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Future Assets! Faculty Newcomer of the Year Awarded to a Libraries’ faculty member and a classified staff member who has exhibited:
Hallie Pritchett - Map Library There are some people who distinguish themselves in a position from the moment they step foot in the door. Hallie Pritchett is one such person and deserves recognition as the faculty newcomer of the year. Hallie came to UGA and immediately dove into her work. Some examples – not an exhaustive list by far include: Hiring the Map Library Associate, providing on-site training for that person. Established cataloging workflow procedures – a daunting task. , and now being able to say that all cataloging is being accomplished on-site with a plan for cataloging the backlog! Assessing the Collection (which revealed many oddities and mysteries about how items are obtained, stored, and shelved). This involved many hours of hot, heavy work and resulted in the identification of almost 35,000 duplicate maps and other materials as candidates for withdrawals. Addressing physical issues including maintenance, custodial, and security of the space and making changes based on that assessment such as reconfiguring space, removing not needed furniture -- and let’s not forget our 2nd Map Library “run-in”! Redesigning the Map Library website into something that is descriptive, content rich, easy to navigate, and resulted in creating finding aids for online cartographic resources and collections:http://www.libs.uga.edu/maproom/index.html For the Libraries, Hallie has served on two Libraries Faculty Committees (PDRC and Nomination and Elections) and was asked to convene the Science Library Space Task Force. At the state and national level she has attended and presented at the ALA Annual 2007 conference: “Rare, Antiquarian, or Just Plain Old” Cataloging Pre-Twentieth Century Cartographic Resources,” and at GaCOMO conference. And on top of all of that Hallie is working towards a Master of Internet Technology, Terry College of Business, UGA with a degree expected in May, 2009! As we all know, as of March 2008 Hallie has also been asked to take on duties as the Federal Regional Depository Librarian following the retirement of Susan Field. For a newcomer, being asked to take on such a position is definitely a reflection of the trust, competence and dedication that has been placed in Hallie. Hallie Pritchett – a true present AND future ASSET! Emily Hopkins Luken - Reference Emily Hopkins Luken began as a faculty member in November 2007. Although a “known quantity” from her work as a classified staff member in several departments, Emily quickly distinguished herself as a caring, dedicated librarian who would take on new creative tasks with competence, and a thoughtful, sensitive colleague. Emily set several goals for herself which she managed to accomplish excellently. A top priority for all SLC Reference Librarians is teaching; to this end, Emily built on the successes of her colleagues by establishing a clearinghouse for class scripts and exercises. From these she was able to develop her own style for teaching introductory classes. Where she really shone, however, was in the UNIV 1120 classes. In this class she and several other librarians had the students research, write and create a short film (using equipment available at the SLC). Note that this equipment was new, could be a bit unstable at first, and required the librarians to get to know it first! In another use of her skills and saavy, Emily took a leading role in working with EITS and CTL in establishing protocols for the student use of the Digital Media Lab. Working with partners who have difference goals can be challenging; Emily always displayed diplomacy and maintained our excellent working relationship while still coming up with policies that were the least restrictive as possible. She is always a creative and flexible member of any group. One other area that Emily has made a name for herself is in the Libraries exploration of social networking software options. Emily has taken the lead in “reference through Facebook and MySpace” to reach students and has begun to see some success in this. This may seem like a small activity; however, there are many issues to consider and Emily was always ahead of the game in making these decisions. Emily created an SLC group within Facebook and recruited librarians and SLC student assistants to join the group for its initial foray and has used Facebook to advertise Blue Card events. These are exactly the types of activities that an information commons should be “trying on for size”. Emily’s work has taken us many steps forward in this endeavor. Emily’s work with LSA has been outstanding. She is a colleague who is always eager to help whether it be to arrange flowers, blowing up balloons, getting pizzas, schlep food for the Thanksgiving luncheon, hang displays, collect money, or even those big activities such as LSA’s Big Read project. Emily has been integral in planning for and developing the proposal for this project which DID GET FUNDED! Efforts such as Emily’s are transforming this organization from a more internally focused group to an active force in the Athens community. Professionally, Emily has been very active. Most notable was being elected program chair for the Atlanta Area Bibliographic Instruction Group [BIG] for 2008! This year’s program met at the end of July and was the best attended meeting thus far. Emily Luken provides a professionalism and polish that is hard to top in a new librarian. The University of Georgia Libraries is very lucky that Emily decided to choose librarianship as a profession and to pursue that career with our organization.
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