Library
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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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Item Cost, Advocacy, and a Mechanism for Transformation: The Proposed Power of Open Access Funds(American Library Association, 2024-01) Sterman, Leila BelleAs paid open access becomes a mainstream academic practice, stakeholders must evaluate their role in the system. While open access advocates develop new ways to support the publication process and funding structure, commercial publishers continue to pivot to maintain their profit, relevance, and power in the publication system. This article provides the details of Montana State University’s Open Access Author Fund as an evaluation of the service and its impact on the local publishing ecosystem. As stewards of publicly funded knowledge, it is essential to critically analyze each new publishing route before adopting and supporting it. Especially when models claim to transform the system, librarians need to understand how an action changes the system, for whom, and at what cost.Item On Ethical Assessment: Locating and Applying the Core Values of Library and Information Science(Association of Research Libraries, 2021) Young, Scott W. H.In this paper, I provide a brief history of the development of values within Library and Information Studies (LIS), drawing on the literature of LIS, sociology, professionalism, value studies, and practical ethics. I begin by tracing the outlines of professional identity as a way of staking out a claim to values. I then turn to the definition and purpose of values, before enumerating the main values present in the LIS literature. Finally, I present an overview of the contemporary conversation and practical applications related to values, focusing on the American Library Association (ALA) Core Values of Librarianship.Item Shifting the Collection Development Mindset: Moving from Traditional Journal Subscriptions to Transformative Agreements(American Library Association, 2024-01) McLain, Rachelle; McKelvey, HannahThis article discusses the experiences of two librarians at Montana State University in negotiating, executing, and managing seven transformative, or read & publish, agreements. The authors offer their perspectives of transformative agreements and share the hurdles and wins they have had along the way, to help others decide if these types of agreements make sense to implement at their own libraries.Item 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, SaraThis 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.Item 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, RachelleStudent 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.Item 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.Item Teaching Privacy Using Learner-Centered Practices in a Credit-Bearing Context(ACRL, 2023) Young, Scott W. H.; Mannheimer, SaraThis 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.Item Finding Aid Aggregation: Toward a Robust Future(Society of American Archivists, 2022-12) Allison-bunnell, JodiOver 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 usersItem 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.Item Bridging the Digital Divide: Wi-Fi Hot Spots as a Means of Digital Equity(2022-01) Salsbury, Meghan; Hansen, Mary AnneMany 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.