Tribal College Librarians Institute

The groundwork for TCLI was formed in 1989 when Kathy Kaya, a recently retired Montana State University – Bozeman reference librarian, had a conversation with tribal librarians at Salish Kootenai College about the lack of professional development opportunities for them in Montana.

Funding for TCLI is provided by MSU Libraries and supplemented with grants from private and government institutions.

The institute has offered sessions on information literacy, grant writing, collection development, Building Library Policies, digitization, preservation, Web 2.0, government information, database training and a host of other subject areas and topics.

In recent years, there have been sessions on the American Indian Movement, Navajo Code Talkers and Ho-Chunk ethnobotany.

TCLI is primarily held in Bozeman, Montana; however, funding was received from the National Agricultural Library in 2001 and from the National Museum of the American Indian in 2006 to hold the Institute in Washington, D.C. TCLI 2008 was held June 9–13 in Bozeman on the Montana State University campus.