From the Dean, April 2025

Spring is all about students at UW Libraries! We're thrilled to highlight some of our graduating student employees—it's bittersweet to say goodbye, but we're excited to see what lies ahead for them. If you're visiting the Libraries, be sure to congratulate our outstanding seniors.

 

At the same time, we’re looking forward to welcoming the next generation of Cowboys. Throughout April, Coe Library hosted New Student Days, where incoming students and their families meet with advisors and register for classes. Even our athletics coaches and Pistol Pete have joined us in the library in to give these students a warm UW welcome!

 

This May, UW Libraries is proud to co-host the inaugural Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit, in partnership with the Wyoming State Library and the Wyoming State Archives. We’re excited to welcome librarians and archivists from across the state to explore the evolving role of AI in libraries and archives. The event will feature a keynote from Dr. Daniel Reed, Presidential Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, who will share his insights on the future of AI in our field. The summit will also highlight Wyoming-based experts discussing current AI practices and applications.

 

In addition to leading conversations about technology, UW Libraries is committed to supporting research and data sharing. Our Digital Initiatives team has launched two innovative, free tools for Wyoming faculty and graduate students:

• Dataverse – A data repository where researchers from UW and Wyoming community colleges can store, publish, and manage their research data.
• Wyoming Research and Data Index (WRDI) – A searchable index of research outputs by UW authors, designed for ease of discoverability, statewide collaboration, and exploration of institutional publishing trends.

 

These tools are key in supporting UW’s new R1 status as a university with very high research activity. We're grateful for the collaboration of the School of Computing, the Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC), and the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) in bringing these resources to life.

UW Libraries’ collections are extensive and spread across multiple locations, and we’re committed to making them as accessible and discoverable as possible. In 2025, we’re launching two exciting initiatives to support this mission.

 

First, as part of our participation in the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), we’re joining a pilot project with the Internet Archive to digitize selected UW journal holdings. This will preserve these materials long-term and make them available online and accessible to all WEST partners through interlibrary loan.

 

Second, we’re kicking off a large-scale RFID tagging project. This effort will tag our entire physical collection—over 2 million items—with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Many of you are familiar with RFID from public libraries and retail stores. This technology will streamline checkouts and returns, improve accuracy in locating materials, and significantly reduce lost or missing items.

 

If you stop by the libraries this spring or summer, don’t be surprised to see RFID teams at work in the stacks. They’ll be hard at work helping us modernize and future-proof access to our collections.

 

See you in the stacks,

Cass Kvenild
Dean of Libraries