Community Engagement Group Meeting. USETDA 2025.

Hello everyone and welcome to session 13, the community engagement group meeting. This session is being recorded and uh moderating our session and our flash talks today is Kristen Terrell and Lily Compton from Iowa State University. My name is Terry Green. I'll be your moderator for the next 50 minutes. And a quick reminder before we begin, um make sure that if you're not speaking, you have your audio muted. Um, and then we're going to be treated to a series of community flash talks. Um, so there won't be time in between to ask questions. Um, but Lily and Kristen will reserve time at the very end uh for any questions and those should those can also be entered into the chat as as you're viewing um the flash talks. Um, thank you again for joining us. I'll turn it over to Kristen and Lily. Thanks, Terry. And um I can tell it's the I think fourth moderator one for you because it's me and Ruth this time. Normally Lily and I go together uh and come as a pair, but for this one, it's actually partnering up with Ruth. >> That's all right. So, um >> I was just copy and pasting. >> No, I know. And it's been all day, too. So, uh very easy to make mistake. But um Ruth and I have been coordinating the community engagement group this year. Um we took it over from the very um wonderful Emily Wukner who was doing it prior. And uh so the community engagement group is an offshoot of the US ETDA, the electronic thesis and dissertation association. And what it is is just a group of ETD administrators from various parts of their institutions. We get together once every couple of months and have a somewhat structured conversation on usually Zoom. Um although that's subject to change I suppose depending on what we can use for free from our institutions. and um and we get to know each other and we talk about what's going on with our work and sometimes also um things outside of work. We were just chatting about the tea talk that Ruth gave last spring. Um so it's it's very fun to get together and we get to know, you know, we just kind of get outside of our silos in a very good and connecting way. So we decided as a group this year that we would submit a flash talk session to the USDA conference and it was accepted of course. And so the pre the presenters for this session are people from the community engagement group um or possibly maybe some future members of the community engagement group. and it's just going to be quick snaps of what's going on with us and our work as ETD administrators. So, each speaker will introduce themselves, uh, their name, their position, and their institution, and then do their flash talk while Ruth runs the slideshow. So, when it's your turn, be sure to let Ruth know when it's time to switch slides and we'll save time by not having to switch who's sharing the screen. If time permits, at the end, we will have five minutes for discussion and questions and answers. So, all right, let's get started with the flash talks. >> Wonderful. And you're perfect on time, Kristen. Uh and the first one we will have is uh from uh Elizabeth McDonald uh University of Memphis uh libraries and uh just be cautious about time. Uh I will be giving a firm um reminder at the uh 4:30 or 5 minute mark and we will move on to the next. So you have five minutes Liz. Uh let's uh let's get it started. >> Okay. Well, thank you. And you see the topic, so we can go on to the next slide. I am a special projects cataloger at the University of Memphis. I have worked with ETDs since we migrated from print to ETDs. And over the course of that, I became aware I I'm involved in cataloging the ETDs of issues that have come up with students and embargos. And um I was happened to be in a um committee meeting on a different subject with the person who does our dissertation writers workshop which is something we've been doing for several years. And I mentioned to her my deep concerns about embargos and that students need to understand them and really buttonhold her about it. And about two days later I got an invitation to why don't you present to us about this. So I said sure and then I did my research. I started off with what I knew about ETDs and particularly what embar what I'd seen um students embargo for and then I went out and researched websites in order to find out what other institutions were talking about their embargos and then of course being a librarian I did a quick search and I've got a link to an article down below which did a really nice presentation of all the the the study of all the different um embargo reasons they had encountered in their research. So then my goals for the presentation was for students to come to an understanding of what their options were, what um open access meant and what embargos meant. Furthermore, I wanted them to understand when in when they might want to consider doing an embargo because I think there was a lot of confusion about that. So um I talked about the issues in particular that are here re regarding patents um grants and funding and u whether they have a non-disclosure account whether they're working with proprietary information ethical privacy issues and that's just to name the primary ones I talked about and the most important thing I always said to them in every instance more than once throughout the presentation is talk to your adviserss because they know Um particularly with publications they know whoopsie something went um security safety as well but in terms of publications they know what their disciplines are likely to accept and not accept in terms of this with with regards to the other things they should know whether your research is um impinging on any of these. And so that was one of the main things. The next thing I went through is how you actually set an embargo. we use the ETD administrator and so I actually use screenshots to show them this is where the embargo um feature is in it and not only that but you know if you don't want to do six months one year or two years this is how you work with it to get it to do permanent embargo or in order to set a different embargo year. I also talk about the if they want to change their embargo and the two ways that that can be done prior to the ETD administrator being released to um ProQuest and then what happens afterward and a shout out to the changes that are coming with that and we are looking at changing that simply because it's been they've been coming in and going out through all different people and we're trying to set a a a specific thing for our institutional repository. The feedback I have had on this has been very positive. The students were unaware. They were happy to get this information. I've done this twice. I did this in February of 2024 and then I did it again in uh this past August. Um going forward, I'm going to expand on based on what the students questions were on what it means and what examples are of all the different types. Um, when I did it, I had a separate screen on patents because that's been a big issue. But, um, I'm also going to do separate screens on the rest of them because I think it makes more sense to the students if I do that. We're talking on about producing it as a webinar and then we're also talking about um, getting an embargo page on the dissertation uh, writer workshop and I think I've motorm. >> You did wonderful, Liz. you were able to put in a lot of information within the time limit. Bravo. You set a good tone for our next speaker. Um, uh, Elizabeth, I'm sorry, Katherine R, uh, Rudd from University Calgary. Uh, Katherine, it's your turn. Hi. Um, can you Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much. I am not part of this community engagement group and I'm not an ETD administrator. I'm a librarian at the University of Calgary. Um, over the last two years, I've been working with a multi-disiplinary research team on investigating our support needs for graduate students and supervisors pursuing non-judial thesis pathways. Our team was made up of a faculty member from uh Brooklyn School of Education, our education faculty, four librarians, two subject librarians, a research support librarian and myself as a repository librarian and two graduate students. Um our project consisted of a survey to faculty and graduate students to understand their current thinking about nontraditional thesis for or against what they think about when they hear that term. who's pursuing them on campus, why are they pursuing them, and how are they going about doing that? We especially wanted to know what supports and barriers they were encountering if they were trying to pursue those pathways. Then we held focus groups with faculty uh supervisors uh graduate and graduate students as separate kind of focus groups um to dig deeper into the barriers that we were hearing about in the survey needs and just the commitment themes like why people were committed to these pathways. Um what we saw was a rising interest from both or what we are seeing on campus is just a rising interest in nontraditional forms of research in general. Um in the repository area we've been accepting nontraditional thesis for a long time like since I started in 2014. Um but every single time we do receive a nontraditional form it's kind of a big deal. Like a lot of people get involved there's a meeting lots of discussion. Uh and it's not because we can't support them, but because it's unclear how we can support them um and that we do support nontraditional uh work. And we found that validated with the survey and focus group. Um that undefined process, the lack of documentation uh is a continued barrier just to pursuing a path and both our faculty and students aren't finding the supports when they are looking for them. What makes a difference is early sustained encouragement, clear messaging, and that these thesis are accepted, they're valid, um, and we need to create better communities and connections so students don't feel isolated during these processes. Also, these transdisciplinary connections through community practice is going to be key. Um because what we also heard was people were doing maybe novel methodologies in one area but it wouldn't be novel in another. So connecting those different disciplines is really important to encourage that. Uh next slide. So coming from the library I like to think about the library's role and impact. Um when students are looking for support they do turn to the library and regard that's regardless of discipline. We built a non-traditional thesis lip guide. Of course, yeah. To build a lip guide to highlight local resources that we have here or um exemplar kind of uh research for nontraditional pathways along the thesis life cycle for students pursuing those paths. Our subject librarians are very key in surfacing examples um and raising awareness of description, discovery, archive, and preservation support that we provide already. But in our functional areas, in our repository areas, we're continuing to work on key messages and awareness of nontraditional thesis support so that students can get the encouragement they need across our library. Our repository needs richer description uh so students can discover non-traditional work across disciplines. Um, so that looks like making sure that that form is documented in metadata, the methodologies are documented and that the file name and description is documented so that people can discover the non-traditional forms. And finally, uh, through proactive outreach, we really want to see students earlier who are considering non-traditional formats so that we can recommend sustainable platforms. we will take anything but it makes it easier if we know that we can sustain whatever format is going to come in. Um, thank you so much to my investigators on this project and for all of us. This wasn't about making nontraditional thesis the new norm on campus, but it was making sure that it's a viable um and validated way to um put out their research. Thank you. >> You are right on time, Katherine. Thank you so much for your overview for uh uh for your talk. Thank you. Uh next up we have Kim Kim Fleshman from Bowling Green State University Grad College. Kim, it's your turn. Can you bring up my slide? Thank you. And Katherine, please see me because I am trying to publish a paper about non-traditionals right now actually. So, I've been talking about that for a few years. Um, so I want to talk about AI and copyright. And I guess I want to start this off with I'm Kim Fleshman. I work for Bowling Green State University in the Graduate College. And I am not an attorney. So, please consult uh this link, this report and other information from the US Copyright Office to move forward based on what you learn and you determine there. you might want to consult an attorney or perhaps your campus's office of general counsel to get some more information. But I wanted to bring this up because it's becoming more and more common that students are um asking about the use of AI in their thesis and dissertations. Every time we find alt text that says AI generated, we do not allow it and instead we send it back and make the student describe the figure. But that's not addressing Grammarly or ideiation or anything else out there about what could be used in AI. Um so at BGSU adviserss or committee chairs are responsible for checking for AI uh before it gets to us and the committee's responsible to review the document and approve it. So I'm not sure how it goes at your university, but I'd love to hear about that later. And um our temp our templates have a copyright statement that most students do not take out. And so from what this is saying from the US copyrights office as long as it has human generated content, they can still leave that copyright statement in um you know because there has to be a certain portion of creativity of course that's involved. Um, so I just kind of wanted to see what people thought about that. And then I wanted to bring up, if you could bring up my next slide, please. Um, I'm sure there's a whole thing missing there. Can I share my screen? >> Sure, please share your screen. actually have a black background so I apologize. So, um, can everybody see this? Give me a thumbs up if you Great. Um, so we all know about Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot and Gemini and Grammarly. Everybody's been talking about a lot of that through this conference, but what about other platforms that are out there that are relatively inexpensive and would make AI harder to detect? Um, I've put links in here. So, Sudarite, for example, is a creative writing tool. Um, it's good at replicating human emotion. Um, it's great for brainstorming, too. And it only costs $10 a month if you want to get 30,000 words out of it, 22 for 90,000 words, and 100 for 300,000 words. There's Jasper AI. It's fast. It's based on GPT3. Um, it can translate and copy into more than 25 different languages. It integrates with Google Docs, Chrome, and claims to produce plagiarism free content. Um, PayPal is free. It does not even require a credit card. Now, there is a paid version, but it's still $6.90 a month. Pretty affordable. Notion AI um is usually 15 a month. Um, it is marketed as being your teammate with writing. Um, it's great for writing first drafts, generating lists. It edits grammar and syntax. It can also summarize long documents for you. Uh, Quillbot claims to be an AI that writes with you again and not for you. Um, it paraphrases things. It checks for grammar. It has an AI detector in it. Um, it has an AI humanizer. Uh, it translates things and summarizes things. If you look at word tune, it is a paraphrasing tool and reading and writing assistant that like Grammarly can correct your spelling in your grammar. Um, it's uh also includes the ability to summarize documents, websites, YouTube videos. Um, you can use it free also without a credit card, but there is a paid version again for $ 13.99 a month. And uh then there's several more tools I'm not gonna have enough time to really cover, but I just wanted to say, you know, can these be used ethically? I guess it's your definition of ethically. [laughter] Uh brainstorming certainly I think most people are pretty good and comfortable with using AI for brainstorming. Um streamlining a literature review, grammar checks, data analysis, content refinement. I don't know where's the line, right? I think our universities have to start talking about where we're going to set that line. Uh certainly we don't want to replace critical thinking or original research. And then I did include some several links for AI policies that I found at other universities if you wanted to look at those. And thank you for your time. >> Thank you so much, Tim. Kim, you really um nailed the time too. Um and the topic is so interesting and I think it's worth a session on its own as well. Um so next up we have um us uh Kristen and I are going to talk about level up grant writing as academic professionalization. >> Do you mind taking over this one and I'll do the next one? >> Absolutely. Um this one uh we last time we shared uh we hosted a session on grant writing uh and um we the topic came up when we first discussed it in our um uh planning session. Um I think our focus was career development and we wanted different faucets that goes into it and uh luckily I think both uh Kristen and I had been involved in a very uh in some initial grant writing work and then we have been heavily engaged in different kinds of uh mechanisms uh in the in the grant writing. So uh we thought why not we host a uh session on grant writing together. Um so uh there we went. Um we had this uh beautiful agenda laid out uh which composed of the three components uh finding funding, applying for funding and uh managing funding. Um although these are short titles, there's a lot that goes into it. Um for funding, um Kristen gave a gave a really good uh uh overview of where to look. Um so these are the places uh the databases that we can actually do a quantitative search on what's out there um if you're looking to apply for grants and then there are also professional societies uh that have that could constantly give out this these information u for example USDA uh we have uh inhouse we have some uh good information out there and there's also teach access council of graduate schools. So all of this uh if you're in involved in those uh you can get information on uh grant opportunities and uh a lot of things that a lot of uh times you don't want to ignore in your own resource uh which is your own institution. So uh I think for both Kristen and I we actually applied for internal grants. Um so uh for our institution and for Ohio University there is uh specific guidelines how you uh want to apply for this spec this specific grant uh what is it used for and what you want to achieve out of that. Um so for um for a specific institution the resources might be housed in staff council union um university library the provost office uh center for excellence discipline specific groups as well and um next up is for uh applying for funding. So um yeah uh when we're looking at uh fund funding proposals uh they're usually they list out the eligibility criteria of course it's like submitting an application uh for anything uh you kind of need to check uh those boxes and then a lot of them have very competitive criteria and sometimes I think for this application process it's kind of writing a compelling story to persuade your funders why they should fund you. So you can you should really stand out in your planning and your persuasive abilities and a lot of times uh presenting with the right numbers um sometimes the return uh of uh investment uh helps and sometimes the detailed plan of the impact and and also the impact that you are going to bring out of this crant uh would be very beneficial as well. At the same time, we should look at the format uh of uh this application. How much uh they how how many words they want, uh when is the deadline and uh things like that. Um timeline is always uh something that we want to um stress about because um yeah uh it's a it's a crucial um crucial component whether you can submit everything on time and then uh your your entire planning of the timeline also u matters and the last one is managing the funding. So um yeah, I think one of the takeaways was to establish a proposed budget and working with institutional accounting uh and purchasing coordinators and track all the expenses as you go and also keep track of deliverables quantitatively and at the end we usually write a report uh to follow up uh on the outline of the application. So, I think that is all. I think I'm keeping track of my own time and it's 7:05 and we're right here. All right. Thank you. Um, next up we have uh uh Larry who is not here, but he shared uh a video of u of the recording that he did. So, we're going to play it here. Larry is from the University of Tennessee. >> Hi folks, this is Larry Tag, the assistant dean for academic affair. >> I'm not sure if you could hear the sound, so I'm going to do it one more time. >> Oh, okay. >> The sound was working, Russ. >> Good. Perfect. Thank you. affairs and director of the ETD program for the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in the College of Graduate Health Sciences. Uh what I want to talk about today is the potential for authorship falsification and ETDs uh when we actually place articles in chapters rather than in appendices. Now, we talked about this several years ago in a USCTDA conference in 2022. And I'm sure you can what we did at that time or what our students did is they provided summaries of an article rather than the actual article in a chapter. So, they were permitted to or encouraged to place the summary in the in the article. And I have one here as an example. Uh this student actually placed this article in chapter 2. Uh they have an introduction with a few um references in here. They have a link to the actual article and the credits given down there as needed. And then they have a the summary and then they have a conclusion. And that only took five pages. So it took very little time for the student to actually generate that information for that entire article. Okay. But what it does is it isolates the students voice to the front matter and the the body of the ETD itself. There is no pollution from other multi-authors uh in this content in this way. And we think that's important because the authorship on our ETDs at least is a single author. But in the past three years since this was presented, a lot of things have happened. And the most important thing that's happened is open access. The number of open access journals journals worldwide is now 22,000. Okay. Many of those are US-based publishers and they include a lot of the kind of publications that we use in the biomedical sciences. U the reason this is important is because they can link directly to the links that are provided in the article to journals the journal figures and tables back into their own ETD and the summary of their ETD. And I got a had a question to ask of AI about that. And I asked that question, you know, is it going to be permissible for students to to do this to use those links directly from from those articles back in their their own summary of their uh ETD? And the answer was absolutely. In fact, they encourage it for the most part to use those links. Okay. And it's important to realize that given the attribute is CCBY for creative commons. That means that the student or anybody that reads that article can use any part of it any way they want to as long as they give the proper attributes. Okay? And they give an example here in the in the information they got from the AI. And the only thing you got to be careful about is that you don't accidentally grab a hold of a third party figure. But most of the time it's very clearly indicated if it happens to be a third party figure. At least in POS and some of the other journals are real careful about that. Now, how does this actually work? Well, if we look at an article from POS, for example, and I'm just going to pick one out here, not one that we've actually used, but when you get to a table or figure, you're going to see a DOI, and you see that DOI link down here that links directly to that figure itself [snorts] and the legend that goes with that figure. And so the student can take that link back to their own thesis or dissertation and use that link in their own summary. Okay, what does that do? What's that? Why is that so important? Because number one, unless the student absolutely wants to have that information in the appendix that's represented by that summary, they don't even have to put it in there because they're going to give not only the credit for the figure, that summary is going to have the links to the actual article and the permissions for using that article in the summary. Okay? So, it's not necessary for them to actually reproduce it unless they want to in the appendix because a reader can get back to the original article which is open access and they've got the figures right there handy for them right there in the uh ETD itself. So, they don't have to go back to the whole article. They can just click on that and the figure pops up. The advantage of that is that the size of the EDDD becomes much smaller because we're not dealing with all those enormous figures in my business that we have to deal with electron microraphs and so forth. So it's very important. So we think this is something everybody really should think about um applying to their own thesis and dissertation program. Thanks. >> Great. I had to speed it up at the end because uh it was short on time. So, uh, thank you Larry for your, um, engaging talk. And next up, we have, uh, Kristen to talk about open resources at Iowa State. So, in the, in yesterday's talk, Lilian, Megan, and I talked about an upcoming open educational resource, and I just wanted to raise everyone's awareness to a few other great resources in Iowa State's digital press. So, can you go to the next slide, Ruth, please? Um, one of them, uh, that came out kind of recently is called a guide to writing the statement of purpose for graduate school applications. This is a datadriven study on statements of purpose for graduate school. And she went through and really laid out what goes into a statement of purpose and how to write a very effective one. Um, that's free. It's available online through Iowa State University. And the next one is called oral communication for non-native speakers of English. At Iowa State, we have quite a few international student teaching assistants. Um, and many of them come to the center for communication excellence for help with their speaking skill development. and some of our consultants and Lily Compton, my colleague, put together this free ebook that provides um a lot of the wisdom that has been developed at the CCE to help with effective oral communication. Let's go to the next one. This is modern information technologies and scientific research and educational activities. This is one of the ebooks that I haven't read, but I had to pop it in here specifically because it talks about um um what was it? Information informatization of the work of graduate students. I just thought somebody in the US ETDA would need to know that this book exists. It's not me, but somebody in this room does have does know what that means. And I think you should know that this book is out there. Let's go to the next slide. This is preparing to publish by my colleagues Sarah Huffman, my major professor Elena Cottos, and my friend and colleague Kimberly Becker. Um, it's all about writing research articles and it goes deep into the weeds. It's again datadriven on what it takes to make a persuasive argument about your introduction, your methods, your results, and your discussion conclusion. So, it's very um very specific advice on how to write a research article that will get published. Let's go to the next one. This is oral communication for non-native speakers of English. Again, kind of in the same vein, but this one gets um a little bit more into the linguistic side of oral communication, focusing on listening, speaking, lexico, grammar, pragmatics, and pronunciation. And then we have one more it looks like. Yes, the OEER starter kit kit. This was by my colleague Abby Elder. Um, you know that Lily and Megan and I have written an OEER now and we've had actually a wonderful experience and it's a good way to get your knowledge out there in a place where people can really access it. So, if you would like to put your wisdom into an OEER, this OEER starter kit is, as you would imagine, a good place to start. And that's what I want you all to know. Perfect. And you're [clears throat] great on time, Kristen. Thank you for sharing all of these wonderful resources. Next up, we are uh going to invite Mamit Carr to talk about Talk Visual Mind AI. >> Hello to everyone. Am you audible now? >> Yes. >> Wonderful. Uh >> okay. Next slide please. Yeah. While ETDs have democratized access to knowledge, the format itself often remains a digital replica of a paper document, inheriting its limitations. Our scholars are still struggling with these fundamental issues. Uh this isn't just another chatbot. Visual mind AI true innovation in its uh flexibility meeting the user where they are whether they think in words or in visuals. Next slide. Yeah. Uh this adaptability is key. A student can start with a chat to brainstorm, generate a mind map to structure their thoughts and then use chat again to drill down into specific sections. Uh now a comprehensive uh research suit. It is a full ecosystem from processing text and video to providing tailored support and enabling collaboration. It supports the entire research life cycles. Next slide. uh the application is not uniform in humanities. AI supports the narrative in STEM. It supports the process but both require human oversight. The critic in humanities and the verifier in STEM. Uh the path forward uh priorities for responsible integration. uh this one to harness this power responsibly we must be proactive. This is a call uh to action for institutions reproaries and supervisors to build a framework that encourages innovation while protecting integrity. Uh these are next slide. This one is a example of a visual mind AI and next one is also and conclusion. Next slide. Ultimately the goal is augmentation not replacement. By representing tools like visual mind AI, we can elevate the quality of research and empower a new generation of scholars to communicate their findings with unprecedented clarity and impact. uh the future the ETD as an interactive tool for discovery not just a strategic document and our responsibility is to ensure careful oversight to mitigate risks of plagarism and over reliance. Uh that's all from my side. Thank you ma'am. Thank you ma'am. Thank you. >> Thank you professor car. Thank you for your presentation. Uh next we will uh invite Rachel Woodwork from University of Michigan to talk about automation of content detection in PDF dissertations. >> Uh thanks Ruth. Um so yeah my name is Rachel Woodbrook. Um as Katherine said I'm not a member of this community or administrator per se. I'm a librarian as well. Um, but I work for the University of Michigan library in the group that runs our institutional repositories for both documents and data. And so we do steward dissertations as part of that. And I'm speaking briefly today about a project I co-supervised um with my colleague Peter Serta on um a a student assistant helping us to explore this automation. So within deep blue documents, we have over 50,000 dissertation and thesis PDFs from the early 20th century through to today. Historical items are restricted to campus use when we have not secured author permission or identified them as being in the public domain. Uh but dissertations are also our most requested items and we receive multiple requests each week for access from across the globe. So, we do reach out manually to authors where we can um when we get requests and we do review them for release based on a process set up in partnership with our copyright office, but right now that's just manual on a case-by case basis. So this summer we explored the possibility of automating content detection of copyright statements in these PDFs um with a great student assistant actually a recent graduate Aurelia Hudac um but she used various different Python-based software and packages to create a semi-automated workflow to bulk process the first 15 and last 15 pages of the PDFs um which had great variability in both their OCR and PDF quality. I'll put the full list of programs she used in the chat in a minute and what she used them for. Um, but I will also note that Aurelia was great. She had some experience with Python in the classroom before this, but she had not used it in practical application, which I think speaks both to perhaps the the usability of the tools also definitely to her skill and acuity. Um, and then very briefly, the script evaluates the PDF to see if it's already OCRD. If not, it will generate it. It scans the first 15 and last 15 pages using exact and fuzzy matching for various iterations of copyright notice. And we also check that list with our copyright office. And then it logs a yes no result as well as a few other pieces of information for each file. Um, next slide. So because of the progression of copyright in the US and the way it works, um, copyright statements were generally required before 1978. So, we had her look only at items up to 1977. There are about 13,000 of those. Um, the code overall takes about 2 hours to run. And we now have a second version of the script here. I think we said that there was a sample of 853 items. Uh, but we did do an additional round of sort of randomizing and drawing an additional sample of 450 items. There's still only one false negative, which is really good. Um, false positives were somewhat higher. We introduced some additional ways to the copyright statement could be phrased. Um, so now we have 19 false positives as well as 45 items flagged as needing manual review, but we're a lot less concerned about that than we are about um not about missing a copyright statement when it is there. So basically, this indicates a likely need of manual review for items flagged as either containing copyright or uncertain. And we did end up having um in our limitations to exclude items from the 1947 to 1952 about a thousand items due to poor quality PDFs. We also surprisingly had to exclude the copyright symbol from the search because it was giving so many false positives and because we didn't find any instances where that was the only indication of copyright, which is interesting to me. Um, so following this project, I put impact up here that there's potentially a basis for considering releasing items that are out of copyright. But beyond that, I think this also gives us a sense of how common copyright statements were in our university's dissertations prior to 1978. um and also a basis on which to extrapolate how much time it might take to assess all of our PDFs for OCR potentially which would be a necessary first step for remediating PDFs um throughout the repository for accessibility. Um and I'll also note finally that Aurelia's code is almost finished um and it'll be released on GitHub and as well as in our data repository when it's finalized. Thank you. >> That is so exciting. Thank you Rachel for your presentation and that uh sets a very strong conclusion to today's uh flash talk. I think all of us did so well with the with the content and with the timing and although these are speed talks I think it's very informationrich. So we will go back to that. I I personally will I think uh they're so interesting. Kristen, what do you think? We have uh still uh time for questions too. Yeah, let's open the floor to questions. Um, and Ruth, do you have a slide that shows the names of each speaker and their title so that if there's a specific question, folks can reference that? Oh, it's so small. Can you put it into slideshow mode? Perfect. Yeah, now I can see them. Thank you for troubleshooting. Yep, sounds good. I see Liz raised her hand. Hi, Liz. Hi. Um, my question is about the non-traditional thesis and dissertations. Um I'm assuming that your digital repository will take different multimedia. We have uh we use DSpace repository and it'll take any file format as long as it's in a fixed form. Okay. Because we've had some issues about whether of how media might or might not go into ours. So that sounds like a really nice solution. Thank you. I think there was a question in the chat earlier too. >> Yeah, I'm sifting through them and see. >> Are you looking uh for EDS? >> Yes. >> Regarding AI, how many of the issues discussed would be addressed if one replaces AI with a collaborator? In other words, if there is a question about using AI for task e X, the question could be rewritten to be a question about a collaborator assisting with task X. Thank you, Terry. Mhm. >> So Kim, I think that was in reference to your uh slides. >> I think I understand the question. >> I'm sorry. I >> So So if you're wondering whether uh AI could be used for something, if if you just change the question, could another person do so and so, >> right? as opposed to the author of the work. >> Think of AI as it's just another person. >> Okay. So, um we have certain schools or departments that allow like a copy editor to review a document which I guess would be similar to using Grammarly. Um, we allow students to use a chapter or up to three chapters of various published journals, articles that could be they need to be the first or second author if they're using it, um, but may not be the only author. Um and again since my school doesn't have to make the decision it's really based on the department and it would also be based on you know is it data science or computer science because maybe they're talking about AI so they needed to use AI to write the document and uh but if this is English and it's more of a creative kind of uh thing discipline um Maybe then it depends on the subject matter. So yeah, I I really can't. Again, I'm not an attorney, so I shouldn't be and I tried to make that clear when I did my presentation. I just know what's out there and what I can present to people and allow those departments to make that decision. Yeah, I think just it it helps to sometimes think about existing policies that talk about these issues with other people. You know, when you're thinking about AI, um the other question I had had to do with the non-traditional works. Um, I'm hoping that if someone submits a non-traditional work that they do it in a way that follows u standards that are amendable to preservation as opposed to using some tool that will disappear in half a year and then no one can make use of whatever's there. >> Yeah, for sure. So, that's part of our consultation whenever somebody has something that's outside of a PDF basically. Um and we'll most of the things have come in as websites and so we've been just doing like a web archiving kind of process but when it's embedded video like that will cause another kind of consideration and how best to get that capture and everything like that. Um we haven't had anything like ArcGIS which has been very difficult for us to preserve the past. So, but every single time basically we come up with a preservation plan for the content. That makes sense. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thank you for the great questions and discussions. We have one minute left. Um, any last comment for the flash talks? Wonderful. We want to have a a round of applause for all the wonderful pre presenters uh for your um yeah for your talks. And um Terry, I will turn it to you to conclude today's session. >> Okay. Thank you so much, Ruth. Um so thank you again everyone for attending this session. Um this was so informational uh with all of these flash talks and everybody kept on time. Um so just amazing. Um so the conference will take a short 10-minute break and then we will resume at 7:40 uh with our final two concurrent sessions. Session 15 national ETD repositories in G20 countries. Um and session 16 sharing collaborative approaches and community insights on ETD management in Canada. And so the um uh the uh management in Canada will be in the breakout room and the uh ETD repositories will be in the main room and we will see you in 10 minutes and then also hopefully you'll be staying for our closing ceremonies as well. She'll be in the main room. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much [laughter] for coordinating and we will be seeing you in the next session. >> All right.