whooooffft. Puh-puh-puh. Is this thing on? Can you HEAR{screeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEeee} me?

Oh, sorry, everyone. I guess I got a little too close to the keyboard. Okay. So. I’m supposed to say a few words about me, who I am, what I do, why I’m here, and stuff like that, is that it?

You know, this kinda feels like a job interview or that time I made the Movers & Shakers list. All the interviewers wanted was to talk about me and you know what? I’m tired of talking about me. I’m not just the Head of Readers’ Services for Kansas City Public Library. There’s way more to me than that. I’m already planning for my retirement. My second career is going to be heavy machinery operator. Yeah.

And I’m not just a columnist for Booklist or NoveList, either. I write thank you notes, too. And rude and quirky postcards to my friends. And pithy comments on bathroom walls about the weak drinks they serve at the Riot Room.

Yeah, I blog. I blog a lot at Book Group Buzz and occasionally guest stint over at Likely Stories. I ride herd on Off the Page, too. I’ve even been known to dash a few lines for my own blog, Kaite’s Bookshelf.

Sure I was KCMLIN Trainer of the Year. Big deal. Did anyone tell you about the time I spelled “cartilage” correctly for the Library’s Books ‘n Beer team in the city-wide spelling bee? No? That’s because they don’t think that’s im-por-tant.

So I was Macmillan’s Librarian of the Month last August. So what? I won a hula hoop contest that same month at Crosstown Saloon and no one wrote about that.

Kaite Mediatore Stover awaits the next cage match

No one ever asks me about the really important things. Like is it true I’m part owner of Ebbsfleet United? Can I really tap dance and read tarot cards? And why don’t I just bake the cookie dough already and stop eating it out of the bowl? See? Those things are crucial. They are integral to my personality. But all anyone wants to know is when I’m going to get my rear in gear and get those two chapters submitted to Jessica and Mary K. and then finish my own book. I don’t know, okay? Stop nagging, already!

Look, are we done here? Because I’m seriously falling behind in my loafing and you’re not helping. If you want to get me out of this jam, pass me the sidewalk chalk and bubbles and let’s go outside and git ‘er done. C’mon. Whattayasay? Enough about me. Let’s talk about you.

Erica Reynolds and her daughter Cady promoting KC Science, INC

I’m Erica Reynolds, the Web Content Manager for the Johnson County Library, and I have been self-awarded the Shovers and Makers award based on the fact that I have assembled the best Web Content Team in the universe—this clever and wily team includes some famous Shovers and Makers like Mr. Neff and Mr. LaCrone. The rest of the team should nominate themselves, too, but they are probably too busy working. The fact that I get to work with 6 people who are solely dedicated to writing, filming, recording, photographing, posting, editing, digitizing, formatting and designing content and graphics for the Web is a dream come true. Now, I just need to utilize my deadly persuasive skills to convince the administration to re-purpose another position into a programmer who is solely dedicated to the patron interface of the library catalog, and all of our patrons will be transported to library heaven.

I’m obsessive about card sorts, paper prototypes and usability studies of all stripes, and I would run them every day if I had someone else to enter all the data so that I could just run studies and then sit back and bask in glow of analyzing spreadsheets, comments, navigation paths, and charts. When we redesigned the Library’s site, I documented all our studies and shared our measurement tools and results at: www.jocolibrary.org/usability.

I used to be driven and obsessive, but now I regularly phone it in and work luxurious 40-hour weeks as I prefer to spend time playing in the park with my daughter. She does her share for the Library, too, like helping to promote KC Science, INC—a smashingly successful community partnership we developed with an IMLS grant. KC Science, INC is a consortium of Kansas City area libraries, museums, parks, and educational organizations collaborating to help inspire natural curiosity and excite the public about all that is astonishing, beautiful, and spectacular in the natural world and the act of discovery. I firmly believe that a stronger connection between students, science and nature is paramount to our nation’s economic success and global environmental future, and I’m happy and proud to be the project director of this exciting partnership. Oh, and I really want one of those S&M buttons.

Libraries can often take themselves too seriously and Glenn Harper (aka harps) at the Frankston Library Service (FLS) is helping to change that. Thinking globally on the web (via Blogger and Twitter) whilst acting locally via the FLS blog, Glenn has taken online library promotion and community engagement to places it may not have been before.

The Blogalogue is a free-wheeling, textually light hearted and often visually stimulating library blog. Fighting sterotypes and alienating more stuffy members of the profession, the Blogalogue serves as an image changing and web 2.0 learning vehicle. It is developed, published, edited, written and largely photographed by Glenn.

Some highlights of the Blogalogue’s online presence so far have included claiming TV’s The Librarians Middleton Interactive Learning Centre as an FLS branch, running an AFL football tipping competition involving both staff and community and claiming that libraries are a stimulus package. Along with What’s On information, the PDF publication of each month’s customer feedback has become a populare regular feature. Usually brief, the posts are punchy, fun and sometimes highly visual, with a considerable use of various web 2.0 technologies and services.

Glenn has demonstrated an impressive ability to shove over the out dated image of the conservative public library and make a new paradigm for online engagement. This work has been recognised via several opportunities to speak about his work as an online maverick at professional events, including at the ALIA ‘08 conference.

I humbly accept this reward on behalf of all those trying to drag libraries and librarians into the new century.

I’m Michelle McLean, officially an Information Librarian for Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation, a public library service in Melbourne, Australia.

I say officially, because I am in the process of trying to get my title changed to Virtual Services Librarian. The reason for that change is that 80% of my part-time hours are spent on my library services virtual presence, which means our website, our electronic resources, our blogs etc, etc.

I gratefully accept this award, based on the following:
- nobody will give me a Mover and Shaker award and this is just as good
- I am proud of the way I have taken our library website into the 21st century – in the last year we have added more blogs (2 of which I contribute to regularly), created screencasts to show our users how to best use our new catalogue and added Google Maps to our branch information and directions (amongst other things)
- I have also helped our profession more generally, by presenting papers at several conferences on Web 2.0 and keeping up-to-date in the profession and by having articles published in the library literature on the same topics
and
- I continue to share my professional experiences and ponderings through my personal blog Connecting Librarian and as part of the team at Libraries Interact

I am privileged to share this award with many other worthy winners, many of whom are not only my colleagues, but my friends. I am pleased to be able to stand beside you in this honour.

I’m back from CIL2009 and I’m declaring myself a Shover & Maker!

Ok, for the record, I’m the Technology Innovation Librarian for the Nebraska Library Commission. Yes, I’m one of those “state workers” (say it like it’s gum stuck on the bottom of your shoe if you want to say it right.) Great title right? But what does it mean? Well to me it means that I get to play and investigate then pass on what I’ve learned to other librarians.

Does this get me in trouble sometimes? Of course it does but if I’m not frustrating someone, I’m not doing my job right. Change breeds frustration. Some cope well, others… not so much.

As for a project I’m proud of that would be the WiFI Connectivity Grants I ran last year. IN the end more than 50 libraries now offer free public WiFi that didn’t before. I’ve been training for almost 15 years now but I’d finally run a project from beginning to end that has a direct effect on libraries and their patrons. This year is getting Nebraska Libraries on Plinkit. (What have I gotten myself into?)

I make. I shove. Sometimes in that order. Sometimes not.

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