Library Staff Service Awards Announced!
We may not be together for the Staff Service Awards this year – but that won’t stop us from recognizing the outstanding work of our colleagues!
The committee recently met to select this year’s award recipients and we are pleased to share the winners and congratulate them on their wonderful contributions and accomplishments!
University Staff:
Josiah Redford | Collection Management Library Services Assistant | College Library
We are so pleased for this opportunity to tell you about Josiah Redford and his exceptional commitment to serving our patrons and his fellow colleagues. Josiah helps manage reserves services at College Library and was integral in helping with the transition from Library Course Pages to Canvas-based reserves services. Josiah’s reserves expertise and service-orientation are well known to many instructors who regularly ask for Josiah by name when seeking assistance with their course content. Josiah is also known for his service on College Library, GLS, and campus-wide committees. Josiah was the only University Staff person on the Librarians’ Assembly Vice Provost for Libraries hiring committee, posing the first question at the VPL candidates’ public presentations. Josiah served as a University Staff Congress Representative for the first few years of its inception and was elected to serve on the Recreational Sports Board for several years. At College Library, Josiah regularly volunteers to serve on committees charged with making College Library more inclusive to our colleagues and patrons, including our Reading and Discussion Group and our “Meetings about Meetings” team. Finally, Josiah excels at serving the campus community at the College Library Reference and Information Desk and in our classrooms. Josiah relishes these opportunities to engage with students and instructors, freely sharing his knowledge and expertise while providing compassionate and thoughtful service.
Academic Staff:
Jesse Henderson | Digital Services Librarian
The group who nominated Jesse deeply value her “energy, humor, good spirits, and exemplary can-do attitude,” which one recommender concisely summarized with the phrase, “Let’s make it happen!” Jesse oversees and leads the work of envisioning new digital collections, working with external partners on digitization projects, and guiding the process of digitization and publishing collections online. Reflecting on this collaborative work, one recommendation letter observed that she “took the time to understand each person’s role, and discussed how their contributions would fit into the overall project workflow, ensuring that the entire group worked together.” Jesse has brought her project management expertise into other areas as well, working with groups of colleagues who are developing the GLS storage and virtual server environment and digital preservation environment. One letter notes Jesse’s “capacities for learning new domains, for taking on new projects that stretch her knowledge and experience, and for creating highly-functional teams with colleagues both inside and outside the library.” Jesse is also celebrated by her peers for her continuous, generous contributions to improving our workplace climate. Her commitment to staff who are new to the libraries is most clearly visible in her leadership of the Onboarding Committee, a group that works hard to make it easier for newer staff to adjust to this large and sometimes complicated workplace. What’s more, Jesse has mentored many student staff, ISIP students, and early-career librarians. We are extremely fortunate (and happy!) to have Jesse as a colleague and leader in the UW-Madison Libraries!
Student Employee(s):
Jordan Craig | Digital Collections Assistant and UWDC Metadata Specialist | UW Archives and UWDCC
Jordan has volunteered and worked for the University Archives and UW Digital Collections in a variety of roles over the last few years – story gathering event volunteer, born-digital collections processing assistant, metadata specialist, embedded digital collections assistant. In all her roles, Jordan has displayed a high level of skill, initiative, curiosity, and intelligence. Some of her accomplishments include: wrangling the files and folders of the large born-digital collection (the Lands We Share!) to ensure its discoverability and accessibility to future researchers; cleaned up the Archives’s FileMaker Pro metadata entry form; produced over 3,000 image scans and data records for the Archives online image collection; entered and corrected UWDC metadata in Japanese and Latin; stitched together audio files for interviews that crossed over multiple sound clips; and created lots and lots of documentation that will aid Archives, Oral History and UWDC staff doing similar work in the future. And that’s just some of her accomplishments! In her short time with us, Jordan has made a significant impact on the work and services of the Archives and the quality of UW Digital Collections metadata. She is a joy to work with as a colleague, always willing to help and share what she learns. She is focused, inquisitive, thoughtful, fearless, whip-smart, and always attuned to promoting real-world benefits for library users and the staff she works shoulder-to-shoulder with. We are so grateful for her work and are so pleased to be able to recognize and reward her for her efforts.
Kelly Starykowicz | Student Assistant | CTS Cataloging
Kelly Starykowicz is a dedicated library employee whose many contributions help make our scholarly resources discoverable and accessible to patrons across campus and around the world. She currently creates original cataloging records for the master’s theses and doctoral dissertations written on this campus, entering them into WorldCat to facilitate the discovery of our rich collections. She has assumed the role of lead student worker in Cataloging and mentors international students in our various procedures, thus helping to make CTS a welcoming environment for all employees.
Erica Uyenbat | End User Computing Student Technician | End User Computing, LTG
Erica enabled College Library to provide top tier support for advisors and new students receiving advising via SOAR, a relationship that is tremendously important for the libraries and exposing new students to library services and spaces. She has been taking the lead on transitioning the Memorial Library computer lab from DoIT management to library management and taking on projects involving hardware investigation and technical service implementation. Most recently, she has been working on projects around remote meetings and video conferencing and creating documentation to guide the work of the peers she supervises and to support those who will succeed her in her current role.
We plan to hold a belated reception later in the year to celebrate with each other in person. When it becomes possible to do so, we will share our plans.
Congratulations to our winners and all who were nominated this year. Your continued dedication to the Libraries, the University, and to your colleagues is truly appreciated!
We also like to acknowledge this year’s Awards Committee for their work. Dave Luke, the committee chair, was joined by Sherry Kanetzke, Kathryn Maloney, Robin Rider, and Katie Sanders. We thank them for the time and careful consideration they gave to reviewing the nominations.