of bol.com to Benelux based retail group Ahold Delhaize in 2012 and remained its CEO. Outstanding Charleston Conference Director Jack Montgomery sends this news! Western Kentucky University Provost David Lee has announced the appointment of Susann deVries as Dean of University Libraries. Currently the Interim University Librarian at Eastern Michigan University, deVries has extensive experience in library services designed to enhance and support teaching, scholarship, and community engagement. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College, a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Wayne State University, and a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Eastern Michigan University. During her 13 years at Eastern Michigan, deVries has served in a variety of roles including Education Librarian and Department Head prior to becoming Interim University Librarian in 2015. deVries was chosen through a national search process chaired by Potter College Dean Larry Snyder. “It is such an honor and privilege to have been appointed as Dean of University Libraries,” deVries said. “I am thrilled to be joining WKU at this exciting time and look forward to partnering with the excellent library faculty, staff and students to continue developing outstanding library services, collections, and facilities for the WKU community.” deVries will start July 1. She is succeeding Dean Connie Foster who is retiring after 41 years of service to WKU and University Libraries. Peter Froehlich (Purdue University Press) (where does he get his energy?) tells us that the studious Leah Pennywark is now Dr. Pennywark and has successfully landed an assistant acquiring editor position with colleague at Stanford University Press. Earlier in the spring the folks at Purdue University Press landed a new talent in the acquisitions department, Susan Wegener. Have a great day and see you next time! If you have comments or questions, you can click the “Contact” button on the upper right side of the podcast website, or you can email me directly at leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com. Hope to hear from you soon!

Online library databases in many schools are piping pornographic and sexually explicit materials into children's lives. We were shocked when we discovered EBSCO, and other similar companies, that provide academic resources for grades K-12 are not filtering out sexually explicit content. Even innocent searches return results like links to hardcore pornography websites, stories normalizing student-teacher sexual relationships, and articles encouraging group, public, and anal sex. This is one of the largest scandals we've ever discussed, and it's something parents and teachers alike need to know. Tune-in to learn more.  Call to Action: Listen to our past episode #10 about filtering in public libraries: http://bit.ly/2m35tYY Learn more and take action here: endsexualexploitation.org/ebsco  

In this episode I speak with Kate Lawrence, Vice President of User Research at EBSCO Information Services. Our conversation covers where to place user research in the organization, emotions in fieldwork, and empowering others to advocate for information literacy.

The news includes: · The Guys have been named RootsTech 2015 Ambassadors for the upcoming conference on February 11-14, 2015, in Salt Lake City. · RootsTech 2015 has announced two special speakers at the conference. They are: o A. J. Jacobs, host of the World's Largest Family Reunion o Donny Osmond, one of the biggest names in entertainment · The Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) is accepting applications for their Young Professional Scholarship 2015. The deadline is 23 November 2014. To obtain a copy of the application, contact APG Executive Director Kathleen W. Hinckley, CG, at admin@apgen.org. · The Council for the Advancement of Forensic Genealogy (CAFG) is now accepting applications until Friday, 5 December 2014 for a $225 scholarship to the fourth Annual Forensic Genealogy Institute to be held 26-28 March 2015 in Dallas, Texas. Those wanting to apply for the scholarship but who have not yet registered for FGI can do so online at https://fgi2015.eventbrite.com before submitting their application. · The Federation of Genealogical Societies and the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society announced the FGS 2017 National Conference to be held 30 August - 2 September 2017 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. · The Guild of One-Name Studies has announced the addition of several new services. MyHeritage has made several announcements: o Millions of new record collections have been added to their offering and their Smart Matches facility makes finding matches to your family tree very simple. o An enhanced family tree editor has been implemented that improves the process of adding people to your family tree, adding photos and videos, working with Smart Matches, and navigating the site. o MyHeritage has announced an important new collaboration and product integration between MyHeritage and 23andMe, the DNA testing firm. This new agreement joins a previously announced collaboration between the company and Family Tree DNA. o MyHeritage and EBSCO have partnered to launch an institutional version of its service, the MyHeritage Library EditionTM. This partnership brings MyHeritage to libraries and educational institutions worldwide. o FamilySearch has announced that the MyHeritage Library EditionTM is now available for free at every FamilySearch Family History Center worldwide and at the Family History Library. · WIkiTree.com has announced an important new feature for genealogists who have taken DNA tests with 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and Family Tree DNA. · The British Newspaper Archive has announced that it has reached the milestone of digitizing 9 million newspaper pages, with 282 British and Irish newspaper titles online. These are accessible through the company's website and through findmypast. · Findmypast has announced a major partnership with The Wall Street Journal's WSJ+ membership program. Members of WSJ+ can claim a complementary three-month subscription to findmypast.com as one of their benefits. · The Indiana Commission on Public Records has approved a contract with Ancestry.com to digitize more than 13 million birth certificates, death certificates, and marriage records. · Ancestry.com has just added 11 new databases to their American Indian collections, with a total of 3.2 million new records. They also have a new American Indian page from which you can search all the records. · Ancestry.com has also launched 31 new German databases with 11.7 million records, consisting of civil registration records of births, marriages, and deaths from 1874 to 1954 · The International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE) has announced that the 2015 Excellence-in-Writing Competition is now open for entries through 15 July 2015. Information is available at http://www.isfhwe.org. · FamilySearch and GenealogyBank announced an agreement to make over 1 billion records from historical obituary searchable online. · Drew highlights the almost 4,000,000 indexed records that have been added by FamilySearch. Listener email includes · Jim discusses "the process" highlighted in one of The Guys' Down Under: Florida episodes on YouTube. He also thanks Drew for his response to a DNA question relating to a mystery in his genealogical research. · Cheryl asks about the meaning of the letter A that appends the Social Security number on her great-grandfather's 1956 death certificate. The Guys respond that these are suffix letters used in conjunction with Medicare numbers to help designate whose Social Security record entitles a beneficiary to use the Medicare benefits. A chart is available at http://www.ncdoi.com/_Publications/Beneficiary%20Identification%20Codes_SNE1.pdf . George continues his discussion of three more mobile genealogy apps: · Family Tree History and Genealogy Coat of Arms of Last Names (iOS only) Atlas 2014 (Android only) National Geographic World Atlas (iOS only) George reviews three new publications: The Surnames of Wales, Updated & Expanded by John and Sheila Rowlands. Published by Genealogical Publishing Company. North Carolina Genealogy Research , by Michael A. Ports. This is a new Genealogy At A Glance reference sheet published by Genealogical Publishing Company. A Weekend of Genealogy: Things to Know and Do Online and Offline by Margaret M. McMahon, Ph.D. Drew discusses the RootsWeb Surname List at http://rsl.rootsweb.ancestry.com and why it is important to your research. Drew shares an important Evernote tip. George reports that the Florida Genealogical Society (Tampa) was given an award by the Tampa Preservation, Inc., in recognition of its project collaborating with the University of South Florida to digitize, index, and make available for free online immigration records in Hillsborough County, Florida, dating from the 1890s and early 1900s.

The news includes: · ICAPGen Conference will be held on Saturday, 1 November 2014, on the Brigham Young University campus in Salt Lake City, Utah. Details and the link to the conference registration can be found at www.icapgen.org. · MyHeritage and EBSCO have partnered to bring the service MyHeritage Library Edition to libraries and educational institutions. · The 35th International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) Conference will be held on 6-10 July 2015 in Jerusalem. Registration is now open for persons living outside of Israel; Israeli residents' registration will be announced. The conference will take place in cooperation with MyHeritage. · RootsMagic has announced a free update for existing Charting Companion 5 owners. RootsMagic has also added direct import support for The Master Genealogist (TMG) software users. · The State of Tennessee has announced its partnership with Ancestry.com and will become the first state to offer access to Ancestry.com in every K-12 classroom throughout the state. · The Board for Certification of Genealogists welcomes its new president, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, and two new board members. · FamilySearch and GenealogyBank have announced an agreement to make over 1 billion records from historical newspapers searchable online. Volunteer indexers are needed, and more information is available at http://familysearch.org/indexing. · FamilySearch and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania announced a joint initiative to digitally preserved select collections of the historical society's holdings. · FamilySearch has announced a new facility for its Family Tree to upload audio files. They also announced the availability of two mobile apps. · The New England Historic Genealogical Society will host an exclusive evening on 13 November 2014 to honor critically acclaimed actress Dame Angela Lansbury at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. Details are available at http://www.americanancestors.org/Lansbury/. George begins a new series about available cell phone apps for the iOS and Android operating systems. He discusses the following: FamilySearch Tree (available for both platforms) FamilySearch Memories (available only for iOS) Pic Scanner (available only for iOS) Billion Graves Camera (available only for iOS) Drew reviews two new publications: Guide to DNA Testing by Richard Hill The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally Listener email includes: · Gus asks what software The Guys are using on their Macs to run Windows programs. · Jane asks about the availability of any free American newspaper websites that she could browse, particularly for New Jersey. · Julie asks for recommendations for learning more about genealogy and becoming a professional genealogist. · Emily discusses finding some shocking information about a grandfather, and asks advice for combating genealogy burnout and about what information is and is not appropriate to share.

This video tutorial will show you how to save articles and create folders in EBSCO.

Export references from EBSCOhost into your EndNote Web account. Video 6 of 23 in the 'EndNote Web for Windows and Mac' series.

Export references from EBSCOhost into your EndNote desktop library.

AZ Teach 21 webinar presented by Reed Brotherton. An overview of select Web 2.0 resources including: Delicious, Animoto, Glogster, Brain Pop, EBSCO, Wall Wisher and more.

Looking for new opportunities in the paralegal world? On The Paralegal Voice, co-host Vicki Voisin welcomes Karen G. McGee, ACP, President of NALA and Christine E. Porter, ACP, Chair of NALA's Continuing Education Council, to talk about opportunities through NALA and how you can revitalize your career with continuing education. They discuss Advanced Certification and all of the options available in specific practice areas, as well as NALA's new "blended learning" approach and how to use these tools for career growth.

This week's news includes: the newly released Welsh 1911 census reveals that singer Tom Jones is actually three-quarters English; MyHeritage.com (www.myheritage.com) has announced a new version of its photo service that makes it easier to upload, share, and organize their photos online; EBSCO Publishing, one of the largest distributor of electronic materials to libraries and archives, and Footnote.com have announced a distribution deal that makes EBSCO the worldwide distributor of Footnote.com to libraries and institutions; Ancestry.ca, the Canadian geographical version of Ancestry, announces a partnership with the Library and Archives Canada in which the entire historical Canadian censuses, 1851-1916, have been released online at its site; and George spoke with Stephen Carr of our sponsor, NewspaperARCHIVE.com, and indicates that the newly announced free membership includes access to up to 5 pages per day at their site -- great for the casual user -- but serious researchers will want to subscribe to the full service.The Guys are pleased to announce details of the RootsMagic Valentine's Day Cruise on Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas, sailing from February 14th to 21st from Miami for a week's tour of the western Caribbean. Details can be found at Rootsmagic's website at www.rootsmagic.com. The Guys are excited about going to Burbank for the Southern California Genealogical Society's JAMBOREE on June 26th to 28th. George will be moderator of "Son of Blogger," a panel discussion of blogs, podcasts, and videocasts. More details are available at the SCGS website at www.scgsgenealogy.com. This week's email includes: Cheryl wants to know how to source a copy of a military record received from a relative; Kay corrects George on what happens on the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) when a spouse receives the Social Security benefits of a deceased spouse; Kay also shares a wealth of information about the land records related to Old Pendleton, South Carolina; Noi located the Pleasantville Cook-Book at the Internet Archive at www.archive.org (the cookbook is at http://www.archive.org/details/pleasantvilleco00clargoog); Jim shares information about UK copyright law and public domain; Lynda shares her experiences with CDs created by an Arkansas genealogy society, and requested a format for the Mac; Mac praises Drew's book, and thanks The Guys for encouraging him to begin lecturing; Gus is now researching his Polish ancestors, and questions how to enter the original name and the Americanized name into his genealogy database program; Blaise shares his experiences working with the "My Library" feature of Google Books (books.google.com); Sam clarifies information about a great-grandmother who immigrated from Austria/Poland to New York in 1902, and asks about immigrants held as LPCs (likely to become public charge); Victoria shares a poignant article in the Los Angeles Times about Josh Lipsky, a White House employee who made the trip with President Obama to Buchenwald concentration camp, and how he connected with his grandparents' story there (see article at http://tinyurl.com/BuchenwaldStory-LATimes); Katie discusses an article about Google Books, and a possible monopoly in digitizing out-of-copyright books (see article at http://tinyurl.com/qkgea2); and Kristin is concerned about genealogical societies choosing to restrict their Web content to "members only." (The Guys would like your input about this topic.)