MSUL through the University Archives and Historical Collections is the caretaker of MSU's rich history including its born and digitized content. Currently, very little of this digital content is available to students, faculty, staff and the public. This project was proposed as one method of preserving and providing access to these resources. The project is executed with the MSUL's Digital Preservation Working Group as an opportunity to experiment with this tool for use among MSUL units. It also provides an opportunity to collaborate outside MSUL and MSU through our membership in this consortium for hosting Preservica. Ideas and documents are shared using the BaseCamp tool.

Timeline

• Original start was summer 2019 but was put aside due to other priorities after some initial successful testing with basic functionality and training courses.
• Resumed late summer 2020 after merging of the UAHC and SPC collection management tool, ArchivesSpace. Basic functionality rechecked.
• Integration with ArchivesSpace was setup and verified in fall 2020.
• Ingesting of content from previous Archivematica system begun fall 2020. Continue into 2021.
• Other test cases from evaluation plan execution began late 2020. Continue into 2021.
• Preservica user procedures drafting Nov 2020 - Jan 2021.
• Evaluation report draft started December 2020.
• Ingesting content for user experience evaluation Dec 2020 - Jan 2021.
• Public Interface support from MSUL Web Services, Jan - Feb 2021.
• Selected User Experience Evaluation Jan - Mar 2021.
• Complete Evaluation Report Spring 2021. Make recommendations.

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

The pilot program for our first Supervisor Community of Practice cohorts launched last fall. This year we have two cohorts of 6 librarian and support staff supervisors. We meet once a month for a year long program to read chapters from a book called Be a Great Boss, and we have 90 minute discussions around the topics and how they relate to supervision at MSUL. The hope is to gain consistency among supervisors at MSUL, and bring any possible systemic changes to light.

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.