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Statewide Projects

Introduction

The Montana State Library continually seeks opportunities for potential statewide library pilot projects. Improving Montana library services is the focus, from better delivery of materials to direct consortial borrowing to improved technology and bandwidth capabilities; just to name a few. As the State Librarian says: "the best statewide project may be the project we don't even know about yet".
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Liberty County Library
Chester, MT


Interested? Contact:
Sarah McHugh

HomeworkMT
“HomeworkMT” offers free online tutoring, academic resources, writing assistance and preparatory testing materials from Tutor.com for all Montana residents. Montanans can get help in math, science, social studies or English from a live tutor as part of this statewide service. The service can be accessed from a Montana public, school, academic or special library or from your home computer.  Tutors are available Sunday through Thursday 2 p.m. — 11 p.m. The SkillsCenter is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This service is provided to Montana citizens and libraries by the Montana State Library, through an allocation from the Montana Legislature.

For an overview of Tutor.com, click here. 

URL to access HomeworkMT: http://homeworkmt.org 

HomeworkMT is a single, shared statewide website.
Authentication is by GeoIP  exclusively.

Courier Pilot Project
This pilot is based on $80,000/year funding approved by the Legislature for FY2010 and FY2011. Pilot funding will go toward maintaining a courier service between potentially 12 “drop sites” statewide. Participating libraries will independently determine, with their drop site library, the method of moving their materials between their library and their drop site. All libraries that participate in the pilot will be responsible for the cost of moving materials to and from their assigned drop site.

Courier Pilot Materials for Participants

Statewide Pilot Map (pdf)

Are you geographically A-where?
Montana State Library Geographic Literacy Campaign
Based on the principles of Information Literacy, this campaign is designed to serve both Montana librarians and Montana library patrons to identify and formulate geographic inquiries, to identify and use geographic and natural resources-related information sources to discover needed information, and to help users understand how this information can be used to answer a wide variety of information needs from any discipline.

Please give us your feedback (doc)

Goals:
  • Educate librarians to identify geographic (spatial) inquiries
  • Develop a suite of subject guides and packaged web resources to respond to geographic and natural resources inquiries (Natural Resources Kiosks)
  • Develop a curriculum for web-based online trainings to educate librarians and patrons about geographic and natural resources principles and topics
  • Develop a marketing campaign to promote geographic literacy as a part of the wider MSL literacy campaigns
  • Increase Montanans familiarity with and use of the Montana Natural Resource Information Systems (NRIS)
Useful NRIS resources:

EZProxy Pilots
EZProxy is a product of OCLC that provides centralized authentication. Library patrons need only enter identifying information one time to have access to a variety of library resources including a library catalog and/or online databases. MSL is currently conducting two pilots use EZProxy software. In the first pilot, the State Library and the Missoula Public Library, along with four other libraries nation-wide, are helping OCLC test a hosted instance of EZProxy. Patrons accessing Missoula’s statewide and individual database subscriptions from outside the library now enter their patron ID only once to gain access to a suite of different database subscriptions Missoula Public Library provides. The pilot launched July 10 and continues for 4 months. Locally, the State Library is launching EZProxy authentication statewide (doc), through a statewide license from OCLC. The first libraries to be configured for one-stop remote authentication into the statewide databases are the MSC libraries, followed by libraries with interoperable ILS. The first goal is to enable one-stop authentication remotely into the statewide subscription databases and the public libraries’ HeritageQuest subscription.  Eventually, individual library subscriptions will be added.