Excellence in the Use of Technology

This award is given for the development of a new or enhanced technical program, service, process, or system.  It celebrates skill, innovation and expertise in the use of technology in improving a library program, task, or activity. Examples include:

• The relative importance of library program, task, or activity;
• Depth of development required;
• Broad recognition as a resource for technical questions or issues;
• Improved use of advanced technologies by employees and/or users;
• Creation of user-friendly materials or interfaces;
• Creation of a streamlined workflow;
• Implementation of the new technology into a workflow if applicable, and
• Cooperation with other departments to identify and satisfy needs for access to materials or services.

Tim Murray - Serials

Relative importance / Creation of user-friendly materials or interfaces: Patrons doing research need to know what newspapers we have, in what formats, and for which years. They may also need to consult indexes and finding aids, or search for papers with common characteristics such as geographical location. It can be very difficult or impossible to tease this information out of the online catalog. The Unified Newspaper Database (UNDB) allows simple searching and collates information about each result. It is invaluable to public service departments like Reference.

Depth of development required: There is no greater depth of development than writing the raw Perl code from scratch, with just a text editor. And when the Libraries have not been able to provide all of the tools that were needed, Tim has purchased them with his own money in order to keep the project moving. The UNDB builds on other long-term projects such as the database of Georgia newspaper microfilm.

Broad recognition as a resource for technical questions or issues / Creating a streamlined workflow: Nobody would question Tim's mastery of the databases and other tools he needs to solve problems related to periodicals. Both in and beyond the UNDB project he has been able to extract data from the Voyager ILS and integrate it with his projects or adapt it for specific tasks and reports for his department. The UNDB links to GIL records and also to the SFX/FindIt@UGA knowledgebase.

Improved use of advanced technologies by employees and/or users: How much easier things would be if software worked the way we wanted it to, or if it did this or that new thing. Ideally every employee could create the exact piece of software to meet their needs and the patrons' needs. In reality we struggle with the limitations of purchased products like library catalogs or try to customize free or inexpensive software that someone else has developed. Very rarely do we find the employee who both understands the local need and has the technical knowledge to produce a customized solution.

Cooperation with other departments to identify and satisfy needs for access to materials or services: While Tim invented the UNDB and its previous incarnations based on his experience with Serials, he has been consulting with Reference for years about how it is used and how it could be best implemented.

Other employees contributed to the UNDB, and I thought of nominating the project for a group award, but upon reflection I wanted to nominate Tim because of his vision for the UNDB and his persistence, creativity and programming skills in bringing it into existence.

Tim Murray - Serials

For the brief time that he was the Section Head of the Binding Unit (my supervisor), Tim Murray tried to come up with a way to make gathering periodicals easier. However, because of the complexity of the situation, the problem of how the programming should work wasn't solved until later, when he was able to develop Pullit for the Binding Unit. Pullit is a utility that collects information about the number of issues that comprise a bindable unit of periodicals via a code that we manually place into the order notes in Voyager, and a list of those titles is produced via Access from which Binding can use to gather. Without Pullit we would still have to move back and forth between CPR and the Binding Office to see if something is ready to be bound, which would particularly be a lot more difficult and time-consuming now that the Main Library periodicals are on the first floor and being that some are in special shelving.

Pullit saves us time, which we can now use to tackle other problems. We can quickly see, at a glance, how many periodical titles we need to gather from, so we are more easily able to plan our workload around gathering based on the amount of time we have to devote to it.

Pullit is easy to use because it lists all of the issues that are displaying in OPAC, along with any that are coded with claim codes or any other codes. So, instead of gathering a stack of issues and bringing it back to the Binding Office only to find that there is one missing because we never received it, we can see the claim status on that missing issue without even leaving our desk. Also, immediate recognition of a bindable unit of periodicals that can be gathered means they spend less time in CPR, which ultimately means that the issues have less of a chance to go missing, and at the end of the binding process a patron is able to check out the bound issues without special permission.

Because it uses both Access and Voyager (two programs with their fair share of problems, as we all know), Pullit sometimes has hiccups for which Tim is always willing (and able!) to find workarounds. He finds the reason why there was a problem and knows exactly how to fix it. The programming work he has done for Pullit is really ingenious and I'm so glad he was able to find the time to develop this for Binding.

Charles King - Systems

Charles King is the lead programmer for the Civil Rights Digital Library. He applied his considerable expertise in Java programming and developing Web applications to help develop the Voci digital library system and to build the CRDL public interface. Getting CRDL to its current stage is a significant accomplishment.

Abby Griner - Russell Library

In fall 2007, the Russell Library’s totally redesigned and expanded Web site made its debut to much acclaim from users, donors, and colleagues.  The site featured a new elegant design that provided lots of space for features and events as well as clear navigation for an expanded array of regular content.  Abby Griner spearheaded the work for this major redesign project.  She guided the Russell staff through planning meetings to decide content, design, and navigation and developed the schematic diagram for the pages.  She established a css scheme for the site to make updating more efficient and went to work developing hundreds of pages of content for the site including over 85 finding aid pages for all of the Russell Library's collections.  She also coordinated assessment of the Web site, first conducting usability testing of the old site to learn what areas needed attention from a user perspective, then testing the collections area of the new site, and then finally, testing the new site as a whole. What she learned was that this new site did a great job of addressing users' interest in clearer navigation and richer content.  As the site reached the final editing stage, Abby patiently, but firmly guided staff through a final series of round-robin evaluations of the site.  With almost a year since the debut, stats show a marked increase in use of the site.  Archivists working with students also note that patrons are coming in having browsed the site and are better prepared to begin research--in short, this site has been a tremendous access and outreach tool and Russell staff cannot imagine what they did before they had it and are all immensely grateful for Abby's stellar efforts.

Pete McBrayer - Systems

I really want to thank Pete for making the JStor/Harvard Object Validator (JHOVE) GUI a reality in my work area. The command-line interface was too complicated for students to use, and the bugs in the GUI were a real problem. Pete's hard work made this important tool available for us to use to verify some older (but high-end) vendor-generated archival master TIFFs on CD, as well as make them more extensible by being able to generate tagged XML records for each TIFF file using the same program. I would have been able to execute NONE of this on my own. So...thanks, Pete, for helping us make this possible!