Here, we discuss two new Library Lever vendor partners, Scite.ai and Genius Academy. Learn more about both of these vendors through reaching out to Library Lever.
Here's the transcript from Friday June 3 on Scite.ai and Genius Academy
Heather Teysko (00:08):
We should go by Teysko and Dray. I'm going to ask Dray some questions about the new vendors. Library lever is getting ready to launch aren't we we're launching soon. Cool, excited. We're bringing vendors on board. And so we're going to start talking every week about some of our vendors that we have signed up. And this week we're going to talk about scite.ai and genius academy, right. And it's just going to be super informal. I'm just going to ask you a couple questions and then people can find out how to learn more by contacting us and how to participate and take advantage of these offers and things like that. Right. So let's start with scite.ai. Scite.Ai's really interesting. Tell, so it's citation being able to track citations for papers, but not just the amount, but actually like how, if they're positive, if we can able to reproduced and things like that for studies, tell me about it.
Heather Dray (01:06):
Right, exactly. Right. So scite.ai provides students, researchers with the way to get, not only that quantitative information, how many times has this research been cited in other scientific publications, which is what we're used to and is, and it has value certainly, but also that qualitative information, which we haven't really had before. So that helps researchers know, yes, this was cited in this publication, but was it cited in support of the research? Was it in contrast to it or was it just like a mention? And this is really the fundamental value that I see in scite.ai, very base level, but the reason I was excited to learn about scite.ai and I love that their tagline is scite.ai before you scite.ai is <laugh> because in my work with students as, as a librarian, you know, I often experience the phenomenon of especially undergraduate students.
Heather Dray (02:05):
They spend their days getting their, their papers together, their research papers together, and spend a lot of time and energy on worrying about the format of their citations. Right. I know that sounds crazy, but that, that seems to be top of mind, at least by the time, you know, I would work directly with 'em and the point of, you know, getting ready to finalize their, their research or their paper. And I love scite.ai because it it's like, okay guys, yes, there are citations. You need to cite your work. You need to find citations in authoritative content and publications. But what about actually taking a deeper dive, understanding what those citations mean in context, engaging your critical thinking skills. So it's less about, you know, pulling together a list of resources or, you know, doing sort of a cursory stab at a literature review, but actually ding deep into the context of those citations, the connections of research, learning about how research is published and how publications cite each other, I think is an, an invaluable skill for students to learn.
Heather Dray (03:25):
Whether they're going to be, you know, going to careers where research is a is their bread and butter, or if it's just going through life as an educated human being and wanting to really understand what research means and that publication doesn't necessarily need truth. Right. And, and I think that's something in our society, certainly we struggle with. So why I'm passionate about them is just, I, I applaud them. I've talked to Josh Nicholson, their CEO about this, just that they're really pushing students in that direction of applying critical thinking and analysis in their work, whether they're an undergraduate and, and of course all the way up through real life researchers.
Heather Teysko (04:16):
Yeah. So, so important, especially with like misinformation, just if you see something as cited eight times, well, is it all just circular logic of different people cited themselves and all of that. Yeah. So important. So important. So like, so how do libraries use them?
Heather Dray (04:35):
Oh gosh. Well, so the most resources and libraries these days have like citation tools, which is again, just a tool within the resource where a student can download a citation in the correct format and then upload it into whatever citation manager they're using cetera. So, you know, a student would go research, journal articles using the library's resources, call together, spend time again, calling together their their citations in sport of their litera as they're building their literature review. And, and that's, it it's time consuming because they're using multiple resources, et cetera, but scite.ai is a, a, a browser plugin. So it helps connect all of that for the student, as they're doing their research, their work, and also scite.ai has its, its own database, a full text articles and, and resources that it's pulling from and creating these smart citations. So a student can start at scite.ai. Certainly that's what I would advise them to do to, to get their content, get those smart citations and start making those more informed right decisions about the information they're pulling the resources they're using as they, for example, pull together their literature review for their research.
Heather Teysko (05:56):
Gotcha. So then just the logistics of like, if a library wanted to participate and wanted to participate through library lever do they have trials? Like how, how does that work?
Heather Dray (06:07):
Yeah. So scite.ai does do trials. It's you, you sign up for the trial. We recommend that you reach out to library lever, you can reach out to me directly or through our community which Teysko isn't in charge of here or certainly find out how to link to those resources via our webscite.ai. So I really encourage everyone to engage in a trial once you see it, you'll love it. And certainly, you know, visit the scite.ai webscite.ai directly too. There's much more information than I can cover in our quick chat today, but like the value is undeniable and I think the impact it will have on future research research, our students and young research are now producing is, you know, I think what will be world changing really, if we're just smarter about it at that, at that level in ours, in academia, I think that's going to change the landscape for the better moving forward.
Heather Teysko (07:09):
So cool. And also they're going to have a podcast. I interviewed Josh yesterday for that's right. Our podcast. So that'll be out and we talked a lot about his backstory of how he got into to doing this. And it's just funny. I had no, it's funny. The things people are passionate about that you didn't even know were like a thing. And he was talking about how he was always geeking out on citations and you know, who was citing, what actually at one point had like a spreadsheet going where he was keeping track of all this stuff manually. And while he was doing a PhD in biology. Right. So like that's in
Heather Dray (07:42):
His free time.
Heather Teysko (07:43):
Yeah. In his free time. Exactly. And it was just, it's like I had no, like, it just, I was blown away just hearing about the, the, and it makes sense. And I just, I loved listening to him talk and his passion that he had for this and, and for what it could do with research and yeah, really, really cool. So that scite.ai, and it's spelled a little different it's S C I T e.ai. Right. So for people who, yes. Right. Yeah. So people who wanna learn more about scite.ai we're super excited to be working with them, I think.
Heather Dray (08:13):
Oh my gosh. And like you said, Josh's knowledge, but really passion is just infectious. So yeah.
Heather Teysko (08:22):
It's
Heather Dray (08:23):
Really cool. Really excited for this partnership.
Heather Teysko (08:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then the next one we're going to talk about, and I think we're just going to do two right this time. Yeah. We'll do we have a number? We have a number that are stacked that are waiting for us to, to talk about, but we're just going to do these two for this little quick Friday, chit chat genius academy. So genius academy. That's like mental health case studies. What, tell me,
Heather Dray (08:49):
Oh my gosh. Okay. So I'll, I'll give you a little backstory on genius academy. I had the privilege of attending the south by Southwest EDU conference on this March and had never been before. You know, it's not a, a normal conference on the librarian circuit. So I, so I had never had the privilege of attending that before, but I'm so glad I did. And genius academy has a lot to do with that. So I was walking around the exhibits floor you know, as we do checking everything out and I was riveted like across the room, I saw what I thought was like a Hollywood docudrama or something on a big screen. And as Heather, Heather T Heather Teysko knows I'm obsessed with all things documentary, right. I just, I can't get enough of them. And so I just, you know, felt the poll and had to go and see what that was about.
Heather Dray (09:48):
And I met this really dynamic and engaging woman named Roco shields, who is the CEO of genius academy. And I took a, it took me about two seconds to wrap my brain around what I was seeing there. And I thought this has got to be brought to libraries period. So what it is is an immersive case study like Heather T was just describing and it's around mental, mental health disciplines, primarily you know, psychology, social work. I think counseling is the other, the other tag. And these are cinematic like Hollywood quality. I don't even like saying streaming video because it's really so much more than that, but it provides the learner the opportunity to see, for example a client and a social worker having a discussion about hard topics in a, in a, just in a beautiful in a beautiful way.
Heather Dray (10:56):
I know there are other videos, products out there in the library space that do that. I know 'em and love them all. This is really a different experience and it had not been brought into the library realm before it had been primarily made available through course packs, you know, directly to the classroom embedded in, in courses, which still will be. But my idea was, you know, this is content that could be available to all students, regardless of their, the discipline they're studying because of the topic matter. Right. So things like you know, alcoholism there, there's, that's a topic living with different personality disorders. You know, it just really runs the gamut and there's a application certainly in the classroom, but just for any student, right. Attending a university or college, I think it would be great for them to have access to this amazing and even
Heather Teysko (11:55):
Content. I'm just thinking, like not to students, but I can see that even in public libraries of people want to have access to that kind of thing. It doesn't even have to be within an academic curricula. Huh.
Heather Dray (12:05):
I agree with that a hundred percent and it it's so dynamic, engaging, authentic mm-hmm <affirmative> honestly I really would encourage everybody to, to check it out. And then the other exciting thing, Heather T mentioned that we're getting ready to have some events, the one with Josh, we're also getting ready to have our launch pre-launch event on June 15th. And the CEO of genius academy, Rocko shields is going to be joining us there and, and presenting there. So I really would love for everyone to come and get to see her in action. She's of course does a much better job of, of talking about this amazing resource than I do, but it it's, it's beautiful and I've not seen anything like it.
Heather Teysko (12:52):
How is it? So you said they're new to libraries. How have they priced this for libraries? Not necessarily giving me numbers, but like, how is it structured for, for libraries, right?
Heather Dray (13:05):
That's something that we're currently working on with, with Roco and her team. So I don't have a solid answer for that, because again, this is an area that, you know, they hadn't ventured into yet. Yeah. Which is the exciting part because we're embarking upon this together. We see the value, we know how important this is for libraries. They now they now see that too, and are, are excited to get creative with us and, and find a way to get this into libraries.
Heather Teysko (13:38):
That's it's exciting. Yeah, I could even, yeah, there's so many different. I'm just my head's spinning now of all the different libraries that all different patrons that want to have access to this. I'll
Heather Dray (13:53):
Just say, yeah. You know, Heather, like, so often now we hear the, the, you know, buzz words or you know, experiential learning, everything is tagged as experiential learning. And that always rubs me some kind of kind of way because I'm I've been immersed in providing programs on experiential learning for a lot of my career. And so I always, you know, get a little prickly on, on that topic, but I can say that what, what genius academy has created truly is experiential learning. Meaning, you know, you have an opportunity to view something, learn about it, come back, think about how you feel about it, how, how it's going to impact your life and then come back to it again and continue learning. So it it's honestly, I cannot gush about it enough. Right. But I, I really wanna encourage everybody to check it out.
Heather Teysko (14:51):
So if they were never in the library world before and here comes Heather Dray talking to them and saying, you should be in libraries, like how did that conversation go?
Heather Dray (15:02):
Great. Yeah. I mean, just an immediate, like wow. You know yes. Like let's, let's figure this out.
Heather Teysko (15:10):
Oh, that's awesome. So that's
Heather Dray (15:12):
Very, yeah, because again, just like Josh and how passionate he is. Right. about citations and the importance of, of that kind of rigor in, in academic research Rocko and her team feel this same way about what, what, you know, they're bringing into the lives of students and learners in the area of mental health.
Heather Teysko (15:35):
Do they have doctor, like, how are they making these videos? Do they have mental health professionals,
Heather Dray (15:40):
All experts, all professionals, basically, you know, all, yeah. It's really, you know, the combination of like that Hollywood production combined with academic theory and expertise.
Heather Teysko (15:54):
And do they have any, like, I know, again, they're new to libraries. Is there, are there like trials, how can people find out more without having to commit?
Heather Dray (16:02):
Yes. Yep. Definitely can reach out to Library Lever and any, any of our channels, the community, our webscite.ai email me directly. And I'm happy to get you in, in touch about it, but yes, they have trials. And also there are a lot of great kind of mini demo videos out there. I would, I would recommend anyone visit that scite.ai. There's a link to it, of course, through the library lever scite.ai, and really even their, even their demo or promo videos are so slick, just breathtaking give you immediately an idea about what the resources and it it's, it'll be, you'll understand very quickly the value this would have for students and learners.
Heather Teysko (16:50):
Gotcha. Gotcha. Very cool. Wow. So needed and sounds exciting. Sounds exciting. So
Heather Dray (17:01):
I mean, and these are the kind of partners, you know, we're really mindfully reaching out to and collaborating with as we launch library lever. Yeah. Right. Our idea really is to bring new and different and to, to help libraries find the, the right resources mm-hmm <affirmative> right. And, and right size their collections and their offerings based on making sure they have the, the most impactful content and resources possible. Right. So, so not everything in the world, but the best things in the world for what the library's goals are. The, the university college's goals are around student success.
Heather Teysko (17:46):
Cool. Cool. Well so I don't really have any other questions and this will just start a little, but for can you, are there any hints you can, we can share about what we have coming up. What's going to be next week. We should drop a little, a little teaser. I can't think of any was a big flop. This is live right.
Heather Dray (18:14):
Well, we have, we do have a couple more that I'm, I'm, I'm trying to decide which ones I'd like to focus on next week, but I can say that I'm always going to kind of make it the one, two punch of something, super visual and creative and something more geared towards the process of, of research and I'll leave it at that. So that's where I'm going with this.
Heather Teysko (18:43):
All right. I like it. And our vendors. We are starting to add them up on our scite.ai as well, I should say. So library, lever.com. There's a place in services you scroll down and there's a vendor list there with the vendors that we have already, and there's more coming there's contracts coming in as we speak. So we're very excited to get this launched and grow and have libraries start to be able to provide this stuff to libraries in new and different sorts of ways. So. Awesome. Thank you Heather, for taking some time.
Heather Dray (19:15):
Thank you, Heather.
Heather Teysko (19:16):
Thank you, Claire and Edward for being our audience, our audience today. I don't think you, I don't have anything else. If anybody has anything you can ask, but
Speaker 3 (19:28):
No, very interesting. Thank you. No, I was just talking about weird coincidences. I was literally half an hour looking at, I go looking at Twitter because the society for scholarly publishing is having their annual conference. Oh
Heather Dray (19:41):
Right
Speaker 3 (19:41):
This week. And they were talking about citation pollution. And I, that's not something I was familiar with or an expression I was familiar with, but apparently this is something that librarians are worried about. So apparently people are, for some reason importing citations that are just wrong or misleading or sometimes
Heather Dray (20:02):
Relevant. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Like, whoa, I didn't know. That was a thing, but it's a thing now, apparently. So it sounds like sight would be a great tool to help with that.
Heather Dray (20:10):
Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely believe, believe that's correct. I mean, it's, it's really, oh gosh. Now I'm going to have to go look that up, but I, I think I understand the concept and why it's a concern. But you know, that's just something I've seen happening more and more, all the technology right. That we have is great. Every everything's connected everything's, you know, in theory is available, but it it's not vetted.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Right,
Heather Dray (20:45):
Right. Right. And just because something is, you know, put online or someone says it's valid, people believe that with, without taking other steps. And I think that's what, what happens, valid citations get corrupted, they get MIS they get misrepresented. So yeah, I totally get that. Now I'm going to have to go and, and hunt down that.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
I think, I think if you literally, if you literally put in citation pollution and I think there's a, I think somebody mentioned an article in the most recent Scully kitchen.
Heather Dray (21:20):
Mm, okay.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
That, that, that will probably bring it up, but I thought very interesting.
Heather Dray (21:24):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
I'm going to see if I can get more information about it from the meeting. Cause I know quite a few people who were there. Okay. So I'm going to see if I can get some feedback on this and see if, if we're addressing it.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Great.
Heather Teysko (21:36):
Yeah. I just put the link into the scholarly kitchen article. Now that was from 29th.
Heather Dray (21:40):
Oh, thank you.
Heather Teysko (21:41):
But that's the first thing that came up. So it's been a thing since 2019, at least.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Me see, I've got, I was Googling, but yeah, sometimes, sometimes it's hard to tell what the date of the article is. <Laugh> it's like,
Heather Dray (21:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Yeah. You're right. September.
Heather Dray (22:01):
Yeah. So
Speaker 3 (22:02):
If you, but if, if you're, if you're on Twitter, if you literally just Google S S P hashtag SSP 2 0, 2, 2, and citation pollution. Okay. Some people are talking, we're talking about it yesterday. Very
Heather Dray (22:17):
Interesting. I'm definitely going to check that out.
Heather Teysko (22:19):
Me too, doing it right now. So I don't forget. Okay. awesome. Look at that wonderful serendipity here. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
All right. Thank you guys.
Heather Teysko (22:33):
Discussion. Appreciate it. And Teysko and Drey, we'll be back next week with
Heather Dray (22:39):
Our back
Heather Teysko (22:40):
With our next, our next show.
Heather Dray (22:42):
<Laugh> hopefully my air conditioning will be working by then.
Heather Teysko (22:48):
<Laugh>
Heather Dray (22:49):
It's it's not pretty around here. Y'all dear.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Oh dear. I've
Heather Dray (22:53):
Been a week without any AC.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Oh, yikes.
Heather Dray (22:56):
So you look at, be a little, a little swampy around here.
Heather Teysko (23:02):
I'd never tell. I'd never tell
Heather Dray (23:04):
<Laugh>
Heather Teysko (23:06):
All right. Well have a good weekend, everybody. Yes,
Speaker 3 (23:08):
You too. Enjoy the weekend.
Heather Teysko (23:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Take care. Bye now.