I’m Frieda Toth, and have been for years known as the Loud Librarian. Most of us in the profession know that the whole “shh” thing is an annoying cliche, but I’m proud to go wayy behind smashing it.

I’m the first Teen Services Librarian in the 100-year history of Crandall Public Library. That means nobody can say, “But that’s not the way the previous librarian did it!” So our Teen Group has done a Murder Mystery, a boffering demo…you get the idea.

The thing I’ve worked hardest on so far is my Hot Topics collection. Remembering that being a teen was feeling a constant state of embarrassment, I selected a couple hundred books on dating, STDs, alcohol, gender ID, religion, lack of religion, politics, cutting and other things teens don’t want to ask the middle-aged lady with the bun about. I put all the books in a discreet place behind the Teen Center couch, so they can browse in private. The books are popular enough to get strewn about but rarely appear on someone’s library card, which is just the way I hoped they’d be used.

My name is Ahniwa Ferrari. Technically, I’m the Online Resources Consultant at the Washington State Library. It’s one of the more vague job titles I’ve ever run across, but on the plus side both the title and the job allow me a fair bit of leeway to define my own responsibilities. Mainly, I am the project coordinator for Ask-WA, the Washington Statewide Virtual Reference Cooperative.

I’ve been out of grad school for nearly a year now (and working as the above for that time), and there’s a lot I’m proud to have accomplished. Ask-WA grew from just 24 participating libraries at the beginning of 2008 to 60 participating libraries today. Virtual reference service is becoming ubiquitous in Washington libraries, including complete buy-in from the State’s community and technical college libraries. By selling libraries on the service, not on the technology, buy-in has been high, the service continues to expand, and patrons have been thrilled to find their libraries offering 24/7 virtual reference.

In addition to coordinating Ask-WA, I’ve changed the format of Statewide Database Trials in Washington State to be much more helpful to libraries. Instead of large trials where too many products were available, we have implemented limited, subject-tailored trials at two-month intervals. For instance, for the March-April period, we are offering statewide trials of Mango Languages and Auralog’s Tell Me More. To counterpoint the paid products, I decided to search out and offer free language-learning products through the trials as well, to help libraries determine if the money they were considering spending was worth the price, or if a free product might suffice.

My final point of pride is my ongoing work with our Hard Times response. To date, I’ve compiled an excellent list of job-searching and economic resources. The plan is to grow this list to include other subjects: housing, health, etc, and to provide the links through a more navigable portal page.

Oh, and I also played a large role in bringing our program into the blogging age.

I’d like to think I’ve done less shoving and more making: making libraries realize the benefits of virtual reference; making database trials more useful; making resistant librarians blog; and making resources available to library users and staff in these tough times. But each of these things, in turn, required their own fair amount of shoving.

How much shoving? Well, a gentleman librarian never tells. As for the second “S” in the title, if you want to know, you’ll have to ask.

I’m the Web Services librarian for Western Libraries at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. The biggest problem with my job title is that nobody knows what it means, so I have to explain it to everybody. The good part is that because nobody knows what it means, I can pretty much claim anything web-related as part of my mandate (except the catalogue; that’s definitely somebody else’s job).

I was part of the team that designed and developed the current Western Libraries website, which launched last summer, and I’m now the coordinator for ongoing maintenance and new web projects. This mostly means that I spend a lot of time going to meetings.

When I’m not working on the website at Western, I develop software for the Evergreen Open ILS project. Three years ago, I wrote the ILS module that talks to self-check terminals and PC login systems. Right now I’m working on the module that reads MARC format holdings information uses it to predict when journal issues should arrive.

I’d like to thank the acade… myself for this wonderful award and will definitely be framing the certificate and hanging it on my wall. (There is a certificate, right?)

I am the first Online Services Librarian in the history of the The San Diego Mesa College Library. I have launched our 24/7 reference service and I administer it’s daily upkeep. Our website redesign is slated for launch this summer and we will be including an IM reference chat widget to our Ask A Librarian component. I am also including screencast tutorials with closed captioning in the website so that we can begin our distance education teaching of information literacy. I have embedded myself in a few online English classes (to my knowledge, not done before at my institution), I have given special faculty training on del.icio.us and databases and weeded the technology section of our monograph collection for perhaps the first time in the history of our library (I had previously thought books on Y2K were old!).

On the side I am a full time doctoral student with Pepperdine University in Education Technology and have just begun my first term of the dissertation. I also have a blog at The Animated Librarian where I muse about tech and library issues. As I hop on my Harley and ride off to do my kickboxing training I will graciously accept this award on behalf of me. Yeah me!

As a young child, Katie Dunneback was routinely encouraged not to be a shover by her librarian mother. The chorus of her siblings echoed the somewhat-frequent entreaties. The lure to be a maker of things, however, was one she could not resist.

In college, long before she ever considered following in her mother’s and great-aunt’s librarian footsteps, she created her own lending library and readers’ advisory service for popular materials out of her dorm room. Unfortunately this led to a number of dormmates assigning her a number of colorful epithets, especially during finals weeks, one of which has stuck to this day.

In the field librarianship, Katie is a maker of connections. Her mind often works in mysterious ways and is used to hearing others say “What were you thinking?” Her first foray into the larger field was with her Young Librarian blog where she presented the somewhat humorous essay “Weblogs as Libraries”. Over five years later she has amassed a number of LIS writing credits, though the blog has gone on indefinite hiatus.

A number of those credits are in the topic of readers’ advisory. Katie’s lifelong addiction to reading (she does display a number of troubling addiction-related habits and has resisted all attempts at intervention to date) has stood her in good stead as she is routinely consulted on readers’ advisory issues, especially romance-related, by her peers. She served on the inaugural committee of the Reading List Council, and is still amazed by the opportunity to have worked with some of the most respected librarians in the field. As a way to ease herself out of the intense work of an award committee, she created the Book-A-Month Challenge which ran through all of 2008.

Currently the Consultant with Southeastern Library Services in Bettendorf, Iowa, Katie helps make connections for those she serves by providing continuing education opportunities and technologic issue assistance among other consulting services. Her latest coup is the creating of a simple database using Open Office software to provide libraries of all sizes a way to track Summer Library Program participation and report statistics requested by the State Library of Iowa.

In her free time (ha!), Katie is a published author of fiction under a pseudonym (you have to ask her about it in person) and a knitter. She is also addicted to Twitter (told you she had an addictive personality!).

Katie Dunneback by Cindi Trainor – I & II