Message from the Dean

October always feels like the busiest fall month. The WSU Libraries are a place of ideas, of collections, and it feels like we are on a positive track. From honoring the legacy of pioneering scholar Gladys Cooper Jennings and welcoming back a distinguished former library employee, Nathan Sowry, to expanding access to scholarly resources, launching new student-centered collaborations, and spotlighting new publications at the WSU Press, we continue to support the university’s land-grant mission through connection, innovation, and service.

Photo courtesy of Erica England

On Oct. 13, WSU Libraries and the WSU Academic Success and Career Center hosted a Résumé Café in the soon-to-open Cougar Commons, our new student academic support space on Terrell Library’s first floor. The event drew 64 students for one-on-one résumé and networking support from 16 representatives of nine companies, including Boeing, Enterprise Mobility, and Marathon Petroleum. Cougar Commons officially opens this spring and will offer drop-in research help, writing consultations, and evening tutoring.

Last Friday, we hosted two powerful programs. The day began at Owen Science and Engineering Library with the dedication of a display honoring food scientist and civil rights advocate Jennings, the first African American woman to earn a master’s degree from Washington State College in 1948. Jennings’ legacy is now permanently commemorated on Owen’s first floor.

Later that afternoon, we enjoyed a talk by Sowry, WSU history graduate and reference archivist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Sowry returned to campus to discuss his new book, Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures. His research recovers the lives of 10 Native American Indian boarding school alums who, despite enduring forced assimilation, became anthropologists and cultural advocates.

I am excited to share that the WSU Libraries recently entered an agreement with ProQuest to add over 530,000 e-books to our collections—bringing our total to more than 810,000 titles on the ProQuest Ebook Central platform. These e-books support unlimited simultaneous users and are ideal for course integration. They are now discoverable in Search It, and the platform also features a beta version of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Research Assistant. I still love a printed book and generally that’s my format of choice, but the flexibility of e-books for research is undeniable. The ability to access them at any hour, text mining, and citation support make them popular for our researchers. Indeed, since January, the WSU community has downloaded more than 219,000 e-books.

Looking ahead, we are preparing trials for three AI-powered scholarly research tools: Scite, Undermind, and Consensus. These platforms help researchers analyze citation context, conduct deep literature searches, and synthesize findings across scientific papers. Let me know if you are interested in helping us evaluate these tools.

We also invite you to join us for these upcoming events:

  • Fallen Cougars Project panel: Set for 2 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, in Terrell Library Atrium, the panel will highlight several of the 250 Washington State College students who perished during World War II. Speakers are me, Raymond Sun, history associate professor and director of the Fallen Cougars Project, and Kyley Canion-Brewer, a history doctoral candidate.
  • First Palouse GIS Day: Planned for Wednesday, Nov. 19, the hybrid event is hosted jointly by WSU Libraries and University of Idaho Library and will be held in the UI Student Union Building and over Zoom. Visit this website to register. GIS Day will feature presentations, networking, and demonstrations of geospatial technologies.

WSU Press has released a powerful new book, Listening to the Birds: A Nez Perce Woman’s Journey of Self-Discovery and Healing by Roberta Tawlikitsanmay’ (Woman of the Forest) Paul, an enrolled member of the Nez Perce Tribe. Paul recounts her family’s intergenerational trauma through ancestral connection and storytelling. Her book traces five generations of their history—from a Nez Perce chief who met explorers Lewis and Clark, to a warrior in the Nez Perce War of 1877, to survivors of government boarding schools, and finally to a young Irish American woman who defied convention to marry into the tribe.

Paul teaches that “if you don’t know the story, you can’t heal,” and her memoir offers both a personal and cultural roadmap for reconciliation and resilience. I had the good fortune to partner with Paul, with help from Browse writer and editor Nella Letizia and graphic designer Amy Grey, on her 2019 exhibit in Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, “Grandfather’s Trunk: Spirit of Survival,” which included her family’s stories and preserved artifacts from their boarding school experiences.

It’s a privilege to serve as dean of the WSU Libraries. If you’d like to stop by my office (Holland 221) for coffee and a chat, please let me know. In the spirit of being open to new technologies, I used Copilot to generate an initial draft of this column and then rewrote it.

With warm regards,

Trevor