ScholarWorks

ScholarWorks is an open access repository for the capture of the intellectual work of Montana State University (MSU) in support of its teaching, research and service missions. MSU ScholarWorks is a central point of discovery for accessing, collecting, sharing, preserving, and distributing knowledge to the Montana State University community and the world.

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Scholarship & Research

Recent Submissions

Comparative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Three Proposed Network Screening Methods for Safety Improvement Sites on Rural Highways
(MDPI AG, 2026-02)
Dhakal, Bishal
;
Al-Kaisy, Ahmed
Effective network screening methods play a significant role in highway safety management programs and contribute to sustainable mobility by facilitating the reduction in all crashes, including fatalities and injuries across the transportation system. This study presents a comprehensive analysis comparing the effectiveness of three new network screening techniques for pinpointing safety improvement locations on rural roads. The proposed methods are the Global Risk Scoring (GRS), the Crash Risk Index (CRI), and the Predicted Empirical Bayes (P-EB) methods. The analysis utilized 10 years of roadway geometry, traffic, and crash data from state-owned rural highways in Oregon, with the first five years (2011–2015) used for model development and the subsequent five years (2016–2020) for validation. Comparative tests assessed consistency with historical crash rankings and temporal stability across observation periods. The analysis revealed distinct strengths among the screening methods. The GRS method demonstrated a high level of consistency with historical crash data, while the P-EB method exhibited superior consistency across different time periods, suggesting its value for long-term safety planning. The CRI method demonstrated reasonable consistency in performance, irrespective of the test carried out. While no single method outperforms the others in all scenarios, each has unique advantages and data requirements that can better suit the agency’s needs, given available resources. This research provides actionable insights for improving safety management strategies and advancing sustainable mobility.
Viewfinder Case Study: Organizational values inventory
(Montana State University, 2026-09)
Finnell, Joshua
The Colgate University Libraries leadership team piloted the Viewfinder Exercise as a foundation for building shared organizational values around AI integration and informing the libraries’ strategic plan. Working through scenario-based prompts and stakeholder perspectives, participants surfaced core values such as trust, human-centeredness, and service quality, while also confronting difficult questions about institutional statements, role-based assumptions, and where the libraries may need to stand firm as AI reshapes the field. The exercise proved most valuable not as a decision-making instrument but as a generative conversation starter, revealing unspoken assumptions and tensions that rarely surface in routine project planning. Key lessons included the importance of early-stage implementation, non-supervisory facilitation of discussions, and treating Viewfinder’s value bank as a living, organization-specific resource rather than a fixed menu.
Viewfinder Case Study: Newspaper collection metadata
(Montana State University, 2026-09)
Wolfe, Erin
The University of Kansas Student Newspaper Collection is a 189k-page digitized microfilm collection that, until this project, lacked any meaningful metadata beyond broad, reel-level date ranges, making the collection difficult to search or discover. To address this, I used open-weight generative AI models to create detailed descriptive metadata and searchable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text for the entire collection, producing nearly 1.9 million indexed content objects and close to 300 million words, with substantially improved reading order over the library's previous OCR tool. I used Viewfinder to reflect on this project from my own perspective as the project implementer, as well as from the perspectives of the researcher, library administrator, and library IT stakeholder roles. Working through multiple stakeholder perspectives helped me see values, tensions, and assumptions that were outside of my normal considerations and helped me gain a more complete perspective on this project.
Viewfinder Case Study: Evaluating AI features in licensed library resources
(Montana State University, 2026-09)
McKelvey, Hannah
This case study explores how Viewfinder was used to consider ways to evaluate artificial intelligence (AI) features that are becoming increasingly embedded within licensed library electronic resources and discovery platforms, including AI-powered search tools, summaries, recommendations, and chatbots. As publishers and vendors continue introducing these features, libraries must determine how they align with institutional priorities and library values. Viewfinder was used to consider different stakeholder perspectives and values when evaluating AI features including privacy, trust and transparency, and fiscal responsibility, and how those values can guide decisions about AI within licensed library resources. One outcome of the exercise was the development of a set of questions that libraries can use to assess AI features to support more transparent and values- based decision-making.
The aerobic scope is clearly linked to the supply–demand spectrum as quantified by DEB theory
(Elsevier BV, 2026-01)
Verhille, Christine E.
;
Kooijman, Sebastiaan A. L. M.
Supply-species typically eat what is available, while demand-species eat what they need, almost independently of what is available. The trait ‘supply stress’ quantifies the supply–demand spectrum, in the context of the Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory. This dimensionless trait is defined as the maturity maintenance times the squared somatic maintenance, divided by the cubed assimilation. This function of DEB parameters is mostly estimated from data on growth, reproduction and life history, typically applied for fully grown individuals. Only a minority of the over 7300 species in the Add-my-Pet collection also have respiration data, combined with other data. Consistent with a set of traits that characterizes the supply/demand spectrum, birds and mammals score high on the supply stress, reptiles, amphibians, cartilaginous fish score moderate and ray-finned fish and invertebrates score low. The structure of the standard DEB model explains why species must have a low supply stress to allocate a large fraction of their assimilation to reproduction. We show this for large taxa, but also for rodents, compared to carnivorans, where rodents have a lower position in the food chain. We list and discuss ecophysiological properties that characterize the spectrum. A decade ago, the factorial aerobic scope (FAS), i.e. the ratio of the maximum and basal metabolic rate (MMR and BMR), was predicted to be high for species at the demand-end of the spectrum, and low for those at the supply-end. The aim of this paper is to test this prediction for respiration data from the literature. Our conclusion is that the FAS indeed increases for increasing supply stress, but the scatter is substantial. The FAS roughly increases from 3.2 at zero supply stress to 32 at maximum supply stress. We discuss an application of this finding for the estimation of the maturity maintenance rate coefficient from data, which is otherwise difficult with simple data. We also discuss the large scatter of respiration rates and show, with a computer simulation study of the standard DEB model, that a little scatter in food intake translates into a much larger scatter of respiration rates. Despite the scatter, the measured BMR was found to be close to the DEB-predicted field metabolic rate. This is remarkable because DEB theory makes no direct assumptions about respiration, but can still predict it exploiting the conservation laws for the chemical elements C, H, O and N. Our findings not only suggest functionalities of the aerobic scope in a wider context, but also support the concept of maturity maintenance, which is key to DEB theory, but hard to make concrete.