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Montana State University Library (MSU Library) is the academic library of Montana State University, Montana's land-grant university, in Bozeman, Montana, United States. It is the flagship library for all of Montana State University System's campuses. In 1978, the library was named the Roland R. Renne Library to honor the sixth president of the university. The library supports the research and information needs of Montana's students, faculty, and the Montana Extension Service.

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Scaling up: How data curation can help address key issues in qualitative data reuse and big social research. Introduction (Ch. 1) - Insights from Interviews with Researchers and Curators (Ch. 7).
(Springer Nature, 2024) Mannheimer, Sara
This book explores the connections between qualitative data reuse, big social research, and data curation. A review of existing literature identifies the key issues of context, data quality and trustworthiness, data comparability, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and intellectual property and data ownership. Through interviews of qualitative researchers, big social researchers, and data curators, the author further examines each key issue and produces new insights about how domain differences affect each community of practice’s viewpoints, different strategies that researchers and curators use to ensure responsible practice, and different perspectives on data curation. The book suggests that encouraging connections between qualitative researchers, big social researchers, and data curators can support responsible scaling up of social research, thus enhancing discoveries in social and behavioral science.
Digital Equity & Inclusion Strategies for Libraries: Promoting Student Success for All Learners
(The International Journal of Information, Diversity, and Inclusion (IJIDI), 2021-07) Frank, Jacqueline; Salsbury, Meghan; McKelvey, Hannah; McLain, Rachelle
Student success in higher education depends on access to digital resources and services, and today's students rely heavily on the library to facilitate that access. Reliance on digital library resources and services surged in March 2020, when many U.S. higher education institutions moved to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This move exposed a lack of awareness about the ongoing digital divide in higher education in Montana, a rural state with a small population located in the Western U.S., and the underestimation of how student success would be affected in an online learning environment. Many students do not have a computer or device with internet access, or access to reliable, high-speed internet. These barriers inhibit students from experiencing digital equity and inclusion in the realm of remote learning. This article discusses the impact on students, and how librarians working at Montana State University are working to address challenges and advance digital equity and inclusion in their state. It demonstrates how access, or lack of access to resources impacts digital inclusion and digital equity, including personal device ownership, access to the internet or cell service, the ability of libraries to implement remote authentication methods, and digital accessibility. The article shares perspectives and strategies from librarians working in public services and instruction, acquisitions, and electronic resources management, and how they are working together to promote digital equity and inclusion and increase the accessibility of library resources in their community.
Improving Library Accessibility Webpages with Secondary Feedback from Users with Disabilities
(Informa UK Limited, 2023-08) Frank, Jacqueline L.
Libraries often have a webpage that is dedicated to sharing accessibility information with their users. However, many of these accessibility webpages do not meet the needs of users with disabilities. This article builds on the work of articles by Brunskill (Citation2020) and Brunskill et al. (Citation2021), which shared feedback on a library accessibility webpage gathered from users with disabilities, and created a guide for auditing the information found on library accessibility webpages. This article shares how the Montana State University Library used the feedback they gathered (“secondary feedback”) to improve our accessibility webpage. It is a best practice to get feedback directly from users with disabilities when developing or improving any accessibility resource, and this can take significant time and effort. Therefore, this article shares how libraries can use secondary feedback, such as a feedback-based content audit, as a good starting place to make improvements to their accessibility webpage before soliciting direct feedback from users with disabilities.
Teaching Privacy Using Learner-Centered Practices in a Credit-Bearing Context
(ACRL, 2023) Young, Scott W. H.; Mannheimer, Sara
This chapter describes practices of teaching privacy to undergraduate students in a credit-bearing context. The chapter features a discussion of a semester-long course, Information Ethics and Privacy in the Age of Big Data. This chapter opens by briefly outlining three points of consideration for approaching a semester-long course. We then highlight three assignments from the course that we think are particularly useful and adaptable for teaching privacy. We include excerpts from course materials and student feedback to illustrate specific points. The chapter concludes with a self-reflective assessment of our experience as teachers. We co-taught the course with a pedagogical viewpoint of learner-centered participation and trust, an approach that we have previously discussed in detail. The course was built around reflective and co-creative activities that make space for students to bring their own experiences and perspectives into the classroom, including self-evaluation, student-led discussion sessions, small-group discussions, creative activities, and hands-on projects. We intend for the assignments and topics of this chapter to be used beyond a credit-bearing context. Librarians teach in so many different contexts. With that in mind, we offer points of consideration for adapting our assignments for other settings, like workshops, one-shot instruction, or a sequence of course-embedded instruction to be completed over two or three class sessions.
Finding Aid Aggregation: Toward a Robust Future
(Society of American Archivists, 2022-12) Allison-bunnell, Jodi
Over the last twenty-five years, cultural heritage professionals have formed aggregations—of finding aids, digital object metadata, or related forms of description—in order to overcome barriers to creating and presenting structured, consistent, and interoperable description and to enable expanded access. Now most of these aggregators are struggling to update their infrastructure, meet user needs for access to archival collections, and engage with some of the most promising conceptual, technical, and structural advances in the field. In 2018–2019, the “Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network” planning initiative identified what aggregation has accomplished, articulated the key challenges facing aggregators, identified which areas could benefit from collaborative work, and created a vision for that work. With the near-completion of a research and demonstration by the California Digital Library, “Building a National Finding Aid Network” (NAFAN), the project and the archival profession have an opportunity to learn from the past and transform access to cultural heritage. However, none of the large-scale aggregations in the United States present a viable model for sustainability. Sustainability will become possible if they overcome the factors that have limited the success of aggregation so far. These include an over-focus on implementing new technical standards and infrastructure and under-focus on the real limitations: lack of knowledge of end user needs and attempting to accomplish too much without the needed resources. By drawing on both the background research described in this article and the further research conducted during the current NAFAN project, this and other cultural heritage enterprises have an opportunity to create a future in which access to cultural heritage is equalized and expanded for both institutions and end users
Job Stories: A Creative Tool for Library Service Design and Assessment
(2022-03) Moorman, Taylor; Young, Scott W.H.
A job story tells the tale of a user, a task to be completed, and the service used to accomplish that task. The job story can be a helpful design tool for understanding users and improving a service. This method draws from the traditions of agile design, user experience, and service design, and it is now beginning to enter the practice of library and information science. In this article, we introduce the job story for library practitioners. We begin by locating the job story within its wider context of service design tools. We then describe our own experience in creating a job story about a service in our library, including our motivations, process, and results. We conclude with steps for creating your own job story.
Bridging the Digital Divide: Wi-Fi Hot Spots as a Means of Digital Equity
(2022-01) Salsbury, Meghan; Hansen, Mary Anne
Many areas of the United States still fall short of digital equity and inclusion, defined as the ability of individuals to access and use information and communication technologies to participate fully in society, democracy, and the economy.1 This is especially true in Montana, the authors’ rural state. Only 63.6 percent of Montana citizens have broadband access, and the average cost of the Internet is $91.54 per month—the third highest in the nation.2 The seven American Indian reservations in the state face even more barriers to access, with some having as low as 23 percent of the population with access to broadband.3 The lack of high-speed Internet coupled with the increase of remote learning (and remote work) added stress to many college and university students’ lives as they struggled to complete their coursework during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though no campus entity gathers information about student Internet access, the Montana State University Office of Planning & Analysis reports that 61 percent of the university’s students are Montana residents, and so many face access challenges similar to the rest of the state’s population.4 To ease the digital divide and improve students’ academic success, two Montana State University librarians wrote a successful grant proposal to purchase Wi-Fi hot spots to loan to students with poor or no Internet access. The hot spots were offered to students with high need on medium to long-term checkouts and were initially marketed to programs and services on campus that work closely with underrepresented students.
“Broad” Impact: Perceptions of Sex/Gender-Related Psychology Journals
(Frontiers Media SA, 2022-03-03) Brown, Elizabeth R.; Smith, Jessi L.; Rossmann, Doralyn
Because men are overrepresented within positions of power, men are perceived as the default in academia (androcentrism). Androcentric bias emerges whereby research by men and/or dominated by men is perceived as higher quality and gains more attention. We examined if these androcentric biases materialize within fields that study bias (psychology). How do individuals in close contact with psychology view psychology research outlets (i.e., journals) with titles including the words women, gender, sex, or feminism (sex/gender-related) or contain the words men or masculinity (men-related; Study 1) versus psychology journals that publish other-specialized research, and do these perceptions differ in the general public? While the men-related journal was less meritorious than its other-specialty journal, evidence emerged supporting androcentric bias such that the men-related journal was more favorable than the other sex/gender-related journals (Study 1). Further, undergraduate men taking psychology classes rated sex/gender-related versus other-specialty journals as less favorable, were less likely to recommend subscription (Studies 1–2), and rated the journals as lower quality (Study 2 only). Low endorsement of feminist ideology was associated with less support for sex/gender-related journals versus matched other-specialty journals (Studies 1–2). Decreased subscription recommendations for sex/gender-related journals (and the men-related journal) were mediated by decreased favorability and quality beliefs, especially for men (for the sex/gender-related journals) and those low in feminist ideology (Studies 1–2). However, we found possible androcentric-interest within the public sphere. The public reach of articles (as determined by Altmetrics) published in sex/gender-related was greater than other-specialty journals (Study 3). The consequences of these differential perceptions for students versus the public and the impact on women’s advancement in social science and psychological science are discussed.
Strategies for collaboratively maintaining A- Z lists
(2021-10) McKelvey, Hannah; Bradley, Star
This article discusses a project to integrate the management expertise of an Electronic Resources Librarian with the experiences of users, including students and Research & Instruction Librarians, to create a more user-centered A-Z database list. The authors analyzed the database lists of 10 peer institutions that use the Springshare A-Z Database List, gathered data about their own database list, surveyed colleagues, and developed an assignment for two library classes to understand how students and librarians use database lists. The article summarizes their findings and includes recommendations for collaboratively maintaining database lists that can be implemented at any library.
Toward A Contemplative Technopedagogy Framework: A Discourse Analysis
(2020-09) Shanks, Justin D.
Digital technology features prominently in the higher education ecosystem, affecting the ways in which educators think, communicate, and teach. This research applies discourse analysis to articles published within The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) to understand: (1) The ways in which conceptions of digital technology in higher education pedagogy have changed and the ways in which they have remained consistent from 1993 to 2016 and (2) The extent to which CHE articles addressed attributes of contemplation with regard to technopedagogy. Research findings indicate that during the previous 23 years digital technology was portrayed as an overwhelmingly positive addition to higher education pedagogy. Less than half of articles analyzed contained attributes of contemplation. Non-contemplative technopedagogical approaches can lead to uncritical adoption or knee-jerk dismissal of digital technology – either of which can have substantial and long-lasting consequences within teaching-learning environments. Contemporary pedagogies need to pay closer attention to digital technologies, but must do so in a purposeful and engaged manner. This historical and discursive research inductively led to the development of the Contemplative Technopedagogy Framework, which provides an approachable introduction to using attributes of contemplation when making pedagogical decisions about digital technology in higher education.

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