🎉 University of Idaho Library: 2025-26 Achievements 🎉

What a year! 🙌 Across every unit, department, and team, library faculty and staff teamed up to launch new services, save students real money, make our collections more open and accessible, and meet a few big surprises with creativity and grit. This page is a celebration of that work. ✨

We accomplished a tremendous amount together. Below are just some of the highlights.¹

For the full story, explore our Teams and Units pages, or dig into the KPI dashboards.

🌟 Executive Summary

The University of Idaho Library had a standout 2025-26. We grew our Course Reserves program to its highest use yet, turned the Studio into a campus destination, spent down our entire open-access publishing fund to lift up local scholarship, and made our digital collections dramatically more accessible. When an unexpected wave of community research need arrived, our archivists stepped up and became a trusted statewide resource. Through it all, the library kept doing what it does best: connecting people to the resources, spaces, and expertise that power learning and discovery. 💪

🏆 Major Accomplishments by Impact Area

💸 Student Success & Affordability

• Course Reserves hit record use, reaching 542 students across 130 course sections in spring — the program’s strongest semester yet — with physical reserve circulation climbing to 316 and 4,476 electronic reserve checkouts, putting required materials directly into students’ hands at no cost. 📚 (Course Reserves)
• Loaner laptops expanded from 28 to 80+, and the unit surfaced the full scale of equipment lending: 6,302 checkouts across the year. 💻
• $202,724 in subscription savings identified by the Collections Team through evidence-based, cost-per-use analysis — renewing high-value resources (avg CPU $9.65) while trimming low-value ones (avg CPU $32.65). (Collections)

♿ Accessibility Excellence (a library-wide win!)

• 3,800+ PDFs reprocessed for OCR and ~400 audio transcripts created or rebuilt, bringing the vast majority of digital collections into WCAG 2.1 AA alignment. (Digital Collections)
• In-house remediation tools, scripts, and campus-facing guides built by DSOS so the work can scale and be shared. 🛠️
• High-traffic web pages and public LibGuides rewritten for compliance ahead of the federal deadline — a genuinely cross-team accomplishment no single group can claim alone. 🤝

📚 Research & Scholarship

• VERSO had a huge year, becoming the campus destination for faculty research identity after the university website began pointing to it — with ORCIDs/Google Scholar IDs added to ~50% of researchers and a new Claude Code-based CV parser. (Research Impact)
• Research Output Views grew to ~115,712 in 2025 (up from ~48,888 in 2024). 📈
• Full $25,000 Open Access Publishing Fund spent — supporting 12 first-time and 7 returning applicants. (DSOS)
• A dozen-plus digital scholarship projects published, recovered, or developed, plus the approval of the University of Idaho Press, the Open Invitation podcast, and membership in the Library Publishing Coalition. 🎙️

🗂️ Special Collections & Community Impact

• When the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expanded to all of Idaho, Special Collections became a trusted statewide resource for Idahoans working through the claims process — recognized in both social and traditional media. 🏅
• Patron interactions jumped to 513 in the spring (from 162 in the fall; 675 for the year) as the team rose to meet the moment. (Special Collections)
• 276 finding aids added or updated and several long-backlogged collections processed — shrinking the storage footprint while making Idaho’s history more findable. 📜
• Three new digital collections launched: Political Buttons, Kibbie Dome 50th Anniversary, and Friends of the Clearwater Newsletter. 🔘

🎨 Spaces & Experiential Learning

• The Studio was the breakout star 🌠 — bookings leapt to 493 in spring (from 215 the prior spring) and weekly usage hours more than doubled to 48.4, fueled by a better location, real outreach, and a booming podcasting community. (REL Unit)
• GIS platforms held strong at ~514 unique users/month, with item views reaching ~1.56M in 2025. 🗺️
• Levine Fellows produced storymaps, web apps, and an R Shiny app, presenting their work to the Library Advisory Board. 👩‍💻
• A CDIL Digital Scholarship Camp brought hands-on digital methods to the community. 🏕️

🚀 Operational Excellence Highlights

🔄 Resource Sharing Takes Off

The Discovery & Acquisitions Unit implemented Rapido and watched interlibrary loan borrowing jump 114% and lending rise 45% year over year — faster turnaround and far more materials in patrons’ hands. The unit added 1,200+ new items and completed a major print-journal withdrawal project, sending 1,109 items to 10 WEST partner libraries. 📦

🎓 Instruction at Scale

The Instruction and FYE teams reached thousands of students through ENGL 1101/1102 sessions and Information Landscape Workshops, and brought all public LibGuides into WCAG 2.1 compliance along the way. 📖

🌐 Web Archiving & Preservation

During the university’s website overhaul, the library preserved university web content with Archive-It and built new digital archive drive infrastructure in collaboration across DSOS, RCDS, and Special Collections — protecting the institutional record for the long haul. 🗄️

🤗 People & Culture

• New faculty mentored through the library’s mentorship program. 🌱
• Student employees supported as developing professionals through normalized developmental supervision, a new approved pay-tier proposal, and a smooth student awards process. 🏆
• Cross-team collaboration — from accessibility to web design to the Open Education Portal — was the through-line of the year. 💞

💚 Thank You

None of this happens without the people who show up for our students, faculty, and community every day. Thank you to everyone across the library for a year of creativity, care, and genuine impact. Here’s to an even brighter 2026-27! 🥂