The Great Falls Public Library and the Montana Library Association have established a new annual award—the Alma Smith Jacobs Diversity Equity and Inclusion Award—to honor library efforts in the area of equity, diversity and inclusion.
Jacobs was a Montana native and worked as head librarian of the Great Falls Public Library for more than two decades before becoming Montana’s State Librarian in 1973—both historic firsts, as she was the first Black female to serve in either position.
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“A passionate advocate for libraries, education, community and social justice, it is in this spirit that the Alma Smith Jacobs Diversity Equity and Inclusion Award recognizes those who follow Alma’s inspirational lead. Each year, this award will recognize a library, an individual, or a group whose efforts have produced outstanding positive effects in improving equity, diversity and inclusion in library services for Montana,” according to a library release.
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Nominations may be made by any library board, individual library, librarian, trustee, MLA member or the Montana State Library Commission. The award shall be based upon, but not limited to, activities or accomplishments such as the following:
- Actions that have promoted a Library environment that is welcoming, supportive and nurturing of cultural, ethnic, racial, class, gender, sexual orientation, language and other human differences.
- Actions and dialogue that highlight unity and strength in diversity.
- Creation and development of programs and services for the community that celebrate diversity, foster empowerment and improve access to quality library services for the disadvantaged and underserved groups.
- Actions that have contributed to raising awareness and consciousness about diversity and inclusion in the context of Library services and the wider Montana Library community.
Award winners will be chosen from nominations submitted to the Montana Library Association Awards Committee.
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The first award winner will be announced at the Montana Library Association annual conference to be held Aug. 3-6 in Missoula.
The Great Falls Public Library also has several ongoing projects.
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On March 1, the City Commission awarded a contract to VisionNet for the installation of an internet connection. The contract is a one time $32,500 construction fee with $26,000 being paid through the federal eRate and $6,500 by the library, as well as a $507 monthly fee, most of which is funded federally and $101.40 paid by the library.
The old Bookmobile was sold at public auction for $13,214.50 and the library plans on using a portion of those funds to trim the library’s trees and improve the landscaping.
In January, the commission approved a $68,000 contract to MMW Architects for the library master plan. The project is being funded by the library foundation.
Susie McIntyre, library director, had an initial meeting with the company about the master plan and staff is currently gathering data and documents for the team. The process will include community input.
Library staff and volunteers are also continuing on the RFID project. There are more than 650 selections of materials on the first and second floors. As of late February, they’d tagged about 75 percent of those items and all of the non-fiction items.
About 25 percent of materials have been encoded and they’re on track to have all items tagged and encoded by the week of March 28 when the new gate, self-checks and software will be installed, McIntyre told the board.
