Over the past decade, gifts to the University of Idaho Library have paid for student fellowships, seeded software used by libraries around the world, helped build three new spaces, and made Idaho's history findable from anywhere.
Donor money does something at a library that few other dollars can. State and tuition funding keeps the lights on, the databases licensed, and the doors open. Gifts are what let us hire a graduate student to spend a summer on a collection nobody has touched in thirty years, or build a prototype that later attracts a federal grant. Nearly everything below started that way.
Make a Gift!The Library's fellowship program is the clearest example of what donors make possible. It is almost entirely donor funded, and since 2017 it has supported well over ninety fellowships for U of I students and faculty — each fellow paid a stipend, matched with a library faculty mentor, and given a real project with a public result: a digital collection, a processed archive, a map, an application, a published essay. These aren't internships in the fetch-and-carry sense; fellows produce work the University and the state keep using long after the fellowship ends.
Funds a graduate student each year to increase the visibility and use of under-described archival collections — opening up material that had sat in the backlog for decades.
Supports graduate students working alongside library faculty in the Data Hub. Recent Levine Fellows built StoryMaps, web applications, an R Shiny app, and the datasets behind them, then presented to the Library Advisory Board.
Focused on wilderness and conservation and the Library's deep archival holdings in those areas. Its first fellow worked on the concept of a "wilderness archive" — research that fed directly into the Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive.
Funds a student each year to raise the profile of the premier jazz archive of the Pacific Northwest, held here at U of I.
The Ben J. Plastino Collection Fellowship funds a graduate student to contextualize Plastino's contributions to Idaho's written record, and the newest named fellowship — the Dr. Richard W. Wells Fellowship, established through a bequest — supports the processing and digitization of archival materials. Alongside these, the Library runs its own graduate, undergraduate, faculty development, and metadata fellowships through the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning. Together they form a pipeline: a student starts with a small metadata fellowship, comes back for a graduate fellowship, and leaves with a public portfolio.
Recent fellows have built Sedimentation: An Archive of Glen Canyon, enriched the U of I Campus Photograph Collection, opened the Kenneth E. Hungerford Collection, and unpacked what a wilderness archive can be. Every October the Library hosts a public Fellowship Showcase where they present.
The Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) is the Library's digital scholarship center. It has drawn close to $900,000 in competitive external funding across sixteen grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Council on Library and Information Resources — money that came to Idaho because donors and the Library were willing to fund the early, unproven versions first.
An open-source framework for building digital collections and exhibits with minimal infrastructure — no expensive platform, no vendor lock-in. Developed here with IMLS support and now used by libraries, museums, archives, and classrooms worldwide, drawing tens of thousands of visits a year from users on every continent.
A framework for publishing transcribed oral histories as explorable data rather than static PDFs — searchable transcripts, topic views, timelines, downloadable datasets. Adopted by oral history projects far beyond Idaho.
An NEH-funded collaboration with U of I theatre faculty, creating a publishing framework for dramaturgical research — the deep contextual work behind a production, made shareable and citable.
CDIL has also delivered dozens of digital collections and scholarly projects, many built with fellows: the Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive, Tender Spaces, Keeping Watch, the Kibbie Dome 50th Anniversary collection, and the Political Buttons Collection among them.
And the collections keep finding new readers. Usage of the Library's digital collections grew sharply this past year — total users up roughly 65% and views up about a third — while the team reprocessed more than 3,800 PDFs for full-text search and built over 300 audio transcripts to make the material accessible to everyone.
Over the past decade the Library has rebuilt substantial parts of its own floor plan — much of it with donor support — into three staffed programs where students, faculty, and community members can make, record, and analyze.
Making, Innovating, and Learning Laboratory. Established and then expanded on the first floor, the MILL puts 3D printers, a laser cutter and engraver, and a full complement of making tools in the hands of any student who walks in. It draws roughly 24,000 visits a year, runs a busy workshop series, and partners with programs from Apparel, Textiles & Design to Theatre Arts to Interior Design. Its Mobile MILL takes the equipment to campus events, reaching another thousand-plus people a year.
Renovated, relocated, and re-equipped with donor funding — a WhisperRoom sound-isolation booth, a professional podcasting station, an editing workstation. The results were immediate: bookings more than doubled year over year, the space now runs close to fifty hours of use a week, and roughly nine in ten bookings come from users who had never used the Studio before. A campus podcasting club started here.
Built in the historic Map Room, the Data Hub is a staffed service point for questions about GIS, data analysis and visualization, research data management, Python and R — and, beginning this year, artificial intelligence. It is also a working space: classes meet here, research groups use it, workshops run here, and a permanent exhibit on the history of GIS is in development.
The data and GIS work behind the Data Hub reaches well past campus. The Library manages the University's ArcGIS platforms, which see thousands of unique users and hundreds of thousands of item views each year, and it hosts INSIDE Idaho, the state's geospatial data clearinghouse — used by agencies, consultants, tribes, and citizens across Idaho.
Library faculty are also core collaborators on major externally funded research. An IMLS award of roughly $350,000 supports JournalMap, a discovery platform that lets researchers search scientific literature by place rather than keyword, now indexing tens of thousands of articles across more than a thousand journals.
The Library's newest research partnership is also its biggest ever: a $695,000 award from the National Science Foundation putting artificial intelligence to work on decades of historical and current aerial photography of Idaho — turning thousands of images into searchable, comparable data that shows exactly how the state's landscape has changed over time.
Over the past several years the Library's second floor has become the place students go when they are stuck. Vandal Tutoring moved in. So did the Writing Center. This year the Library moved its own reference desk up from the circulation area to join them, rebranded it the Research Help desk, and hired a dedicated reference coordinator to run it.
A student who arrives at the Library at 9pm with a paper due doesn't neatly sort their problem into "I need a source," "I need help with my argument," and "I don't understand the assignment." They need all three, usually in that order, and now they can walk between all three in under a minute. Circulation student employees have been cross-trained to make referrals, so the handoff works from the front door up.
The reference conversations themselves have changed. Overall question counts went down after the move — that was expected — but the substance went up, with the share of genuine research consultations climbing across the year. Librarians describe the new space as feeling different: patrons slow down, and conversations that used to be a pointed finger and a call number are now sit-down consultations.
The second floor is still taking shape. The Research Help desk is slated for redesign, with deeper joint programming with the Writing Center and Vandal Tutoring to follow, and the floor also holds a gallery space where student and Special Collections exhibits go up through the year. The ambition is a single floor of the University where every kind of academic help lives together.
The Library logged 278,169 visits this past academic year +10% year over year, and study rooms, group spaces, and the first-floor presentation area remain among the most heavily booked spaces on campus.
Under new leadership, the Library's Special Collections and Archives has dramatically expanded the number of finding aids describing its holdings, the descriptions that make a collection findable instead of just present. More than fifteen hundred are now published, with well over two hundred added or updated every year, and views of them in Archives West have more than doubled in just the last two years.
What that description work makes possible became clear this past year. When the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was expanded to cover all of Idaho, Idahoans filing claims needed documentary proof of residency — and they came to the U of I Library. Hundreds of "Downwinder" research requests arrived in a matter of months, and the department became a recognized, trusted resource for Idahoans navigating the federal claims process.
Dozens of new donations accessioned each year, including major processing projects — the John Osborn papers, the Rachael Osborn papers, the Sierra Club Northern Rockies Chapter records — that had sat in backlog for decades and now document Idaho's landscapes and wilderness politics.
A digital archivist now guides the acquisition of born-digital collections, and hundreds of gigabytes of University web properties are captured and preserved each year.
Archival and primary source literacy is taught in classes across campus, plus a one-credit workshop and regular sessions in the Library's information literacy series, with work underway toward historic preservation certification offerings.
Keynotes at community historic preservation events, displays partnering with the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and the Smithsonian traveling exhibit Voices and Votes, and dozens of stories a year in the Idaho Harvester and the regional press.
The collections increasingly live online too, through Digital Collections like the Gem of the Mountains Digital Yearbook Collection and the Northwest Historical Postcards Collection, and through the International Jazz Collections.
None of the above matters if the ordinary work isn't excellent. It is.
Library course reserves now save U of I students roughly $90,000 a year in course-materials costs across nearly 300 course sections — savings that have more than doubled since 2022 as more faculty put required readings on reserve.
Developed for English 102 students and opened to everyone, this series draws dozens of sessions and hundreds of attendees each semester, and demand keeps climbing. Students come because the sessions answer questions they actually have about finding, judging, and using information.
Library faculty taught more than two hundred instruction sessions to over 3,500 attendees in a single semester, including intensive partnership with the English composition program — where library instruction and AI literacy are now built into the curriculum and student participation runs above 80%.
Every Tuesday during the academic year, a U of I researcher presents their work in the Library, free and open to all. Nearly thirty colloquia a year — the Taylor Wilderness Archive premiered at one to a crowd of more than eighty.
A catalog and resource-sharing operation gets faculty and students what they need from anywhere. Interlibrary loan borrowing rose more than 50% in a year after the Library made it more visible in search, and regional Summit borrowing rose 45%. As the largest library in Idaho, we continue a role we've held for over a century: official regional depository for U.S. federal government publications, making almost two million government documents available to the public.
A donor funds a renovation, and a room that sat empty becomes a space in use fifty hours a week. A donor funds a fellowship, and a graduate student finishes with a portfolio of public, citable work. Several of our fellows have gone on to jobs in libraries, archives, and digital scholarship on the strength of exactly what they built here.
Sometimes a fellowship starts something much larger. Keeping Watch, a digital exhibit on Idaho's fire lookouts built by graduate fellows working with a U of I architecture professor, grew into the National Interdisciplinary Lookout Conference — now in its second year, co-sponsored by four U of I colleges and the Forest Fire Lookout Association — and into Lookouts, a peer-reviewed journal published on the Library's own platform. A single donor-funded project became a national scholarly conversation, hosted from Moscow, Idaho.
That is the pattern worth funding: fellowships and projects that produce durable scholarship, telling the story of Idaho and the West well into the future. We will never be the biggest or the richest library. But we are unusually good at turning a modest gift into something that outlasts it.
Thank you for your interest, and for your support of the University of Idaho Library.
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