Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College is one of two recipients of this year’s award, with the other being Hanover College. The funding will serve to enhance student success and library services at the colleges’ respective libraries.
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, along with Hanover College, has received a 2025 Library Innovation Grant from the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana. The grant funding will allow each college to enhance the services their libraries provide as a way to boost student success on campus. The PALNI awarded a total of $13,750, with $8,000 going to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, and $5,750 going to Hanover College.
According to an article on Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College’s website, Rusty Tryon, DMin, MLS, who is both the director of the library and an associate professor at SMWC, was quoted as saying of the grant funding, “I am grateful for PALNI’s support and partnership in this innovative work at The Woods. It is reassuring and reinforces the need to explore creative options to make higher education more affordable and more accessible. While removing financial barriers for students is the most important outcome of the project, I am excited to share our experience with others to encourage them to consider new, impactful ways to facilitate student success on their campus.”
SMWC’s project is called “Opening the Woods Core: A Large-Scale OER Adoption Project.” The project will seek to eliminate textbook costs for students for its Woods Core curriculum, which is the school’s general education curriculum. This will significantly assist first year students by reducing the amount of money they will need to spend on course materials for general education courses by instead relying on Open Educational Resources. The project will also assist with finding OERs for other, non-Woods Core curriculum courses, pending student and instructor interest, to further help students reduce their textbook costs.
Hanover College’s “Empower Students by Empowering Faculty” project will see the college adopting a “teach-the-teacher” model so that librarians can help embed literacy instruction into the instructors’ course curriculum. This will come to fruition via piloting a summer workshop that will empower instructors to become literacy advocates within their respective projects.
Kirsten Leonard, who serves as the PALNI Executive Director, said of both projects, “These projects highlight the essential role that libraries and library staff play in driving student success and advancing institutional priorities. Through their ingenuity and willingness to innovate, library professionals are developing the tools, resources, and strategies that directly empower students to thrive. Projects like these are the kind of high-impact investments that pay measurable dividends across entire institutions, and we’re proud to support them.”
For more information about Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, visit the school’s website.