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Taking strategic advantage of an eclectic community mix to deliver innovative library service where it’s most needed helped the Copper Queen Library in Bisbee, AZ, win LJ’s 2019 Best Small Library in America, sponsored by Baker & Taylor.
Honey Grove Library & Learning Center, TX, is one of the two finalists for LJ's Best Small Library in America. The library has been named a finalist before, in 2014; a lot has changed since then.
Whitehall Public Library is one of the two finalists for LJ's Best Small Library in America. When social service agencies began to resettle refugees in Whitehall, in the Pittsburgh, PA, suburbs, the library started building bridges between refugees and long-term residents.
It takes two hours by boat to get to Rotuma, an isolated island at the very tip of Fiji, the South Pacific island nation. Opeta Alefaio and his team from Fiji’s National Archives (NAF) made the trip during a government outreach event in 2015 to bring a bevy of archival material, including land and genealogical records, photos, and historical audiovisual footage. This was the first time the islanders had seen these records, says Alefaio, and they formed a huge line outside the tent housing the documents.
Days after Amber Alexander became library director at Presque Isle District Library (PIDL), she was given a highly unusual task for a library: stewardship of the cherished 1937 Rogers City Theater, donated by a community member to prevent its closing. Undaunted, Alexander jumped in, hired a manager for the 280-seat venue, navigated tax laws, and facilitated a diversity of programs, from first-run films, speakers on local history, and authors’ presentations to arts and cultural programming through the Michigan Arts and Humanities Touring Directory.
Skye Corey was still in library school in 2014 when she attended an Ontario Library Association Conference and saw a presentation by staff from the Toronto Public Library about their Middle Childhood Framework. It focuses on developing innovative programs, services, and collections for six- to 12-year-olds through intimate spaces that draw kids in and inspire them.
Lindsey Dorfman spent several years traveling and working in high-end restaurants before earning her MLIS and joining Kent District Library (KDL), Michigan’s second-largest public library. She says working in the hospitality industry, with its focus on providing gracious, professional service, has helped her shape KDL’s service model and address Michigan’s third grade literacy issue.
In 2011, when Tonia Burton became children’s services consultant at the Central Library of Rochester & Monroe County, the Children’s Center was in trouble. It had little programming and a limited collection, and few families used it. The library board considered closing it—unless Burton could turn it around.
When Kate Lasky became director of what was then Oregon’s Josephine Community Libraries (now the Josephine Community Library District) in 2010, she knew she had a hard road ahead. All four of the county’s libraries had shut down in 2007 from lack of public funding, and a group of concerned citizens had raised $600,000 to reopen them 18 months later as a nonprofit.
Amber Williams must be a superhero to stay on top of all the initiatives she brings to life at the Spokane County Library District (SCLD). Whether it’s feeding hungry children, bringing rebirth to a dilapidated park, heading up a countywide poetry slam, launching a video creation studio, or hosting teen book talks that consistently have a waiting list, Williams sees her role in simple terms: “I build community.”
Courtney Dean is an archivist and community convener who oversees the Center for Primary Research and Training (CPRT) at UCLA Library’s Special Collections, an innovative fellowship program providing hands-on training in archival methodology to graduate students. Matching students’ skills and interests to archival collections, Dean has proven herself an attentive mentor and creative catalyst for engaging in critical archival work with programs such as Activating the Archive.
“Fair, just, and fearless.” That’s how New York Library Association (NYLA) Sustainability Initiative’s (SI) Rebekkah Smith Aldrich describes her cochair, Claudia Depkin. It’s not surprising that Depkin, raised by parents who were actively involved with their local library, sees this institution as a conduit for addressing climate change.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated much of coastal New Jersey. Libraries became a refuge for residents, who showed up in droves to check in with relatives, power up their devices, file insurance claims, fill out Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) forms, or simply get warm. Libraries were a mix of safe haven, recovery center, technology and information hub, and HQ for local volunteer groups.
Julia Maddox joined the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester in 2016 as the founder and director of the iZone, a space for “Imagination, Ideas, Innovation.” Maddox had just under two years to begin developing the service that would activate the 12,000 square foot, $3 million project. “Since our physical space would take a year to design and build, we dubbed it our ‘prototyping phase’ and embarked on a period of fast and furious experimentation and iteration,” Maddox says.
Fangmin Wang didn’t start his career as an innovator. “I liked learning and I liked doing research,” he says. But when Wang joined Ryerson University Library, he found a tradition of thinking outside the box and a library culture that valued experimentation. That, along with mentorship, jump-started his journey to find and fill gaps across his campus with library resources, expertise, and support.
As manager at the West Toledo Branch, Toledo Lucas County Public Library, Andrea Francis noticed one particular impact of the nation’s opioid epidemic on her customers: more children being raised by grandparents. “Ten percent of Ohio households have grandparents filling the role of primary caregiver,” says branch services manager Susan Skitowski.
“If it doesn’t work out, just learn from it,” says Craig Arthur of his approach to Digging in the Crates. A community-driven program hosted at Virginia Tech’s (VTU) Newman Library, it features hip-hop study hours, a monthly seminar series, open studio hours, media literacy workshops, and partner-created events. Combining his skills as a librarian and DJ, Arthur’s programs “draw students and community members who may never have attended library events and open up doorways to conversation and art that library users may never have encountered,” says Lisa Becksford, a VTU colleague.
The five months that Nicholas Alexander Brown spent in 2011 as a White House intern for Michelle Obama in the Office of the First Lady changed his life. “I [saw] the intersection between the arts, events, politics, and cultural diplomacy in action,” he says. “I was hooked and decided to explore opportunities for combining my passion for the arts and public service.”
Adam Watts didn’t realize he was on a path to librarianship when he became a shelver while pursuing a degree in 3-D animation in college. Zack Weaver was a PhD student studying Maker Education when he imagined creating a free and open school for Makers. Janet Hollingsworth, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)–accredited structural engineer, didn’t think she’d apply her craft in a public library. Yet together, they comanage BLDG 61 at the Boulder Public Library (BPL). Opened in 2016, the 1,500 square foot Maker space has hosted more than 1,500 events, nurtured 60 local businesses, and partnered with 40 community organizations.
In 2012, a blind man came into the Nakusp Public Library in rural British Columbia, where Sabina Iseli-Otto was then library director. He wanted a digital audio version of Robert J. Sawyer’s sf novel Hominids, in DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) format. Her library had only ten DAISY CDs, and none of them were sf. “It took two weeks to order another book—not the one he wanted, but another one that was okay,” Iseli-Otto says. “I’ll always remember that emptiness at, for the very first time, not having something for someone to read.”
Like many college-aged youth, students at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman can get intimidated by the library. That is heightened for MSU’s 650 Native American students, who make up four percent of the nearly 17,000-member student body. Enter Scott Young. As the library’s user experience (UX) point person, he’s motivated to improve the experience for everyone but “especially those library users who historically have been underconsidered,” he says.
“It is important for…libraries that own [a] one-of-a-kind collection to make such a collection available and accessible to the world,” says Azusa Tanaka, Japanese studies librarian at the University of Washington. That was the impetus for her to develop an online, searchable compilation of finding aids for 156 multivolume Japanese-language sets held in academic libraries around the United States. Each of the Japanese Multi-Volume Sets Discoverability Improvement Project editions contains between two and 100 books and covers myriad topics, many unique to their institutions.
“I see librarians as change agents, and…that [is] very powerful,” says Joanna Marek, who for the last 11 years has been thinking of ways to impact students in their early years. As an elementary school librarian, she gives children the foundation to reach their potential.
Heba Ismail wants to have a positive impact on people’s lives—especially her public library colleagues across the Mid-East and North Africa (MENA). “The library environment in the Arab region suffers from the lack of training for librarians in light of decreasing budgets,” Ismail says.
Developing a youth literacy program wasn’t in Laura Lay’s job description when she joined the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) in 2015. But the literacy crisis facing California’s youth—55 percent of third and fourth graders can’t read at grade level—was too critical to ignore.
Low college grades and a rocky first year teaching didn’t stop Jennifer Thrift from becoming a school librarian—they just pushed her to try harder. She strives to instill that same resilience in her students, so she was thrilled to learn about Breakout EDU, a start-up company that creates escape room kits for classrooms.
Until age nine, Michelle Carton couldn’t read. In and out of foster care, she attended 13 different schools, and educators labeled her a lost cause. But her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Abe, helped Carton realize her value, made her an able reader, and gave her dreams and ambitions she hadn’t known were possible. Paying that forward, says Carton, “it became my mission to provide all students with…ideas and concepts they may never otherwise [encounter].”
“The Heathers,” as their peers sometimes refer to them, are STEM/STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) education masters and collaborators. In fact, so closely do they work together, and with so much mutual admiration, that they nominated each other as Movers & Shakers—and were jointly nominated by others as well.
“Kirstin [Krumsee] is passionate about making it easier for librarians to understand and use data to help drive decision-making and…tell their stories to staff, administrators, and external decision-makers and stakeholders,” says nominator [and boss] Beverly Cain, State Librarian of Ohio.
As an undergrad working on a student documentary film about their deceased grandfather’s World War II experiences, Erica Titkemeyer discovered his oral history interview in a library’s special collections. “It was really a transformative experience when an MP3 was sent to me and I was able to hear his voice,” Titkemeyer says.
“This story began with the Calgary Public Library’s (CPL) work to remove barriers to library access,” says Roberta Kuzyk-Burton, learning and development specialist at CPL, of Anton Chuppin’s efforts to lead the development of a staff web interface to integrate and simplify all library, staff, and user transactions and interactions.
When Pete Schreiner accepted a two-year fellowship at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 2016, his initial assignment involved researching virtual reality (VR) and other emerging visualization technologies and reporting on the equipment and expertise that would be needed to support them at NCSU libraries.
Sue van der Veer started her career in education but eventually realized public libraries were a better fit for her passion for teaching, learning, and community connections. When she joined the City of Port Adelaide Enfield (PAE) Libraries in South Australia in 2015, the system had “one iPad and lots of aspirations,” says colleague Pam Welford. Despite a background in the arts and little formal STEM education, van der Veer jumped into creating successful programming for youth and adults to explore digital resources and STEM disciplines.
Metadata librarians, catalogers, and library technologists who want to tear down silos need only look for one of the online communities that Becky Yoose has created or helped create. At conferences, they can seek out “The Hat” that she wears to signal a gathering of library professionals interested in improving metadata, website development, and customers’ finding experiences.
Aaron Williams, who started out as a part-time clerk at the McCracken County Public Library (MCPL), has seen firsthand the positive effect libraries have when they provide people with access to otherwise unattainable resources and services. That’s why he’s devoted himself to helping others through his library work.
Anita Cellucci is on a crusade to support the emotional life of her students at Westborough High School. A 2016 School Library Journal School Librarian of the Year finalist, she is certified in mental health first aid through the National Alliance on Mental Health and has worked to spread the training to other area educators. After securing a two-year Library Services and Technology Act grant in 2015, she developed a mental wellness curriculum, prioritizing the library as a stigma-free space.
After an inner-city middle schooler participated in an after-school library program called HackHealth, her mother reported dramatic changes in the family’s grocery shopping. “She’s telling me ‘No, mommy, I want to drink water instead of this.... You shouldn’t be doing that.... Did you look at the sodium content?’ ”
Around the time Sarah Lawton joined the Madison Public Library in July 2013, a new report on Madison’s “staggering racial disparities that existed across all indicators—academic, economic, health—was just being released,” she recalls. “Black Madisonians fare much worse than their white counterparts in all areas.”
In 2013, when Diana Lopez came to Marin City Library (MCL), situated in Marin County’s most diverse and economically challenged community, it had the fewest hours of any branch in the Marin County Free Library and was an untapped community resource. Lopez changed all that, enhancing basic services, providing opportunities for local teens to develop their technology skills, and offering specialized support for grade schoolers.
When Maile McGrew-Fredé took a part-time position in 2005 as director of the Embudo Valley Library in rural Dixon, NM, she “got a crash course in library as local hub or root system,” she says. That core value, and the recognition that there were many gaps in her knowledge, led her to library school. More than a decade later, McGrew-Fredé still believes that libraries “are both an expression of, and a force for, shaping community.” She put her convictions into practice as community engagement and outreach librarian at Santa Cruz Public Libraries, where she worked from 2012 to 2018.
One of Marisa Méndez-Brady’s nominators, Christina Bell, Bates College humanities librarian, says she possesses two great traits: “equal commitments to serving her patrons and making the field itself better.” In her first few years after grad school, Méndez-Brady was often the only person of color at librarian meetings or on faculty. Like many academic librarians of color, she struggled with racism and microaggressions directed at her and thought about leaving the profession.
The killing of Philando Castile in 2016 occurred just blocks from Ramsey County Library’s (RCL) largest and busiest branch, Roseville. As RCL worked to provide programming in response to racism and inequity, a grassroots organization started by two locals, Do Good Roseville, hosted an event suggested by resident and DGR member Nyia Harris: “Ask a Black Man.” It featured a panel discussion and audience Q&A. The library and DGR agreed to collaborate to continue the “Ask” series, bimonthly discussions moderated by Harris, giving voice to the community’s underrepresented residents.
Jenn Carson was a certified yoga and children’s yoga instructor when she got her first library job as a part-time clerk nearly 11 years ago at Kennebecasis Public Library, Quispamsis. “My director at the time supported my crazy idea to start offering children’s yoga programs,” she recalls. “I noticed that the program was benefiting kids that had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders and other exceptionalities, such as [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder] ADHD.”
“I have always wanted to be there for people, regardless of their circumstances,” says Annmarie Galbraith. After working in crisis intervention services in Glasgow for ten years, helping people survive addiction, homelessness, exploitation, mental health conditions, and poverty, she was looking for a change. “I still wanted to work with people,” she says. “It was then [in 2013] that I saw the advert to join Macmillan@GlasgowLibraries.”
For as long as she can remember, says Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, she has had an interest in combating “the silencing of black voices, the invisibility of blackness in the public square, the tradition of shaming, and stereotyping blackness.” Her awareness of social justice began as a youngster, driven largely by library books she discovered by authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Maya Angelou. An undergraduate focus on the history of the black press led her to archival work.
The staffs of Library Journal and School Library Journal would like to thank the following for their participation in putting forward the names of those considered for inclusion here and for other recognition throughout the year.
Social justice is intrinsic to Jarrett Dapier’s work as a young adult librarian, first at Evanston Public Library, IL (2009–14), and now at Skokie PL. Before coming to libraries, Dapier was a legal assistant for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, where he was drawn to cases that involved teens and young adults. At the same time, he was active in the Chicagoland theater scene, directing and acting in productions that, he says, “almost always involved young people coming of age, falling in love, striving to be authentic in a cruel, prejudicial, and violent culture.”
Tamara King had quite the career in public relations: she interviewed presidential hopefuls and celebrities and crafted talking points for a governor. But she didn’t realize what was missing until she met someone in library development. “As she described how [librarians were] able to impact lives, I remember thinking, I want to do that!” says King. With that, she went back to school to get a degree. “I loved the library’s ability to open up the lives of its users and be a great equalizer.”
As leaders of the 118-member academic library consortium OhioLINK, Gwen Evans and Amy Pawlowski negotiated first-of-their-kind statewide electronic textbook pricing agreements with six publishers—John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, Macmillan Learning, Cengage, and SAGE—which resulted in an estimated $39.7 million annual savings for students attending higher education institutions in Ohio. The duo moved from concept to implementation in just three and a half months.
Sidsel Bech-Petersen worked on the redesign of the main library in Aarhus, Denmark, for ten years, talking to “citizens, politicians, architects, and partners to…figure out what the future for libraries looks like,” she says. Her goal was to create a human-centered space and identify “the kinds of approaches, tools, and methods libraries need to create transformation.”
A colleague’s suggestion transformed Cicely Lewis from a language arts and Spanish teacher into a librarian at Georgia’s Meadowcreek High School. The woman remarked that students who never checked out books were rushing to read them after talking to Lewis, so she should be the school librarian. “I thought, ‘This is the perfect job for me: I love working with teens, reading, and promoting books,’ ” says Lewis. Two years after Lewis spoke to the principal, the position of school librarian opened up and she got the job.
“Our libraries need to be steeped in equity, be actively antiracist, and be places of joy for our students,” says school librarian Julie Stivers, who aims to “leverage students’ experience, perspective, and wisdom.” When Stivers started at Mount Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, NC, four years ago, she committed to a major overhaul of her library’s collections and spaces to reflect her students and their experiences better.
Amber Clark was a rising star at the Sacramento Public Library when Director Rivkah Sass nominated her as a Mover & Shaker in fall 2018. Clark was “one of those people whom you knew was strong and was going straight up” to library leadership, says Sass. Tragically, Amber Clark was shot and killed on December 11 in the North Natomas branch library parking lot. Her killer, police say, was a man who had been banned from the library. Her work, however, lives on.
Violet Fox’s passion for cataloging extends beyond her job as Dewey Editor at OCLC. In 2017, she launched the Cataloging Lab, designed to help support the crowdsourcing of new additions and changes to often offensive, outdated, missing, or arcane Library of Congress Subject Headings. According to Jenna Freedman, communications and zine librarian at Barnard College and a 2003 Mover & Shaker, the lab is a “platform for constructive action and has opened the door to several important changes…to remediate bias…or to include important terms that were previously absent.”
Library Journal has rolled out the 2019 class of Movers & Shakers! You can find them all here, as well as past Movers by category, year, and location.
The 54 individuals honored here—in 50 profiles—are powerful. That word might not jump to mind when many people think about librarians, but it is apt. It captures not only the 2019 Movers’ distinctive contributions to the field and their impact but also the power they foster in the people they serve. They give patrons the intellectual, emotional, and technological tools to become their best selves. They provide solutions to move the needle on critical issues such as literacy and health, race, social justice, and gender bias.
