Using Hands-on Workshops to Promote Literacy in Data Science

Sponsor: National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region
Award Amount: $9,500
Duration: October 2018 - April 2019

Contact: Sara Mannheimer, Data Librarian
Phone: (406) 994-3361
Email: sara.mannheimer@montana.edu

Synopsis: Despite the growing predominance of data-intensive research, many students do not receive formal training in data management and computational data analysis. The available training resources are primarily targeted toward researchers, not students. It is therefore imperative to develop and administer workshops that raise the computational competencies of undergraduate and graduate students, specifically addressing skills necessary to succeed in data-intensive scientific research. This suite of workshops will provide students at Montana State University with a basic understanding of coding, with introductions to data processing, visualization, and analysis. Introductory and intermediate R workshops will be offered at the beginning of each semester. Workshops on data visualization in R and data wrangling in R will be developing in Fall 2018 and offered in Spring 2019. In order to broaden the impact of these workshops to a wider audience, curriculum materials and workshop recordings will be published with Creative Commons licenses in MSU ScholarWorks, MSU’s open access institutional repository; the MSU ScholarWorks links will be further distributed via a landing page on the Library website, designed by MSU Creative Services.

Data-Driven Improvement to Institutional Repository Discoverability and Use

Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Award Amount: $50,000
Duration: October 2018 - October 2019

Contact: Kenning Arlitsch, Dean of the Library
Phone: (406) 994-6978
Email: kenning.arlitsch@montana.edu

Synopsis: With this Planning Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through its National Leadership Grant program under its National Digital Platform project category, the Montana State University (MSU) Library, in partnership with the MSU School of Computing, the University of New Mexico Library, and DuraSpace, will develop a sustainability plan for the Repositories Analytics & Metrics Portal (RAMP) that will keep its dataset open and available to all researchers. This grant will also fund the development of a preliminary institutional repositories (IR) reporting model; a search engine optimization (SEO) audit and remediation plan for IR; and explore whether machine learning can improve the quality of IR content metadata. The project team expects work conducted in this planning grant to make the case for advanced research projects that will be high-impact and worthy of funding.

Please view the full grant narrative [PDF] for additional information about Data-Driven Improvement to Institutional Repository Discoverability and Use.

A Prototype for an Institutional Research Data Index

Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Amount: $25,000
Duration: October 2018 - October 2019

Contact: Sara Mannheimer, Data Librarian
Phone: (406) 994-3361
Email: sara.mannheimer@montana.edu

Synopsis: This Sparks Grant in the Curating Collections project category sponsors the design, creation, and assessment of a prototype Institutional Research Data Index (IRDI). IRDI will be an easy-to-install metadata indexing system that promotes discovery, reuse, and impact of institutional research datasets by (1) automatically harvesting metadata from third-party data repositories; (2) generating new descriptive metadata for individual datasets using external topic mining of scholarly profile sources like ORCID and Google Scholar Profiles; and (3) by optimizing for discovery by commercial search engines.

Please view the full grant narrative [PDF] for additional information about IRDI.

The Tribal College Librarians Institute

Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Amount: $249,926
Duration: September 2018 - September 2021

Contact: Mary Anne Hansen, Research Commons Librarian
Phone: (406) 994-3162
Email: mhansen@montana.edu

Synopsis: This Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (LB21) Planning Grant under the Community Anchors project category supports the Tribal College Librarians Institute (TCLI), an annual, weeklong professional development program for tribal college librarians and archivists that provides continuing education programming across all areas of librarianship and is tailored to the specific, unique needs of library personnel at tribal colleges, as well as academic librarians mandated to serve the information needs of Native students. Project activities will build upon the success of two previous LB21 Awards by focusing on preparing and empowering tribal college librarians to be community anchors that meet the information needs of, and provide lifelong learning opportunities to, veterans and military families, in addition to the academic and community constituencies they serve. TCLI programming hasn’t targeted resources for veterans in previous years. Additionally, this project is unique from previous IMLS-funded projects in that some of the goals of the project were generated organically by tribal college librarians during the 2017 TCLI meeting, during which they expressed an interest to share and merge their training, instructional, and programming efforts at new levels, strengthening their network beyond the yearly institute to stronger collaborative efforts throughout the year.

Please view the full grant narrative [PDF] or the TCLI website for additional information.

A National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics

Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Amount: $100,000
Duration: May 2018 - May 2019

Contact: Scott W.H. Young, User Experience and Assessment Librarian
Phone: (406) 994-6429
Email: swyoung@montana.edu

Synopsis: A National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics is an IMLS-funded project that aims to critically address library values and practices related to third-party tracking on the web.

This community-fueled effort will enable our profession to take important strides toward a better analytics practice that protects our users’ privacy from unwanted third-party tracking and targeting. Our goal is to produce a roadmap for enhancing our analytics practice in support of privacy. Read the full grant proposal [PDF].

Please visit our project website for additonal information

"Re:Search" - Unpacking the Algorithms that Shape our UX

Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Amount: $50,000
Duration: October 2017 - October 2019

Contact: Jason Clark, Head of Special Collections and Archival Informatics
Phone: (406) 994-6801
Email: jaclark@montana.edu

Synopsis: Clark, in association with the MSU Library, has received a $50,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program planning grant for “Unpacking the Algorithms That Shape our User Experience.” Clark is partnered with student research assistants Julian Kaptanian, an undergraduate studying the History of Science, Environment, Technology, and Society, and now-graduated Tyler Bass, who recently received his bachelor’s degree in computer science. The research focuses on “Algorithmic Awareness” an understanding around the rules that govern our software and shape our digital experiences and is being introduced as a form of information literacy.

Concluding in October of 2019, the grant aims include a white paper, a research paper, a pilot course and syllabus, a set of resource documents, and a comprehensive reading list. Additionally, Bass’s work has focused on teaching tool to provide a tangible, transparent search experience.

Clark and Kaptanian’s notable teaching opportunities have been an Association of College & Research Libraries webinar and a workshop at the Learn @Digital Library Federation Conference. Moreover, the research has just been accepted for presentation at Open Repositories 2019 held at the University of Hamburg.

The goal of this research is to help patrons understand algorithms and how their interact with data and digital systems.

For a more in-depth look at the work done, here is the link to the MSU News Services article recently published: http://www.montana.edu/news/18360/msu-researchers-receive-grant-to-build-algorithmic-awareness-as-form-of-digital-literacy. Please view https://github.com/jasonclark/algorithmic-awareness for open educational resources and to learn more about the Algorithmic Awareness Project.

Measuring Up: Assessing Accuracy of Reported Use and Impact of Digital Repositories

Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Award Amount: $500,000
Duration: December 2014 - December 2018

Contact: Kenning Arlitsch, Dean of the Library
Phone: (406) 994-6978
Email: kenning.arlitsch@montana.edu

Synopsis: Montana State University and its partners, OCLC Research, the Association of Research Libraries, and the University of New Mexico, will address issues related to assessment of digital collections and institutional repositories by improving the accuracy and privacy of web analytics reporting on digital library use. The project team will examine the difficulties that libraries face in producing accurate reports of the use of their digital repositories through web analytics software and recommend best practices that help improve accuracy and consistency of these reports while also protecting user privacy. This work will provide the necessary frameworks, data models, and best practices librarians and archivists need to establish baselines, measure progress, and make informed policy decisions. Additional recommendations will include an assessment framework so that libraries may begin to measure the impact of open access institutional repositories to evaluate digital library performance and enable impact studies on author citation rates and university rankings.

Please view the full grant narrative [PDF] for additional information about Measuring Up.