Prompted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, the MSU Libraries completely revamped the lending process for Reserved Reading Materials, including material in the Affordable Textbook Project. To give MSU students, faculty and staff quick access to Reserve material, the MSU Libraries now offers Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) for our high-use Reserve items. We are scanning Reserve items and uploading them to Sharepoint, which allows patrons to request these items via the ‘Get it!’ button in the catalog.  A form is then sent to a Patron Services staff member who emails the patron a link to a digital copy of the requested item. These links expire after a specified time so the MSU Libraries are not violating copyright laws. Low-use Reserve material is still available for check out at Patron Services. Returned items must be quarantined for five days before they can circulate again. It has required the collaboration and hard work of several departments in order to make CDL a viable resource for our MSU patrons.

For more information: https://lib.msu.edu/things-to-know/

Collaboration with MSU St. Andrews facility to train staff on book design in MS Word to develop a compilation of student writing and research proceedings from the MSU St. Andrews Writing Fellowship. We printed 150 copies of Still Connected and 100 copies of Proceedings of the MSU St. Andrews Summer Research Fellowship. This collaboration brought in about $2400 to the Libraries for the consultation and book production, and it will likely be an annual collaboration. This collaboration strengthens the partnership between the MSU Library and the MSU St. Andrews facility. The service provided expertise to the St. Andrews research fellowship program and training for staff at the St. Andrews facility. The books we produced increase the visibility of MSU Libraries and MSU in general and the print-on-demand nature of the service provides an innovative way to disseminate student work.

When the MSU Libraries experienced COVID-19 related closures, Interlibrary Services (ILS) expanded on its current services to provide increased scanning of documents, and home delivery to all our MSU patrons, increasing book shipments to over 200 books per week. Circulation has provided a paging service with at the door pick up for students who live on campus and cannot receive items via campus mail. ILS staff worked with collections librarians to fulfill ILL requests by leveraging its existing purchase-on-demand service to buy books in lieu of borrowing along. These services along with guiding patrons to the many other emergency resources the library has implemented, has allowed the MSU Libraries to continue to serve our patrons to the best of our abilities during these difficult times.

Per their website, the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) is a gateway to graduate education at Big Ten Academic Alliance universities. The goal of the program is to increase the number of underrepresented students who pursue graduate study and research careers. SROP helps prepare undergraduates for graduate study through intensive research experiences with faculty mentors and enrichment activities. SROP has been happening at MSU for more than 10 years, but not until 2019 did Erik Ponder get involved to promote the library as a resource for SROP interns while on campus. After his brief talk to the 2019 cohort, Erik realized the library could be much more involved in the program, and he set out to convince program director Steven Thomas to give MSU Libraries a larger role. Steven agreed to bring the interns to the library for an afternoon at the beginning of the 10-week program, and Erik created a committee tasked to plan a tailored library introduction. When campus closed, SROP was reimagined as a virtual 4-week program with 28 interns rather than 80, and the MSUL session went virtual as well.

https://grad.msu.edu/srop

This new collection was built to support teacher education classes during the 2020-2021 academic year which took place entirely online due to the pandemic. The books chosen were award-winning, genre-specific, and/or curriculum-specific books that were also available as e-books for our academic library to buy. Though children's and young adult book are available in e-book format as evidenced by collections at public libraries, the selection available for our library to purchase through Gobi was more limited than expected.

The project began with a title list from Gobi with award-winning children’s and young adult books from 2015 to 2020. From that list, specific awards were chosen. Within that selection, books were selected based on genre, age, use for the curriculum, and user license. The goal was breadth, not depth, of coverage. Initially, fifty-six books were purchased for Fall 2020 with another twenty-three added for Spring 2021.

Since the students using this collection were accustomed to a physical collection in a specific space and e-books can be difficult to find in our catalog, a guide with links to the e-books was created. It included brief summaries of the plots, awards won, and the number of simultaneous users. This made sharing of the collection simple in a year where ease and barrier removal was particularly important.

In response to the ongoing pandemic and the shift of a large number of classes to online, instructional designers within MSU IT Services created professional development training and a peer-review process to provide feedback and assistance to instructors as they create their courses. Librarians have volunteered to serve as facilitators and lead groups of instructors through a modified version of the Quality Matters process to review their courses. Following a two-week Quality Matters training, facilitators provide guidance to faculty on how to perform course reviews, answer questions on the rubric used in the review process, review the completed rubrics, and assist faculty in developing a remediation plan for their course. Over 450 instructors have signed up for the review process, and facilitators work with a new group of approximately 5-6 instructors every two weeks. Through this process, librarians are adding to their instructional design expertise and are partnering with instructors across campus to improve course design, reducing barriers for students and leading to better academic outcomes.

Web crawls of 2020 local election websites and Facebook. These websites are very transitory and usually disappear shortly after an election. No one was collecting this information. Metadata was added to the collection and website URLs (seeds). This is a follow-on to a 2019 micro-grant. This effort helped add specialized content for future students and researchers in political science, history and other social sciences. Content also included candidate website from under represented communities in the Greater Lansing area - these are not regularly collected in the historical record.