Winners of 2019 Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) National Awards for Federal Librarianship Announced
Congrats to the Winners!
From FEDLINK/Library of Congress:
The Library of Congress has announced the winners of the Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) national awards for federal librarianship, which recognize the many innovative ways that federal libraries, librarians and library technicians fulfill the information demands of the government, business and scholarly communities and the American public.
FEDLINK will honor the 2019 award winners at an event on May 7, 2019, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The names of the winners will remain on permanent display in the Library’s FEDLINK offices.
Federal libraries and staff throughout the United States and abroad competed for the awards. The winners are listed below.
2019 Federal Libraries/Information Centers of the Year
Large Library/Information Center (with a staff of 11 or more federal and/or contract employees): The U.S. Military Academy Library, U.S. Military Academy (USMA), West Point, New York, is recognized for empowering more than 4,600 cadets and 650 staff and faculty to be leaders of distinction in scholarship and research. The library further supports the academy through its Liaison Program that links a librarian directly to each academic department and its Personal Librarian Program, which assigns one librarian to each cadet battalion. This develops ongoing relationships with freshman cadets to introduce them to the library and how to do college level research. In Fiscal Year 2018, the library introduced the USMA Digital Commons, an institutional repository with contributions from 15 USMA departments and other research-producing institutions within the Academy, to share the scholarly output of USMA with the world. It includes 26 research centers, the Center for Enhanced Performance and the USMA Preparatory School.
Small Library/Information Center (with a staff of 10 or fewer federal and/or contract employees): The Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, Corporate Research and Information Center, Newport, Rhode Island, is recognized for its outstanding service as a hub for innovation to expand and enhance digital access via the Research Commons portal. In Fiscal Year 2018, the information center doubled its digital depository to more than 16,000 full-text items. It also expanded its access to allow other Navy Warfare Center libraries to streamline access to content and increase cross-command research collaboration and knowledge sharing. The Research Common’s pilot has become so successful that five of the ten Department of the Navy Warfare Center commands have signed on to use the Research Commons as their primary research knowledge management solution. The information center is now recognized as the most progressive library within the ten Navy Warfare Centers.
2018 Federal Librarian of the Year
Michele Mason-Coles, Clinical Librarian, Darnall Medical Library, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, is recognized for providing innovative patient-centered care and advancing readiness, quality, education and research. In Fiscal Year 2018, she implemented an electronic Patient Health Education Portal that provides credible, reliable and vetted plain language, health information resources to educate patients and their family members. Mason-Coles provided instruction on literature searching, information organization and evidence-based medicine to more than 30 pediatric interns and residents. Mason-Coles also accompanied clinicians to the pediatric inpatient unit and the neonatal intensive care unit where she responded to clinical questions from the medical and nursing teams and bedside patient care queries. She demonstrated information retrieval techniques to residents on medical rounds. As the lead for the Darnall Medical Library’s training program for the National Library of Medicine Associate Fellowship Program, she trained 10 associate fellows with an additional five associate fellows currently in training.
2018 Federal Library Technician of the Year
Derek McDowell, Reference Assistant, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Library, Bethesda, Maryland is recognized for his innovation and dedication as both the technical lead for library technology projects and his superior customer service to patrons throughout the country. As the primary point of contact and technical lead for the NIH Library’s Digital Production Studio, he trained and assisted staff in the production of high-quality audio and video products in support of NIH research. McDowell produced a series of oral histories featuring many notable scientists of the NIH staff, saving the agency more than $50,000 in production costs. His efforts also supported online customer usage of the Library’s bioinformatics analysis tools. With the assistance of librarians, McDowell prepared over 450 items for analysis for the CounterACT Program, which identifies better therapeutic medical countermeasures against chemical threat agents. He provided direct support to the Indian Health Service and tribal staff from across the country with document delivery service and other account creation projects to support access for 12 regional offices, over 600 hospitals and clinics, and 4,000 clinical staff and others working in the tribal health centers.
Read the Complete Announcement
Filed under: Awards, Government Libraries, Libraries, Management and Leadership, National Libraries, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.