Makerspaces have become increasingly popular additions to libraries, allowing visitors to learn and apply hands-on creative skills in tandem with traditional scholarship. Several CSU campus libraries have developed maker spaces, adopting maker culture, which values creation as an alternative to consumption. Both makerspaces and libraries provide informal learning opportunities, so it’s not surprising that libraries are serving as facilitators and incubators for the accessible, collaborative culture that makerspaces strive to create, according to Isis Leininger, Coordinator at Oviatt Library’s Creative Media Studio, CSUN.

In October Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill 798, the College Textbook Affordability Act of 2015, which establishes a $3 million grant fund to be awarded to CSU and community college campuses that demonstrate their commitment to increasing adoption of high-quality, no-cost and low-cost course materials.

For the past few months, staff at San Jose State’s King Library, CSU Northridge’s Oviatt Library and Fresno State’s Madden Library have been working collaboratively as “vanguard” campuses to create and share test instances of Ex Libris Alma. The CSU Chancellor’s Office is leading all 23 California State University libraries in implementing Alma as a shared Unified Library Management System (ULMS) platform. Testing the platform on a smaller batch of data is an important stepping-stone towards achieving that goal.

Staff at Fresno State’s Madden Library recently partnered with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Kennedy Library for a pilot aerial imagery digitization project to strengthen maps and aerial imagery collections, discoverability, and access across CSU campuses.