Paraprofessional of the Year 2009: Tina Adams

There is no doubt among the staff and managers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, Raleigh, that advanced library technician Tina Adams deserves to be the winner of the LJ Paraprofessional of the Year Award for 2009. “Certainly this library has never seen anyone like her before, not in my nine years on staff,” says her immediate supervisor, Tripp Reade, NCSU media resources librarian, in his nomination letter. The case he and his cohorts made for Adams was so strong, LJ’s editors agreed.

“The most important factor in building a library is the people you hire,” Susan Nutter, LJ’s 2005 Librarian of the Year and NCSU vice provost and director of libraries, reminds us.

“Tina works in Access and Delivery Services (ADS), the department that is the public face of the library.... She has influenced the culture of that department to raise the level of that service, particularly in her assigned area of course reserves,” says Nutter. “I would call her a courageous supervisor. She holds staff to a high standard and has a rare talent for giving honest feedback, while still conveying her respect and appreciation for each individual who reports to her. She faces problems head-on and finds solutions.”

In 2007, ADS merged its circulation and reserves units. “Prior to the merger, each unit had separate workflows, structures, and organizational cultures,” comments ADS head Mary Chimato.

“The successful merger has resulted in improved customer service, faster turnaround time processing reserves, and better documentation of departmental policies and procedures. To say that Tina made the merger a success would be grossly understating the matter.”

Chimato, who joined the staff just as the merger began, was obviously delighted to find a staffer who could help make the transition work so well.

Adams’s personality was a major asset. “Her gregarious nature and strong customer service ethic helped Tina make friends in every library department, and she has put these relationships to good use in an effort to reshape ADS,” states Reade. Adams used cross-training to implement the new workflow, allowing for more flexible allocation of staff.

Adams also has developed a program to provide a reserve copy of every required textbook, some 4500 titles annually at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The project gives students who face financial hardships access to these expensive texts.

Adams and the 15 staff members who report to her handle all of NCSU’s electronic reserves, while the many branch libraries at NCSU manage their own print reserves. The huge operation provides scans of some 55,000 items, using great care to check and abide by copyright requirements.

The digital reserves require constant communication with faculty, and that is easy for Adams. Under her aegis, the communication is steady, the service is prompt, and faculty and students constantly express their gratitude and pleasure via email and notes.

Adams has been nominated by fellow staffers and won “Pride of the Wolfpack” awards in 2007 and 2008 for her exemplary service as an NCSU employee.

Adams has a crucial role in NCSU’s participation in the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a partnership the library entered last year. Materials at NCSU that are in the public domain will be scanned and added to that Internet archive, thus making them freely available to the world.

She was key to the workflow planning for the project, tracking and building liaisons with all the departments needed to make it happen. “The success of the project is dependent on the constant movement of materials to and from the scanning facility, and Tina has carefully and successfully overseen and managed this,” notes Annette Day, associate department head in collection management.

“Adams is sensational—a pioneer—when it comes to crossing the boundary between those who do and do not have the MLS,” declares Reade, especially about Adams’s OCA interactions.

Adams’s supervisory talent and service orientation got her appointed to the Staff Development Committee for the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN). “Her experience in training and developing her own staff, as well as her interest in and awareness of librarywide issues, led to her appointment. As a member of this group, she will contribute at the regional level to programming for the TRLN Staff Enrichment Series, an award-winning staff development program that targets library support staff of the TRLN libraries (Duke University, North Carolina Central University, NCSU, and University of North Carolina [UNC] at Chapel Hill),” says Nutter with pride.

Asked about that relationship between librarians and support staff at NCSU, Adams is surprised. “Honestly, I’m not sure how it has been in the past, but I have never had any problem about that supposed line between librarians and support staff,” she says. “I don’t feel any tensions on that front. I’m not sure if that is really the situation, or it is just a function of my personality, but I don’t see any gap between librarians and support staff, or between we who work in the library and the NCSU faculty.”

Although Adams had no prior library jobs, she has rich experience in direct customer service, working at such establishments as Sir Speedy Printing, as customer service supervisor at Sam’s Club, and as assistant manager at the George Street Tavern in Wilmington, NC, where she even hired the entertainment and tended bar. She was a gallery curator at her alma mater, UNC at Wilmington, where she juried and hung art, created advertising, and supervised volunteer workers for exhibits. As an art educator at the Children’s Museum in Wilmington, she scheduled art projects and taught art classes to students of all ages.

To add to the gratification of service to people, at various times Adams has volunteered to work with such agencies as the Children’s Miracle Network at Duke Children’s Hospital, Carnivore Preservation Trust, American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, Golf Tournament of the Spinal Cord Society, and Angels Among Us at the Duke Brain Tumor Center.

Clearly, her work, volunteer experience, and personality make Adams an extraordinarily talented public service expert and the perfect employee for a busy library.

Adams says Reade is a “spectacular” supervisor and a great mentor to her. “He helped me understand and work with the library side of it all. It was a very busy day when I started. Tripp said, 'I’m gonna teach you to scan, then when we slow down we’ll start your real training.’ It was a great way to start, because I learned every detail of what we do here. It means I never have to ask my staff to do anything I haven’t done,” says Adams. That is part of why she loves her job.

“People who provide great customer service take great pride in it, and they love helping others,” says Adams, summing up. “You get true gratification helping people. We are such a high-volume library at NCSU that we get that gratification and feedback all the time. That makes my days very joyous.”