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The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced on September 8 that Nancy Pearl, a renowned librarian and former executive director of the Washington Center for the Book at Seattle Public Library, is the 2021 recipient of its Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

The Romance Writers of America (RWA) has again found itself embroiled in controversy. This time, the association gave one of its new Vivian awards to At Love’s Command by Karen Witemeyer, a historical romance that most observers saw as glorifying the genocide of Lakota people at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.

The creative problem solving that allowed Anaheim Public Library to weather the pandemic while meeting pre-pandemic goals have earned it the 2021 Gale/LJ Library of the Year award.

I never imagined that we would find ourselves honoring a second class of Movers & Shakers at a distance owing to the pandemic—albeit now with an end, perhaps, in sight.

While teaching a challenging concept to middle schoolers, Ozy Aloziem told a student, “Practice makes perfect.” The student responded, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes progress”—a light bulb moment for Aloziem that would guide and shape her approach to her work. She believes that we must keep working, she says, and if we fail, learn and try again.

Whether he’s helping community members impacted by wildfires or creating a storywalk and drive-thru storytime during quarantine, County Librarian Todd Deck takes his cues from Tehama County Library patrons’ needs. “Connecting with the community is a foundational tool in being a catalyst for positive change,” says Deck.

When Google’s sister company Wing began using drones in 2019, Kelly Passek’s family was an early adopter. Passek realized the technology could help her meet library goals: She wanted to increase book checkouts and prevent summer slide.

Millie Plotkin’s recovery from an eating disorder began during library school, when she received treatment. Several years later, she heard someone use the phrase “eating disorders information clearinghouse” at a conference. “That planted the seed of an idea that I could combine these two important parts of my life,” says Plotkin. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck last spring, Nini Beegan, organizational learning and innovation coordinator for Maryland State Library (MSL), quickly realized how Zoom could help libraries during quarantine. “I noticed how much our libraries were struggling with communication—amongst staff, with customers, and amongst libraries,” Beegan said. “Maryland has a history of libraries working very closely together, and we are used to communicating easily.”

Bridget B. Striker was en route to her own wedding when she told her groom that her favorite part of her career as an archaeologist and mapping specialist was researching at libraries. It brought to mind the Purpose Diagram, which shows that purpose exists where one’s passion, profession, vocation, and mission intersect. She decided in that moment to pursue her MLS. The rest, she says, is local history.

Emma Molls works with researchers who are interested in shaking things up in publishing—and so is she. As Publishing Services Librarian for the University of Minnesota (UMN) Libraries, Molls leads the development of her department’s core principles. These statements outline the program’s values to guide Publishing Services through changes and shifts in open access (OA) and scholarly publishing.

Not only does Makiba Foster run her own library’s African American Research Library and Cultural Center, she is also a key convener of such centers across the country. She leads Archiving the Black Web, a project that brings together Black collecting institutions, from public libraries to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to map out the future of digitally curating the Black experience. This first-of-its-kind initiative launched during the pandemic—funded by a $150,000 National Leadership Grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program—focuses on how to best archive the plethora of digitally born Black culture and content.

“I came to librarianship with a problem,” says Shaneé Yvette Murrain, director of community engagement at Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). As both an undergraduate at the HBCU Bethune-Cookman University and a master’s student in divinity at Drew University, she couldn’t find primary sources documenting historic Black churches—traditions, women’s leadership, memberships—in digital collections. In her final year, the university’s theological librarian introduced her to the field.

Inspired to pursue librarianship by the range of services provided at her local public library, Zeineb Yousif has worked tirelessly to promote digital access to her university’s research and collections. “I loved the idea of having a job where I could help lots of different people while getting to regularly try doing something new,” she says.

A stack of bundled newspapers from a defunct bookstore in Cairo. Dailies from Republican-era China. Imperial Russian broadsheets dating as far back as 1782. More than 1,000 independent and revolutionary newspapers from 19th-century Mexico. These are a few of the multilingual, globe-spanning media resources that Bryan Benilous has digitized through the East View Global Press Archive.

Four days after her school closed due to COVID-19, Amanda Jones, Teacher-Librarian at Live Oak Middle Library in Watson, LA, launched her first virtual trip for students and their families. To date, she’s completed 50 such trips, with topics ranging from the Renaissance and the Mars Perseverance Rover to Uganda and Nepal.

Whether he’s tossing books at pep rallies, writing grants, developing community partnerships, or convening a student roundtable to improve the school, Dustin Hensley is driven to serve students.

When students came to the library looking for their course textbooks because they couldn’t afford to buy them, Capital Community College’s Director of Library Services Eileen Rhodes started promoting Open Educational Resources (OER). “This became a passion of mine, as I saw…the relief on students’ faces when I informed them that their book was available online for free,” she says.

After the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020, Christopher Stewart, library media specialist at Bell High School, part of the District of Columbia Public Schools, knew his students wanted to protest peacefully and was determined to help. Armed with books, water, snacks, milk (in case students were teargassed), and hand sanitizer, Stewart joined them in protests.

For the past five years, Heather De Forest has worked to expand the Community Scholars Program, which provides free access to scholarly publications to staff members at nonprofits and charities throughout British Columbia.

When the pandemic began, Marzena Ermler knew job seekers would need help beyond the résumé critiques and mock interviews that New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Career Services team previously offered. “I began brainstorming for a new pandemic-friendly job search service,” she says. Ermler launched what she calls resilience coaching, helping job seekers manage their stress and mental health. Volunteers have provided over 2,500 hours of coaching, she says. 

In summer 2017, Jennifer Sturge took part in the Lilead Fellowship Summer Institute. Participants were challenged to find their why—their core mission as a school librarian. When she returned to her district, she surveyed her colleagues about their whys. One shared realization was the need for diversified collections that reflect the student population. “I want them to see themselves in our collection,” she says.

David Kelsey spent most of his life volunteering at senior facilities, so his outreach programs at St. Charles Public Library are a natural extension. “I wanted to be a minister growing up,” he says, but chose the “outreach ministry” of librarianship instead.

Southern California is home to the largest Farsi-speaking community in the diaspora. In his three years and counting at the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), M. Ramin Naderi, acting senior librarian at the Venice–Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch, has become a driving force behind much of LAPL’s service to that population of approximately 700,000 people.

Amy DelPo saw firsthand how ageism impacted her parents, especially as each was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Witnessing how the world treats older adults, particularly those with dementia, motivated her to create Older Adult Services at the Denver Public Library (DPL), one of the few libraries with an administrator devoted solely to aging adults.

As a bilingual Family Literacy Coordinator at Nashville Public Library (NPL), Klem-Marí Cajigas believes it isn’t enough to offer Spanish-language content and programs. She scrutinizes books to make sure that translations are of the same caliber as the English versions. In her work delivering literacy workshops to families in Spanish for a grant-funded project between NPL and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Cajigas reinterpreted the entire curriculum so that it was culturally relevant to Nashville’s Spanish-speaking population; the project reached nearly 600 families over eight years.

When the pandemic made it impossible for families to attend school, meet with in-person tutors, or take advantage of other educational enrichment opportunities, Hayward Public Library’s (HPL) Education Services Manager Lindsey Vien reached out to her community partners for solutions.

When Allison Waukau originated the Native American liaison position at Hennepin County Library in June 2018, the role was to be grant-funded for 18 months. It has just been made permanent, thanks largely to her ongoing initiatives supporting the library’s Native community.

While the past year has been a severely challenging time for libraries to provide basic services, let alone examine and revamp them through a racial equity lens, a trio of Madison Public Library (MPL) employees were determined to do just that. Dominic Davis, Jody Mohrbacher, and Yesianne Ramírez-Madera, coleaders of MPL’s Racial Equity Change Team (RECT), kicked their efforts into high gear following the library’s closure in March 2020—and succeeded on many fronts.

As Madison Public Library (MPL) director of public services, Krissy Wick not only transitioned traditional librarian roles to community engagement librarian positions, but instituted robust partnerships with the Madison community. Wick collaborated with the Madison Metropolitan School District and many others to develop the Read Up summer children’s program. More than 75 percent of participating kids maintained or increased their reading levels in the first two years.

When Alison Williams began as Copper Queen Library’s (CQL) program coordinator five years ago, budget cuts only allowed for a part-time position. In her interview, she made it clear that she wanted to increase staff hours, the budget, and community participation, which was in steep decline. Thanks to her work, the role is now full-time, two new positions have been added, and community engagement is on the rebound. She’s also written and been awarded more than $155,000 in grants for new programs and collections.

As libraries began closing their buildings in March 2020, Callan Bignoli noticed a disconnect between the message being sent by administrators—that libraries should continue to demonstrate value and resilience in the face of looming budget cuts—and what she was hearing from workers, that they felt unsafe being asked to continue working, even behind the scenes or providing curbside pickup; afraid for their jobs if they refused (or even if they didn’t); and dismissed by those telling them to step up.

After Shannon Jones landed a library job at Eastern Virginia Medical School, her interest in medical librarianship was ignited when she watched the librarians interact with physician teams to help with patient care and clinical work. She had not even known such a position existed, and she saw the power of the work to help both medical professionals and patients.

Currently SFPL’s African American Center manager—her “dream job”—Shawna Sherman works to improve the library’s support for Black youth and families. She’s partnered with San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) African American Parent Advisory Council and Black Student Union, 100% College Prep Institute, and the San Francisco Alliance of Black Educators, attending their meetings to share what’s going on at the African American Center and connect with Black families in the district.

As a PhD student in library and information science in the U.S., Claudia Șerbănuță aimed to apply her learning to the libraries of Romania, her home country. She wrote her thesis on what happened to Romanian libraries under communist rule in the 1970s and ’80s, and worked with Susan Schnuer on a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation training program for 12 Romanian public librarians. Șerbănuță not only facilitated language translation but contextualized the learning for the visiting librarians, some of whom went on to take leadership roles in Romanian librarianship.

From her start in publishing to her current work as a librarian at Simmons University, Stacy Collins has always called for structural change. In her own words, she aims not only to educate others about systems of oppression but also to disrupt those interrelated systems through her work and scholarship.

When she served as field manager for OCLC’s Geek the Library community awareness campaign, Jennifer Pearson traveled to libraries across the country. She realized that rural libraries were doing amazing work in their communities, and that led her to take a directorship in a small town, a move that also let her return to the South.

During a tumultuous year of COVID-19 and demonstrations against police violence toward Black people, Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL) Adult and Community Engagement Coordinator Brenda Johnson-Perkins found the opportunity to put into action her belief that “anyone can bring their whole heart into librarianship to make opportunity and visibility accessible for others.”

The federal E-Rate program provides vital discounts that make it possible for many U.S. schools and public libraries to afford broadband services and equipment. But the application process can be challenging. As manager of E-Rate Services for the Arkansas State Library, Amber Gregory has helped libraries throughout the state navigate the complex process, securing millions of dollars in discounts during the past 10 years.

“If you want to see change, find a way to be a part of it,” says Christina Fuller-Gregory. She honed her knowledge of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) best practices as part of the 2017 ALA Emerging Leaders cohort’s Advancing Diversity in Public Libraries project, and at Spartanburg County Public Library (SCPL), SC, developed the SCPL EDI Lexicon, a glossary that defines common social justice terminology for library workers.

Emily Dowie, who started working in libraries as a 17-year-old page, created and leads the NYLA Roundtable Coalition for Library Workers of Color. Points of action for the organization include library sponsorship of support staff attending library school, library staff workshops around undoing racism, and the formation of a mentorship program.

Christina Jupp Grove has fond childhood library memories, but one bad experience gave her insight that influenced her future. During college, she offered to work off library fines. Library staff rejected that and suggested she pay by credit card. “It made me super cognizant of the default middle-class expectations of public libraries and the barriers that exist for accessing library services for a lot of people,” she said.

In her 12th year at Microsoft, Carmi Parker wondered, “If I were independently wealthy, what would I do?” The answer surprised her: She’d be a librarian. In 2016, she became an online experience coordinator for Whatcom County Library System, launching a career in which her two loves, books and tech, merged to meet a growing need.

Nichelle Hayes has two major passions: her work as a genealogist and the library. She’s married the two, coupling her love of family history with the research skills of librarianship. She is a genealogist with a focus on African ancestry and a special collections librarian with a focus on the African diaspora.

As a middle school librarian at an independent school, Maegen Rose believes that libraries have a responsibility to shape the growth of their students through developing reading habits reflective of the larger world and deepening critical thinking skills. In a recent article, she wrote that libraries have a responsibility, along with schools, to engage in equity, diversity, and inclusion work. She helps the profession meet that challenge through her advocacy efforts.

Arlene Laverde's persistence kicked into overdrive in May 2020 when Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), announced that librarians would be excluded from receiving compensation for summer school. Laverde immediately launched an email and social media campaign asserting the role of librarians as teachers, their importance in the lives of students, and their support of fellow educators.

Librarians Elaine R. Hicks, Stacy Brody, and Sara Loree have been named LJ's 2021 Librarians of the Year for their work with the Librarian Reserve Corps, helping the World Health Organization manage the flood of COVID-19 information.

The 71st National Book Award ceremony, held on November 18 and hosted by Jason Reynolds, was completely virtual. And rather than holding court at Cipriani, National Book Foundation Board Chair David Steinberger and Executive Director Lisa Lucas broadcast from elegant—and appropriate—locations at their respective home bases: Steinberger from the Trustees’ Room at the New York Public Library and Lucas from the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library.

Going virtual in a pandemic year, the National Book Awards reveals that writing matters more than ever. 

Rhode Island's Cranston Public Library, promoting equity and cohesion in a rapidly changing city through its deep involvement in civic life, wins the 2020 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize, developed in partnership with the Gerald M. Kline Family Foundation.

The Central Arkansas Library System, Georgia's Gwinnett County Library System, and South Carolina's Union County Library System demonstrate the focus on equity, social justice, and the health of their communities that has earned them Honorable Mention for the 2020  Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.

The National Book Foundation announces 25 finalists for its 71st book awards that reflect a society at the crossroads. 

The Georgia Public Library Service helps states tell their stories of impact with targeted tools and training, plus a dash of cash—winning it LJ's 2020 Marketer of the Year Award.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Broward County Library, FL, to close its branches to the public, it immediately surveyed patron needs and created a targeted, data-driven marketing campaign to inform customers about electronic resources, online programs, and other content the library was offering. Los Angeles Public Library created new cardholders with its Art Card, designed by Gajin Fujita, an established graffiti artist. These very different campaigns, aimed directly at patron needs and preferences, earned the two libraries Honorable Mention for LJ's 2020 Marketer of the Year Award.

Library Journal apologizes for the pain we caused and failed to address in announcing the Library of the Year. While we stand by the award, we commit to taking the following action steps.

When we announced The Seattle Public Library (SPL) as the 2020 Gale/LJ Library of the Year yesterday, many librarians protested our celebrating a library that had allowed the Women’s Liberation Front, an anti-trans group, to rent a meeting room for an event in February. We hear the anger and disappointment and take these concerns seriously. We understand why SPL’s board of trustees made the decision it did, but we wish that the library had not allowed that event to go forward. Nonetheless, Library Journal stands by the award, and we want to explain why.

The Seattle Public Library has turned its attention outward, actively listening to community needs and transforming its work to make equity a top priority, earning it the 2020 Gale/LJ Library of the Year award.

As a homeschooled kid in Gurnee, IL, Eddie Kristan found his lifeline at the Warren-Newport Public Library (WNPL). "The library provided me with books and a safe place to read and watch media," he says, recalling how he read all seven banned-at-home Harry Potter books there. But even more importantly, the library gave him the human contact he craved.

Thanks to Stephanie Katz, what started as a zero-dollar budget proposal is now an international arts magazine with 20 online issues—including annual teen issues—and a print anthology. Katz, assistant supervisor of technical services at Manatee County Public Library System (MCPLS), founded 805 Lit + Art, or simply 805, in 2015 and has since made a name for herself as a grassroots library-based publisher. 805 has published 188 writers and 135 artists from Florida and beyond, about ten percent of whom are international.

Glenna Godinsky’s mother spent the last four years of her life living with Godinsky, her husband, and their three kids after she developed Lewy Body dementia. Says Godinsky, "we learned by doing, and that skill set has helped me, daily, in my role at the library."

When Pang Yang realized there were not enough children’s books written in Karen in the Saint Paul Public Library (SPPL), she partnered with community members to publish two bilingual picture books for the city’s growing Burmese refugee community. More than 5,000 copies were distributed throughout the city and to some schools.

In 2019 Lesley Mason, then library director at Caldwell County Public Library, NC, wanted a Black History Month program that would resonate with the county’s largely white rural farming community. Post-recession, many families had turned to gardening, so she reached out to the local chapter of the NAACP and the State Extension’s Master Gardeners to bring in Rev. Richard Joyner, whose community garden at the Conetoe Family Life Center, NC, helped transform his town. The library also hosted an exhibit of photography by John Francis Ficara, titled Distant Echoes—Black Farmers in America, from the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, MD. More than 50 people attended Joyner’s talk and another 500 viewed him on a Facebook live stream. Circulation jumped up by 3,000 items that month, Mason says.

The 2020 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on YouTube on Monday, May 4, by Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy.  Here, this year’s poetry winner talks about reading what’s on the page and a love for verse that started in the library.

Nearly half of Los Angeles’s four million people are Latinx, from more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries. As multilingual collections manager of Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), Anna Avalos selects Spanish-language materials for all 73 branches, as well as offering collection assessments and recommendations to branches that don’t have Spanish-speaking staff. In the nearly three years she’s been in the position, she’s quadrupled the Spanish collection. She also acquires Armenian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, and Thai content.

Library Journal is rolling out the 2020 class of Movers & Shakers! You can find them all here, as well as past Movers by category, year, and location.

It is my great pleasure to congratulate and welcome the 2020 Movers & Shakers. They join a distinguished group that is now nearly 1,000 strong. Reading any of these profiles will surely bring a little light into our COVID-19–quarantined days.

Matthew Bollerman is not only a tenacious steward of his own library but of libraries everywhere. As director of Westhampton Free Library, NY, during construction of its LEED Gold facility, Bollerman saw how a building project could impact the surrounding environment. When he and Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Mid-Hudson Library System executive director (and LJ columnist and 2010 Mover & Shaker) attended the 2013 U.S. Green Building Council conference, both wondered why libraries weren’t stepping up their sustainability game.

In 2018, when Jessica Ralli, coordinator of early literacy programs for Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), learned about the federal family separation policies at the southwest border, she reached out to the legal organizations representing separated and unaccompanied kids. Some were as young as three and "had to endure long wait times in difficult court proceedings, often resulting in stress and trauma," she says.

When disability and accessibility advocate JJ Pionke arrived at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014, he found the literal environment unwelcoming: he not only had difficulty finding a bathroom in the library building to accommodate a person of his size, but also encountered poor wayfinding and signage, a ramp without a handrail, etc.

In 2013, as the Affordable Care Act was being implemented, the Obama administration asked librarians across the United States to help patrons find health insurance through the healthcare marketplace. Aileen Luppert, managing librarian of Spokane County Library District (SCLD), "was one of the first to answer the call," says colleague Amber Williams (a 2019 Mover & Shaker), managing librarian of strategic initiatives.

For Nancy Liliana Godoy, archives that engage equitably with people and organizations in traditionally marginalized communities can aid in the building of collective memory, transform lives, and heal historical erasure and trauma. Godoy is the steward for the largest Chicano/a research collection and the largest LGBT collection in Arizona. She co-established the Arizona LGBT History Project to preserve local history and make archival material accessible to future generations, including working with a team to digitize parts of the Bj Bud Memorial Archives, Arizona’s largest LGBTQ collection.

As a single mom juggling three part-time jobs from 2010–14 while working on an undergraduate degree, Shauna Edson also faced the barriers created by the lack of internet in her apartment. "To turn in assignments, access readings, and do everything else students need to do online, I had to go to a public computer lab," Edson says.

"I like to introduce myself by telling others that I teach in the largest classroom in the school: the library!" says Tamara Cox. In 2010, as Cox completed her library degree and moved from the classroom to a school library, South Carolina was making drastic cuts to school funding. The resulting loss of library staff and gutted library budgets sparked Cox to get involved as the legislative committee chair of the South Carolina Association for School Librarians (SCASL). Now there is "no greater advocate for public education and school libraries" than Cox, says nominator Jane Harrison, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in Cox’s school district, Anderson One.

Maisam Nouh has done a bit of everything for the Ferguson Library, in Stamford, CT. In high school, shortly after her family emigrated to Connecticut, she began volunteering for the library’s summer reading program. Later, she took a part-time job as a page. Then came a stint at the circulation desk, an internship, and ongoing side gigs. Now, as IT supervisor, Nouh oversees all aspects of Ferguson’s tech infrastructure, including its Sierra library services platform.

"I was surrounded by data, the product of a decade of digitization" at Michigan State University, says Thomas Padilla, who was digital scholarship librarian there from 2014–16. He began to wonder how cultural heritage institutions could start to ethically engage with the data they generate and use it to begin to think about their collections as data. 

Michael Hibben led the technology initiative that brought Pepper, a humanoid robot, to Roanoke County, making Roanoke County Public Library (RCPL) the first public library in the United States to recruit an AI robot. He worked with RobotLAB to code Pepper for library use and also added Vector, a smaller robot produced by Anki, to the RCPL team.

While earning her PhD in English, Emily Sherwood found herself drawn to "collaborative environments and interdisciplinary projects [rather than] to the solitary and focused scholarship more common in literary studies." This interest led to her current position at the Digital Scholarship Lab, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester (UR).

Social science research involves a lot of non-numerical data, including interviews, images, videos, and speech transcripts. But once results are published, these are often discarded. Nic Weber is working to change that by making such datasets easier to store, discover, and access.

Roslyn Dean’s team at Broward County Library (BCL) needed an innovative way to bridge the language barrier between staff and the vast number of non-English- and limited English-speaking customers BCL serves, so she turned to a popular device, Amazon’s Echo Dot. Utilizing voice assistance apps and devices, BCL installed Echo Dots at service points in each of its 36 branches, enabling a quick, easy, and cost-effective option to assist staff with translation. 

When the University of Oklahoma (OU) welcomed a new data-driven president to campus, interim Dean of Libraries Carl Grant knew "we were going to need metrics that showed strong community engagement" for the library’s exhibit services. Tim Smith, OU’s head of web services and artificial intelligence, was just the curious expert to rethink the library’s exhibit engagement metrics.

When María Fernanda Pardo arrived in the United States from Colombia with a business degree more than 33 years ago, she quickly realized that studying English did not offer enough fluency to function, much less reach her full potential. A supportive family helped her overcome the challenge.

"For many of our students, the library is the only place on campus they feel truly free," says teacher librarian Julia Torres. Close to 2,000 students attend the five middle and high schools on the Montbello Campus in northeast Denver, where an unstaffed, frequently shuttered school library suffered eight years of neglect. In its place now is a vibrant, student-focused media center, thanks to Torres. 

Young people too often grow up without a sense of what’s possible. As a teen and technology librarian for the Dakota County Library in Minnesota, Tom Jorgenson is making sure that doesn’t happen.

When Kristin Grabarek noticed that traditional story time activities at her branch of Denver Public Library  weren’t drawing the community’s many immigrant families, she created a new learning experience that didn’t require English language skills to participate. These half-hour Saturday morning sessions (called Little University) are built around play and exploration, and each also targets a social-emotional skill. An add-on, Little University for Grown-Ups, is aimed at caregivers.

Maggie Murphy is known for her expansive collaborative creativity when it comes to transforming information literacy instruction at the University of North Carolina Greensboro libraries and across the country. Says Murphy, "I really want students in all disciplines to think about art and visual media as sources of information alongside textual information sources," she says.

Both a librarian and a lawyer, Will Cross says he "work[s] at the intersection of copyright education and open culture" as director of copyright and digital scholarship at North Carolina State University (NCSU). His leadership at NCSU and across the region is building support and a model for adoption of open educational resources (OER), transforming pedagogy, and impacting scholarly communications, says nominator Greg Raschke, senior vice provost and director of libraries at NCSU.

After the 2016 presidential election, Haley Samuelson and Nate Gass found themselves fielding questions from worried patrons at the Cook Memorial Public Library District, IL, wondering if the stories they were hearing on the news and reading on social media were true. "We became on-the-fly political fact-checkers," says Gass.

It is important to take a moment, even in the midst of crisis, to honor this year’s Movers & Shakers. It is a waypost, a signifier of normalcy in a year from which so many landmarks are missing. But it’s also a reminder that we still need people moving us forward and shaking up our thinking—perhaps never more so than when we feel shaken by forces outside our control.

When South Carolina State Library created a new position to focus solely on diversity and inclusion, agency leaders actively recruited J. Caroline Smith, who had learned Spanish using Mango Languages so she could develop partnerships with community members and groups to better serve Spanish speakers in Charleston County, SC.

Her job description involves curating and preserving African American history in the Austin area, but kYmberly Keeton goes well beyond that. She leads genealogy workshops to help African Americans trace their roots and organizes public forums that bring African American history to life for area residents and connect them with a sense of identity.

As a former middle school English and social studies teacher in Wilmington, NC, Christy James learned just what a powerful impact a school librarian could have from her influential colleague Jennifer LaGarde, aka Library Girl (a 2012 Mover & Shaker). "After working with her, who wouldn’t want to be a librarian?" James says.

Since he was young, reading and food have been Ron Block’s passions. "Nothing brings people together like food," Block says.

Brian Mortimore has always been drawn to human resources (HR)—matching the right employee to the right job and ensuring they’re taken care of once they sign on. He worked in medicine and higher ed before bringing his high ideals to Kent District Library (KDL) in 2003.

In 2016, Nashville Maplewood High School English teacher Jarred Amato read an article with his class about book deserts, neighborhoods with limited access to books. “We were outraged,” he says. “We thought: ‘What can we do together to solve this problem?’”

As digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University Libraries and codirector of its collaborative digital space Studio@Butler, Alex Gil works with faculty, students, and colleagues to create digital interpretations of their work, including interactive maps, visualizations, editions, and online exhibitions.

As an attorney for six years, Leslie Cartier found herself seeking out opportunities to teach and realized that education—specifically, school librarianship—was her true calling.

In five years as a school librarian, Samuel Northern has worked to give meaningful experiences to students, as well as to seize learning opportunities himself. As a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow for Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic, he participated in a 14-day voyage to Antarctica. He gained real-world research experience as Teacher at Sea for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And in 2018, he earned a Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching grant to study project-based learning in Finland.