Jon Miller — Director, The University of Akron Press
In June 2018, Jon Miller gave a presentation, “Opportunities of a Skeleton Crew,” at the Association of University Presses conference.
Well done, Jon!
Tammy Stitz and Shelly Blundell had the following article published:
Evaluating the accessibility of online library guides at an academic library. Journal of Accessibility and Design for All, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2018).
Find it at: http://dx.doi.org/10.17411/jacces.v8i1.145
Well done, Tammy!
Melanie McGurr presented “So Much to Do and So Little Help: Migrating a Small Consortium,” with Demetria Patrick at the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians (OVGTSL) 2018 Conference at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, on May 14.
Mike Monaco presented “Automating Authority Control,” also at the OVGTSL 2018 Conference on May 14th.
Nicely done!
Frank Bove and Sean Kennedy presented “Changing Tides and Shifting Sands: Serials and Academic Libraries,” at the Spring meeting of the Northern Ohio Technical Services Librarians on April 27th in Parma, Ohio.
Nice teamwork!
On Friday, April 20, 2018, Wendy Lampner, Manager of Design & Development Services, received an award from The School of Social Work. They inducted her into the Phi Alpha National Honor Society as an honorary member to thank her for her efforts in helping them put their courses online.
Nicely done, Wendy!
You may have noticed in a recent UA email that announced Achievement Awards winners, that one of our very own is being honored. Tammy A. Stitz is this year’s faculty winner of the 2017-18 Exemplary University Service Award. Tammy was nominated by both Ian McCullough and Marilia Antunez. Here are some excerpts from their award-worthy nomination letters.
Ian McCullough on Tammy Stitz:
Her work ethic is frankly astonishing and absolutely unmatched in my experience – at Akron and all jobs before.
She has created and maintained several high quality and much needed workshops to help STEM graduate students. The first is her long-running and respected LaTeX training series, which several professors send their new graduate students to.
… she created a new series of workshops in the last year or so to improve the ease and quality of graduate work, hosting seven seminars in person and five online in addition to all of her regular library instruction.
An example of her pushing us to be better is her most recent research has been on accessibility – both electronic and physical. She has done what a good faculty librarian will do – she studied the literature, determined best practices, and brought back that knowledge to the library for implementation.
Marilia Antunez on Tammy Stitz:
Tammy has collaborated successfully with other units on campus by initiating and working with technical writing faculty to combine the strengths of the academic program with that of the UA Libraries to best meet the students’ needs.
She applied and received funding from the Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO) to develop workshops to help engineering and computer science students in this essential graduation requirement.
At the international level, Tammy offers free and valuable resources to all learners. She created an online guide with thousands of views worldwide . . .
From day to day responsibilities to represent the University at the international level, Tammy is often the first and last person to leave work. Tammy is intelligent, innovative and works very hard to do the best she can for the UA community including our primary users—UA students.
In addition, Tammy’s work on the Accessibility Committee, which is a Faculty Senate Subcommittee may have played a role. She shared her and Shelley Blundell’s research which resulted in the creation of the wiki-space that was created for all web authors about web accessibility. They wrote an article to be published by the Journal of Accessibility for all in the near future. Shelley and Tammy provided a workshop for faculty during disabilities week last November. Jamie Newhall, Patrick Tabatcher, and Tammy will provide a workshop about video accessibility next week as part of the Library Gather Series.
Congratulations, Tammy! Very impressive!
Beate Gersch is busy getting out there professionally. As part of a Northeast Ohio Regional Library System event on May 3, 2018, she will participate in the Critical Conversations Mini-conference: Tolerance is Not Enough: Libraries Respond to Hate. According to the website, she will kick off the day with an interactive presentation entitled “Library staff and information professionals as cultural brokers: Celebrating the joys and tackling the challenges of cultural diversity and inclusion.”
In addition, she and Stephanie Dawson Everett will share an encore of their ALAO presentation from last fall for a Race Card Project webinar this April.
This presentation demonstrates the evolution of the “race card project,” inspired by Michele Norris (www.theracecardproject.com) and describes how the project got started at Bierce Library within the context of the annual Rethinking Race event. They will share the simple steps of setting up a race card wall and monitoring the comments, as well as the challenges that are involved with a sensitive topic like this, particularly when dealing with a diverse student body.
Here is the full text from the ALAO announcement:
This presentation demonstrates the evolution of the “race card project,” inspired by Michele Norris (www.theracecardproject.com), at a large public university. We describe how the project got started within the context of the university’s annual campus and community wide diversity awareness programming. We will share the simple steps of setting up a race card wall and monitoring the comments, as well as the challenges that are involved with a sensitive topic like this, particularly when dealing with a diverse student body. Finally, we will outline our efforts to incorporate this outreach event into the curriculum through collaboration with faculty. The audience for this presentation will be able to a) plan this outreach event on a very low budget, b) anticipate potential challenges based on the characteristics of their own institution, and c) identify partners for collaboration outside their library.
Nicely done!
The UL Incident Report form is once again available online. Below is the link for the incident report form, please make yourself familiar with when & why to use it. Any submission to the incident form will go to Aimee DeChambeau, Melanie Smith-Farrell, and Zachary Brown. Please contact Zachary Brown if you have any questions about it.
https://www.uakron.edu/libraries/forms/incident-report.dot
Melanie McGurr, UL Electronic Services
Melanie McGurr has accepted a two-year appointment to serve on the American Library Association’s Publication Committee starting in July of 2018. The committee oversees publications coming out of ALA in all formats. More information can be found here:
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/committees/ala/ala-pb?year=2018
She will also be teaching a two credit Honor’s colloquium in Fall semester. The course, A Cultural History of the British Country House, will concentrate on all aspects of the history of the Country House (architecture and art, politics, economics, and social class) from Tudor times to the present.
Quite impressive, Melanie!
Ian McCullough, Assistant Dean, Research and Instruction Services
In January, Ian McCullough was named an Assistant Editor for refereed articles by the journal Issues in Science and Technology Libraries, where he had been a peer-reviewer for several years.
In addition, he was granted the joint title of Assistant Professor, Chemistry starting January 1st, 2018.
Congratulations, Ian!