Academic Librarians Stand Out Among LJ's Movers & Shakers

Community Builders
Casey Long, business liaison librarian, Georgia State University, Atlanta, is committed to improving undergraduate information literacy. Her efforts have paid off, according to nominator Sarah Steiner, learning commons librarian at Georgia State: "Long now reaches almost 100 percent of students either virtually or physically." Long is particularly focused on developing faculty relationships and making sure the training is designed to engage distracted students.

Jenica P. Rogers-Urbanek, collection development coordinator and technical services team leader; senior assistant librarian, SUNY-Potsdam, has been "an unofficial leader" of the SUNY Cooperative Collection Development plan. Her goals: reduce duplication in orders, negotiate acquisitions discounts and cross-campus site licenses, and subscribe to WorldCat Collection Analysis.

Activist
Carlene Engstrom is director, D'Arcy McNickle Library, Salish Kootenai College, Pablo, MT, which serves multiple roles: as an academic library, tribal library, and a public library for the residents of the Flathead Reservation. She is committed to integrating tribal libraries into the "larger library world." In addition to digitizing the Char-Koosta newspaper archives, she has helped migrate her library's holdings into the University of Montana Libraries shared catalog, the National Library of Medicine's Lonesome Doc/DocLine document-sharing program, and both the Federal Depository and the Montana State Depository library programs.

Tech Evangelist
Lauren Pressley, instructional design librarian, Wake Forest University Library, Winston-Salem, NC, is dedicated to understanding user expectations so library services can become more relevant. She's worked with the web librarian to develop a searchable tool kit, a collection of short, modular video tutorials that answers recurring skill-based questions. The tutorials make it possible for in-library instruction sessions to focus on higher-level critical thinking.

Innovator
Chad Boeninger, reference and technology coordinator, Ohio University, Athens, is an early and vociferous advocate of Library 2.0 technologies, beginning with his 2005 creation of the Ohio University BizWiki, one of the first wiki-based subject guides. He focuses on practical applications, most recently concentrating on technologies to make librarians mobile. An example: the capability to forward AIM messages to a cell phone and to text back quick answers.

Advocate
Pam Sessoms, electronic reference services librarian, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Libraries, has channeled her frustration over the lack of coordination among reference software tools to come up with a solution. She and her husband Eric, a software developer, developed LibraryH3lp. It is "the only fully integrated chat/IM reference platform that lets more than one librarian at a time answer questions across a wide variety of protocols and transfer these chats to other librarians on the system," says Sessoms. The system is available to all libraries at a low cost.