EXCELLENCE IN USE OF TECHNOLOGY:

This award celebrates skill, innovation and expertise in the use of technology in developing or enhancing a library activity, service, process, or system. Attributes to highlight include originality, creativity, relevance, quality and benefits derived from the results. Examples include:

• The discovery of unmet user needs and implementation of ground breaking or unique technological solutions to meet those needs;
• Implementing new technologies to introduce new services or the retool traditional services resulting in a better user experience or to improve and extend library service to meet user needs;
• Creation of a streamlined workflow, user-friendly materials or interfaces by the incorporation of the new or enhanced technology;
• Developing processes that encourage organizational innovation;
• Creative collaboration between departments, groups, individuals or other libraries / types of institutions, resulting in demonstrable improvements in service to users;
• Creation of library instruction and/or patron programming through the innovative use of technology (might also be Excellence in Instruction): and
• Explorations of the future of libraries

NOMINEES:

Christian Lopez

His excursions into Podcasting facilitate interdisciplinary creativity and cooperation between UGA departments. These new partnerships raise exciting possibilities. The best example may be the Wormsloe pocasts -- "Wormsloe Speaks: Environmental history at the Wormsloe historic site near Savannah - This podcast series features the work of an ongoing partnership between UGA's Anthropology and History departments and Wormsloe Fellows, the Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping Science, and the Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History."

Donnie Summerlin

Donnie led digitization of 19th and early 20th century holdings of the Columbus Enquirer and several Milledgeville newspapers from microfilm. He managed the imaging of the film, supervised students who cropped more than 100K pages of content this year, completed the optical character recognition process for full-text searching, generated derivative image files for the Web, managed the creation and processing of the page-level metadata, indexed the data in the XTF database, and configured the public interface to support online display. His ability to manage all of these processes and supervise students so effectively is much appreciated by the DLG.

Bob Trotter

In the fall semester of 2008 the Libraries were faced with the highly undesirable task of cancelling journal subscriptions as a result of the budget cuts mandated by the state. Collection development librarians compiled the list of titles proposed for cancellation, but it was also necessary to devise a way to communicate this information to the university community and receive their comments in return. Bob's track record as technology genius is already well established, but his role in this project was especially valuable due to its high-profile and sensitive nature.

Here' s what Bob did:

• Designed a database that made it easy for UGA faculty and others to see what titles in their fields were slated for cancellation.
• Provided a mechanism for faculty to comment on individual titles.
• Designed a parallel backstage database incorporating additional details such as use statistics for librarians to consult.
• Provided a mechanism for librarians to add evaluative comments and rank titles based on faculty input.
• Maintained statistics of how many individuals had commented, how many titles had received comments, the cost of saving titles in each rank, etc.
• Accomplished all of this in a very tight time frame and with multiple chiefs giving him instructions.

The most important outcomes of Bob' s work were:

• By making the process transparent, well-organized, and responsive, the Libraries good reputation and credibility were preserved even in such a difficult and stressful arena as budget cutting and loss of resources.
• Other libraries such as Georgia State and Georgia Tech have been able to adapt Bob' s database rather than reinventing the wheel for the cancellation projects they are now undergoing.

Troup County Records Project

• Sheila McAlister
• Mary Willoughby

The Troup County Archives has scanned 100K pp of 19th and early 20th century superior court records in partnership with the DLG and with the support of a federal NHPRC grant. Troup's ability to get the grant and to near completion of the project has been dependent on the process that Sheila developed to partially automate the creation of standards-compliant, file-level Dublin Core records from an EAD/XML finding aid of the collection.

The success of the project also has been tied to Mary's ability to work effectively with the Troup Co. imaging staff to correct imaging problems and file naming issues. Mary has processed tens of thousands of images for Troup, including creating the public Web versions of the images and archiving the master files for long-term preservation.

The Troup records are an important (and growing) new addition to the DLG.