This week we talked with Eileen Lawrence of Coherent Digital about how they tame wild content - the kind of content that isn't indexed in journals, but is still really valuable and contributes to the scholarly record.
Notable links:
Coherent Digital website: https://coherentdigital.net/
Presentation on Grey Literature with Toby Green
Transcript for Episode 005: Coherent Digital Taming Wild Content
Hello, and welcome to the common stacks podcast. This is the show that brings together professionals from within the library world, as well as interesting experts from other professions to engage in discussions around the issues affecting libraries, looking at the ways in which libraries are dispelling. The myth of this is how we've always done it.
Heather:
This episode, Rob and I are talking with Eileen Lawrence of coherent digital. She's the VP of sales slash chief inspiration officer, and has worked with libraries since 1980. In 1997. She became the sales VP of Chad Wailey, Inc. And in 2000 she was the co-founder and sales VP of Alexander street press. With the mission of making silent voices heard, she believes in social change through education and in the power of the arts to heal. Eileen serves on the nonprofit boards of LA theater works and a musical coherent. Digital is her new project and coherent digital has a mission to tame wild content. And I started off by asking her exactly what that means.
Eileen:
Okay. I love talking about this. So we've been doing this all of us for decades. There's a lot of content out in the world that nobody can find. It's sort of, you don't even know it's there. It might be on old hard drives and people's paper files, but a lot of it is actually digitized, but not index, not findable, not in catalogs, not in OCLC, and it's important content. When we started with Policy Commons, we found that a lot of the output of policy organizations is influencing public policy, influencing political decisions, cited in journals. But then when you go back to find that organization might not even be there anymore the papers disappear, they go up, they go down. So this is wild content it's content that needs to be digitized, cataloged, put it permanent URLs, made findable and made safe. So we're actually with permission making copies of documents and presentations and, and other formats that we can serve up if things disappear. And that's really important for bringing these things into the scholarly record and keeping them there.
More...
Heather:
I feel like pop culture kind of got a little introduction to that when the, all of the stuff with President Trump pulling out of the climate accord. And people - and not to get into politics - but the thing I want to focus on is the people who were like to trying to take those documents and upload them and try and keep them - is that the kind of thing we're talking about here, but on a much larger... Obviously circumstances are different with each one, but -
Eileen:
Right. Circumstances are different. That was so political. Yeah. It's, it's kind of like that people are creating their own archives here and there - archives sometimes go away because people lose their funding. Sometimes universities don't have the person power to continue maintaining archives. They can find a safe home for their archives within our Commons. That's that's one example, a great example that we use a lot is Policy Archive. This was started out here actually near UCLA by a man named Tracy Weston, who was doing a little mini version of what we're doing with Policy Commons. He had some, some nice organizations, MacArthur Foundation, Environmental Law Institute, and he was gathering up their archives and put them into something called Policy Archive, but he ran out of funding and he was maybe getting towards the end of a career. He wanted to stop doing this, and find a home for policy archive.
Eileen:
So we made an arrangement with him. We worked with him and agreed that Policy Archive would in its entirety, come into the Policy Commons. And that's where it lives now. And the materials are still openly available for anyone. So when you go to - in fact, I was just having this conversation with Chris at Stanford the other day, because she said Policy Archive, isn't there anymore. How did it end up in Policy Commons? And do you have metadata associated with this? So when we go and see things we know came from Policy Archive, and I showed her that actually, if you search for a document that turns up in the Environmental Law Institute archive, the policy archive logo is there at the bottom. So you can know that that's where, where it came from.
Heather:
I just kind of got right into the weeds with you. And I'm sorry for doing that. You stood up this business during the pandemic, right?
Eileen:
Little, did we know when we started the business that there be pandemic? Yeah.
I remember the day that, that Stephen and I were having a meeting, Stephen of course created Coherent Digital. And a few of us came in as co-founders, including Toby Green, who was formally the head of publishing at O E C D I, I came along, of course, Stephen and I have worked together since 1997, going back to Chadwick-Healey for anyone listening, who remembers Chadwyck-Healey. And then we brought along a lot of people from Alexander Street Press. So Mindscape Commons is created by and built by Elizabeth Roby, who was the counseling and education editor at Alexander Street Press. She created a series called Counseling and Therapy and Cideo. And a lot of people listening to this podcast have that entire series in their libraries. So that's Elizabeth. And now she's taking video to the next level with VR and interactive video and immersion. Andre Avorio came over to coherent digital people may remember that at Alexander Street, we launched a freely available product, you'll know this Heather, called the Open Music Library. And Andre invented and created the Open Music Library and maintained it.
If you really look at Policy Commons and Mindscape Commons, you'll see a lot of similarities in the concept, the functionality, the idea of community sharing and hosting, bringing people together with similar, similar interests. Pete Ciuffetti, who has been in this business for decades has worked with many of us, and many companies over the years. He's here as our head of development. He's our chief technology officer. So he came and then there, there were other people who, who have joined us. So it was a little bit of, of bringing the band back together, which, which felt great. Jenny Wilson, who's been sales manager at a number of companies, Jenny and I worked together for those of us who have been around long time, and remember Turner subscriptions. Buzzy Bash was the president of Turner subscriptions. He's now of course, gone on to create Bash Subscriptions, Jenny and I worked together way, way, way, way back in the 1990s. Then Jenny sold for us at Alexander Street, and she just joined Coherent Digital a few weeks ago. So, you know, it's a good feeling.
So, pandemic - back to the question, when we launched the company, there was no pandemic. And I remember, you know, we were just kind of chugging along and our obstacle well was not the coronavirus. It was, how are we going to get people to pay attention, and know who we are to draw the lines from our products, back to the people they knew at farmer companies and how are we gonna work hard to get out of beta. And then along came the coronavirus.
And I remember the day when Stephen and I were on the phone together, and we looked both of us like deer in the headlights. And Stephen said, who Eileen, who would've imagined, you know, and there we were. But when you think about it, Heather, we had to two projects going on. One was a mental health product. What has happened during the pandemic, people are crashing, people need support. So, you know, we, we didn't even really need to pivot with that product. We just needed to make sure that it had in it, the things that people were going to need during the pandemic, we paid special attention to telehealth training people, how to counsel people, remotely, both products really served academia during a pandemic when people could get to campus because of the fact that they were fully online and also the pricing models and access models that we've, we've always offered libraries. We make it very easy for people to give access to students who are remote and faculty.
Heather:
I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit more about Mindscapes and how you use virtual reality. Like, can you just explain this to me a little bit as someone who's kind of just catching on to virtual reality right now? And how, how does this work?
Eileen:
I will. So Elizabeth Roby, before pandemic looked around to see what, what would really be needed. And we had this idea about virtual reality because it was so kind of up and coming. We were seeing VR labs being built in libraries and universities everywhere, but would what, what were people doing with those labs? So she visited a number of sites in person and spoke with a lot more people by phone and zoom. And what we were seeing is that these labs were going up, but people didn't have academic content to put into the lab. So there was a lot of gaming going on. People were buying the equipment, they kind of knew that they, they ought to have a VR lab for something even if it was just to allow faculty and students to create virtual experiences, but there wasn't enough content.
And then we also saw the huge need to support mental health education. That's only grown and grown. We made connections with people like Dr. Tyler Wilkinson, who is head of the counseling program at Mercer university. And he's a pioneer in using, in VR, in the area of mental health. We were fascinated by what he was doing. He was showing tremendous results in terms of engagement, remembering what happened during a, a teaching session, but also the ability to train students in situations that are impossible without VR, you wouldn't take an undergrad graduate counseling student and say, we're gonna practice counseling someone suicidal now, or someone who's displaying rage, but you could do that in VR. And what do Dr. Wilkinson's studies showed was really a surprise. Even to him. He thought that students would be more anxious going into a VR session, but they, it turned out they were less anxious and they came out less anxious.
So the confidence is built. You can repeat, repeat it's non-threatening and the confidence is built. The other thing that VR does is it allows you to kind of walk in another person's shoes to, to really understand. So I can explain to you what it is to be homeless or someone can explain to me, but I, I won't really know what it feels like to be homeless, but when I went through the VR experience of being homeless, I really got it. You know, your, the bodily measurements are different. People's heart rates change the signs of on stress, like moisture on the skins change. And people feel emotions. You see people leaning into these VR experiences as if they're really in the room, really with the people and you get emotional. It's very, very different from reading a case study in a book, or having someone explain it to you.
We knew that, that we were onto something and creating academic material to, to work in VR labs. The early adopters of Mindscape Commons were faculty. They pull out their own money during the pandemic, remember CARES funding, and it was the description of how that money was supposed to be used. But there were some faculty members who just went to their administrations and say, "I want some of that CARES money for Mindscape Commons," and that succeeded in some cases, but sometimes just grant money. So that, that product's been wonderful. It's been taking off and it's really serving a need, which makes us feel really good. You know, at Alexander Street, the mission was to make silent voices heard and here it's to tame wild content, which is making silent voices heard also, I mean, these voices are really silent. You don't even know they're there, but always we've wanted to fill a need and really give people things that they need to to fill identical holes.
Rob:
Well, I could tell you from our experience working with companies that Eileen has operated there have been firsts to the market and to engage a library regarding products, that new products that differentiate is any sales organization's dream. It's a connection to the product it's created to resolve problems. And going back to, you know, at the end of the chat ACHI days for us, the, the products just got very easy to sell, and there were unique curriculum needs that the products filled and that carried on with Alexander street press. There were categories that weren't created, and we were talking to libraries and, and the sales engagement strategies were simple because is we were in a new space and a new category. And the same thing for us when we partnered with Coherent Digital, that these products stood on its own merit. You could explain them that this is different.
It's not this, it's not that it's a firsts. And that to me is the term tremendous value and good time that we've had working with Eileen and her team and everybody that's behind these great products, becasue they've been first to the market and libraries really enjoy those. It's a conversation that lasts it, engages faculty. And it's really a thank you to Eileen for working with groups, consortia, and resellers, with products that connect to faculty and the process is smooth and simple. We're not just throwing spaghetti on the wall with your products. They have a market fit, they have a purpose. And the missions of all these companies have been very successful. Eileen and the team has created loyal customers and working with the new products have been great. What's interesting. Eileen is how the content can come from libraries as well. And maybe you could explain how this is a hybrid product. You're both a, you enjoy the content, but you can also contribute to the content. So maybe you could explain that.
Eileen:
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because one thing you said earlier about giving customers products that they need, and we've always made sure that there is a need, the ideas have come from customers. We've had a lot of ideas, Stephen and I, over the years for products that we thought were great. And then we do a little tour and go around and talk to customers, think, go, we don't need it. Or eh, you know, let's kind of this way. And we would throw out ideas until we got this. Like, oh my God, we need this so much. And then we had a little expression that rose up early at Alexander street that all of our products have our customer's fingerprints on them. And you know, we could go almost feature by feature book by book in some instances and say, oh, that's John to finale's fingerprint. That's Jill Emery's fingerprints.
You know, we want to give customers what, what they want and what they need in the way that works best for them. So in this instance, this is here, Coherent Digital. This is the most collaborative environment I've ever worked in with, with Stephen and the team because we've built a number of community features into the products. One is an upload capability, that's it really it's, it's it, it's just fantastic. You know, in Mindscape Commons, there are dozens of users that have already contributed their own VR experiences and research projects in Policy Commons. There's an upload feature that lets you take either a link or if you don't own the copyright or if you've created something and you have the copyright, you can put up the whole document and add metadata tags, author, and so forth.
These things go into the Commons. The user sets permission. It could be just for yourself. So you have your own little nest of items or your class, your institution, or for all other members to see it's bringing people together. People with similar interests, if somebody in Poland is searching on a topic and comes up with a search results, that that includes a list that you've built or a document that you've contributed. Now, you've got a connection to a scholar that you didn't have before where letting people put their mark on the products in different ways. There's a, a new feature that went live a couple months ago. That's a list builder so that as you're searching, maybe you're doing a search on sustainable development goals and you find 15 or 20 things that are really right on the mark to your research. You can tick them off on the search results set and then throw them into a list that you've created and named.
You can need even make that list public. You can publish your list. So the customer engagement is really important. We created a new position here. There's a wonderful a woman named Yuma Rahe who joined us. Maybe it was a year ago, nine months ago. It feels like she's been here forever. Yuma is our product engagement manager. So when one of your Common Stacks members buys one of our products, Yuma will be in touch immediately say, I'm here to help you use it. Mostly I'm here to help your users engage with it. How can we do that together? And I know this is so in line with your mission there at, at, at your new, your new company. So we're gonna be working together on ideas for user engagement, faculty engagement. How can we get all that linking users? The worst thing is when a librarian buys something and then comes to us, says, nobody knows it's here, but we go to a conference, right? Heather, we've been all through this where a faculty member comes up and says, wow, this looks great. I tell my librarian to get this for my library. You already have it, you know?
Rob:
Yeah. And this really follows the history that the, the products were maybe the original crowdsourced and, and you really created these products with the library and the solution in my, but you did something else concurrently. You always created great price schedules. You always pushed us to look at how we were calculating our pricing ma pricing sheets going, wow. Their team just added a whole different set of criteria. That programmatically was a challenge, but it, from a presentation to the library, you always produce these price sheets that were fair and equitable, and that's tremendous. It takes, it takes effort to do that. And maybe a little bit background on, on how your team has gotten so good with pricing.
Eileen:
You're looking at the team. And you know, it was, it was when I first started working with Stephen at Chachi I had nothing to do with managing sales people or creating price lists or anything. It was really new, but again, listening to customers. And I remember the day that, oh God, I could even remember it was Gettysburg community college. I can almost remember the librarian's name. And she called and she said, there's something that's not fair because you know, we have this, this budget, but we have only this many students and we're paying the same prices, this library. And I thought about that. And then there were other people who would come and, and, and, and, and, and say things that made me realize that we had to get a little more granular with the pricing or an HBCU would call and say, look, we're Howard, and our budget is so terrible and we always are struggling for money.
So over time we kept adding these, these layers. We didn't want to make it complicated, but we just wanted to make it fair. So that if you're an HBCU or tribal college, you should pay less just because, you know, so we would not notch it down a bit. It just evolved over time. Nobody ever complained about our pricing at, at Alexander Street. It was the, it was just the weirdest thing. Nobody would ever challenge us on pricing or the license agreement. So I think simple simple, fair, but options that that met people's needs.
Rob:
Well, we applaud for that keeping to your price schedule and structuring your business. So there's consistency. There is predictability of cost is really important. Questions are different for libraries as they go through their budgetary cycle and the predictability and the value you've been able to deliver in these price sheets from our perspective is, is tremendous. It's, it's really important that we can closely correlate pricing to value. And we could model that around all of the price sheets we've seen with you and keep that up for all the products you released.
Eileen:
We're trying anyway, thanks for the feedback. It's really, really, really it to hear that. I mean, real when people create something, what do they want? They want people to use it. And if they put up barriers that people can't use it, I don't understand. We want the products out there. We want the products to use.
Heather:
I want to ask you a couple of questions, just about the different Commons and, and how you're getting this content. And I watched one of the presentations on your website with Toby -
Eileen:
Wonderful presentation. Isn't it.
Heather:
It's really good.
Heather:
So good. I'll put it in the show notes for this. He made the comment about how a lot of this stuff, and he was referring to the far side being this kind of content that you're gathering here, putting together
And he said that the, one of the differences, a lot of this stuff is born digital. Right? So it already, it's very creative. It's kind of a web 2.0, sorts of stuff. Crowdsource sorts of is blog, blog, things, videos, all that kind of stuff. And I guess I'm wondering, how does that change? How you're gathering it, wrapping it up with the fact that it was digital to start with, does it help? Is there more metadata? Is it harder because you've got different formats?
Eileen:
This is where I kind of wish I had our technology people on the line, but we created something called coherent spot and it goes out and searches and harvest. So a great example of how we're libraries with policy commons is we're gathering content from tens of thousands of NGOs, IGOs think tanks around the world. Most of them you, you haven't heard of, but you're looking for something in a subject area. And up comes content from, from this African NGO that might, might have been alive for, for a year, you know, but what they put out was, was really important. I'm an African specialist. So Jenny Wilson has told me that they're over close to 850 African NGOs that we've already found and we're harvesting content from them. So our bot goes out, looking, looking, looking to see if there's any new content coming from those organizations.
Eileen:
So we're, we're pulling it in. So a good example of how this is serving libraries is, I don't know if people listening will know a Don who's, the Latin American curator, a Don Griego at Stanford. He had a list of, I don't know, a dozen, a dozen and a half, very small Latin AR NGOs that work in the area of human rights. And it was a lot of work to find them, track them every year, find their output, bring it into the library. Is it digital? Is it print? So he asked us for help. And we now monitor those NGOs regularly. And we sent him alerts whenever they publish new content. And we make copies with permission so that as those URLs break, which they do in about 25% of the instances in the policy world will serve up the copy. If, if the link is broken, that means that academics can now put these items into their course packs or live guides and they'll be there.
And that wasn't the case before how we find things, how we build policy commons. A lot of it again goes back to the customer policy commons is now at UC Irvine and Julia gel fan. There's some wonderful, she's been letting us know about organizations that are important to her. We haven't heard of many of them, and we find them research them, contact them. It takes a lot of digging in a lot of work, but once we make a connection, then we can start harvesting. So it's, it's just partnerships in, in many different directions. It, it it's just building before our eyes. It it's so exciting, Heather, you know, we'll wake up one day and I'll have an email that says, policy comments just passed 3 million documents. We go, oh my God, 3 million documents and we'll go and we'll look, and then we'll get another email policy comments just surpassed 21,000 organizations in the directory.
And then we'll get another email that says, you know, of the 21,000 organizations we've pulled in content from about 10,000. We will have pulled in content from about 10,000 of them very soon. And you know, soon we'll have content from all, all of them who produce content. You know, so we're watching it grow before our eyes. And it's led quite a lot by customers right now. We're hearing honestly, the whole 850 African organizations that came from customers who said, we have an interest in Africa. Policy commons is a great African studies resource right now. It's just phenomenal because it's the current material that's being produced by Africa. And you know, we, we need now to get beyond this concept that African studies means you study the history of Africa. I mean, Africa right now is underrepresented in its voice, in the sciences, in E every other area.
So the economics politics, so policy commons is doing that is bringing the African voice into so many disciplines. And then our other project Africa commons that we're building right now, that'll launch in may. That will be not African American, but it'll be at the African archives, the African culture, the African heritage, working with archives there, and it'll work very much the way policy commons does in that. It'll have a directory that, that links over to these, these resources that are not only impossible to find, but they're gonna disappear if they're not preserved digitized. Soon
Heather:
On that note, I think you've answered all of my questions, but where can people go to learn more and obviously on include links in our show notes and stuff, but for people listening, where do you want them to go?
Eileen:
We'd really like people just to come to coherentdigital.net on the homepage, scroll down, you'll see the projects. We talked about landscape comments, and policy comments, Canada comments, as long now. That's gonna serve people in Canada and the north Northern part of the us Africa commons will go live. In may. We just acquired the Taylor Francis digital history archive. So British society, 19 30, 19, 19 50 files from world wars to cold war and cold war Eastern Europe database. Those three are currently on the Taylor and Francis platform. They will be on the coherent commons platform in may, and we're gonna be adding additional functionality, gorgeous content on those three history elections content that came from the national archive in the UK at Kew, and hasn't been seen before. It's really gonna be changing the way 20th century history scholars get to look at history. It's, it's pretty exciting, especially the secret files. So they're those. And then we acquired from Taylor and Francis, a south Asian archive from the south Asian research foundation. And that project will be on our, our platform in the spring as well.
Heather:
I appreciate all of your very thorough answers.
Rob:
Please, please come back and yes, dive into these products when they're released. We'd love to learn more about how you enhance these products, because you're doing things differently, the narrative about how you curate your services going forward. I think it's a very unique store. You're producing different products. Librarians tend to understand if there's content that comes and goes, but the production of your products and the curation is very interesting. And, and please come back and share and maybe bring some of the tech team on board is it tells a very good story of how you're creating once again, first in the market. And thanks for joining us today, this has been really good.
Eileen:
Well, thanks so much for inviting me and best of luck to you with your new venture as well. It's, it's exciting to see,
Heather:
Thanks to Eileen for taking the time out of her day, to talk about wild content, the content on the far side and how libraries can actually bring it into their collections and allow researchers to use it. You can learn more at co here, digital.net, or check the show notes of this episode for all the details, too. Thanks so much for listening. Make sure you subscribe. So you never miss an episode. Leave a rating wherever you're listening to this. If you like the show and Hey, why not join our slack channel too? So you can continue the conversation after the episodes. Check the show notes for the link. We'll talk with you again soon. Thanks so much.