2024 Nominees

Alaina C. Bull

Alaina C. Bull is UW Tacoma’s Humanities and Student Success Librarian, whose work is deeply rooted in mentorship, community-building, and equity-based reflective practices. Her work is transformative in its attention to sustained relationship building as a method for partnerships and collaboration, and it has touched all aspects of the UW Tacoma Library’s operations and services.

Alaina’s approach is wonderfully human, building on connections to grow programs and services.  She designed the program to provide training for Pack Leaders (orientation leaders) on how to support their peers in using the Library; she took on the role as Interim Manager of Public Services and deeply improved efficiency and morale while recruiting and hiring; her work in Real Lit[erature] Book Club has brought over a dozen of authors to campus social justice conversations, including award-winners Angie Thomas, Tommy Orange, and Sarah Gailey. In 2021, her excellence was recognized by winning a UW Tacoma OSCAR(Outstanding Student Ceremony for Awards and Recognition) with the Students' Choice Community Impact Award for Real Lit[erature] Book Club.

Her scholarship and mentorship is also deeply impactful in the field. Alaina’s Project Information Literacy (PIL) work on dismantling the evaluation framework was honored as one of ALA Library’s Instruction Roundtable Top 20 Instruction Articles of the Year (2021). She contributed profoundly toward the development and implementation of a successful new model of graduate student apprenticeship at UW Tacoma; her co-supervised students have a nearly 100% placement rate after graduating.

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

To me, library work is about connections: connecting people to ideas, people to resources, and people to other people. I enjoy creating and fostering those connections, particularly within our local community. I love working with our students, local community groups, the public libraries, the public schools, to get to create more connections and building our community.

(author Johanna M Jacobsen Kiciman)

Anne-Marie Davis

Anne Davis (Collection Development Coordinator for Odegaard Library and Anthropology Librarian), has been nominated for the 2024 DLA Award in recognition of her outstanding work in advancing undergraduate student success, her groundbreaking efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (DEI) in collections, and her deep subject expertise as a liaison for the Anthropology department and Museology Program. Peers noted Anne’s transformational work across these multiple spheres of librarianship, her influence on research and learning in her liaison areas, and her "unwavering devotion to undergraduate student success."

Anne’s longstanding commitment to DEI over the course of her 20-year career at UW has had a profound impact on faculty and students. This commitment shines through her visionary leadership in DEI, accessibility, and anti-racism in Libraries collections. She has led diversity audits of sections of Odegaard’s collection and advocated for dedicated funding for librarians to purchase DEI materials across the disciplines. Her stellar track record in this area was recognized by her appointment as co-chair of the UW Libraries Task Force on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Anti Racism in Collections.

Anne’s dedication to undergraduate students represents another extension of her focus on DEI, most notably through her creation of innovative collections that support the whole student. These collections include: Good Reads leisure reading, Graphic Novels, Study Abroad, Life Skills, International Good Reads, and English as a Second Language. She has also championed and supported Recommended Reads for Equity and the new Board Games collection. She is a visionary who constantly centers student needs and stays ahead of emerging areas of the UW curriculum.  As a result of her work, she has become a noted expert in the field through her scholarly activity, and a leader in the Libraries through her service on multiple Libraries, UW, and professional committees.

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

The students and their amazing questions! It’s so much fun working and learning alongside students as they do their research. Lately I’ve been a part of student research on the mummification process, Swifties, Lushootseed orthography, and sexism in golf. It’s endlessly fascinating to see what they are interested in and help them answer their research questions and I learn so much at the same time.

Reed Garber-Pearson

Reed Garber-Pearson has served as liaison to the Integrated Social Sciences (ISS) degree program since 2017. Reed’s colleagues in ISS have described them as “truly exceptional” and “the embodiment of what it takes to create a strong UW Community through the libraries: integrity, respect, collaboration and care for all.” In addition to supporting ISS students through consultations and research services, Reed works closely with ISS instructors and has developed and revised course modules focused on using library resources and conducting social science research. Reed also developed and currently teaches a credit course on media literacy. Beyond curriculum development and teaching, Reed serves on various ISS staff committees and recently co-wrote a successful seed grant to develop a Peer Mentoring Advisory group.

As Online Learning Librarian, Reed is an important member of the Instructional Design & Outreach Services team. Reed’s contributions include the Graduate Research Institute (GSRI), which is an annual high impact teaching program that reaches graduate students in all disciplines. The team assesses and improves on the institute every year, and has worked to ground the online workshop in anti-racist pedagogy and special support for BIPOC students. Even before the pandemic, Reed has been a strong advocate for students who engage in remote forms of learning, by ensuring that online students were represented in the Libraries’ Professional Student Advisory Board, and by leading a cross-departmental participatory design project for online students.

Reed has embedded their commitment to equity and anti-racism in all aspects of their career, positively impacting the UW community and the library profession in countless ways. Their work is varied and examples include researching fair and equitable hiring practices for the ISS Diversity Committee, improving course content accessibility, creating an Immigration Resources guide, and advocating for changes in transgender inclusion and decriminalizing libraries. Recently, Reed and a group of library workers wrote and published “Confronting White Nationalism in Libraries: a toolkit” in order to “proactively push against white nationalist and bigoted attacks on our communities and libraries.”

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

I am proud to follow my values as a librarian, even if full change cannot be seen yet. I support and empower others through critical information skills, and those one-on-one relationships are what I enjoy most.

Verletta Kern

Verletta Kern, Interim Director, Scholarly Communication & Publishing Department and Head, Open Scholarship Commons & Digital Scholarship Librarian, has been nominated in recognition for her outstanding work in planning the strategy, programming, and spaces at UW Libraries' new Open Scholarship Commons (OSC). The OSC advances open, public, and emerging forms of scholarship through workshops, events, and consultation services. Verletta expertly navigates partnerships and coalition building, fostering collaborations between the UW Libraries, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the e-Science Institute, Learning Technologies, the UW-QUAL Program, and the UW Press. In developing the OSC, Verletta "identified and built upon synergistic activities and initiatives that benefit and serve" the community.

Digital scholarship programming celebrates new knowledge creation and dissemination. Notably, Verletta founded and organized several successful programs including Hacking the Academy, an open scholarship program series designed to raise awareness around the new ways scholarship is being produced, shared, archived, and reused. The Going Public annual symposium is dedicated to expanding faculty and graduate student skills in sharing research with wider publics. An intensive Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program expanded digital scholarship skills for UW students, faculty, and staff.

Verletta is lauded for her commitment to open and community-engaged work, and described by colleagues as a trusted leader, innovator and connector. She is the "key advocate" and "leading voice" of UW Libraries for open scholarship. She models excellence and shared decision making, inspiring others in her vision.

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

What I enjoy most about being a librarian is bringing people together to tackle tricky questions. Sometimes these questions come from Libraries’ users and require bringing multiple colleagues into the fold to answer those questions collaboratively. Sometimes the questions are related to program building like we’ve done building our digital scholarship program or, most recently, our open scholarship initiative. Each of these questions is its own unique puzzle and best solved collectively rather than as a solo enterprise. With each of these tricky questions or puzzles I’ve worked on with students and colleagues, I learned a great deal and it keeps me coming back for the next.

Sandra Kroupa

Sandra Kroupa is the Book Arts and Rare Book Curator in Special Collections, where she has worked for over 53 years. A prolific writer, lecturer, and exhibit curator, Sandra is a tireless teacher of classes and workshops on modern and historical book arts and the history of the book. Sandra has wide-ranging, ongoing collaborative instructional partnerships with faculty and students in undergraduate and PhD programs, particularly in Textual Studies, the iSchool, History Department, and French and Italian Studies, among many others.

A book artist as well as a scholar, Sandra co-founded the Book Arts Guild, serving on its board and coordinating lectures and workshops of visiting artists and giving many presentations herself. During the pandemic, Sandra was able to parlay a half century of in-person teaching to online presentations for faculty at UW and other universities.

In 2002, Sandra’s excellence was acknowledged with a UW Distinguished Staff Award. She has frequently been profiled in the press, and you may read more about her work in these articles.

• UW Daily: Interview with Sandra Kroupa: “Sandra Kroupa: UW Libraries’ book arts and rare books curator — and local legend”
• The Seattle Times: “Meet the UW libraries’ keeper of rare books and artifacts”
• Crosscut: “The keeper of 155K extraordinary books”

(author Conor Casey)

Caitlin Maloy

Caitlin Maloy is the Nursing and Research Services Librarian. In her first two years at University of Washington’s Health Sciences Library, Caitlin has emerged as a collaborative and innovative colleague, teacher, leader and researcher. Her ability to define her role in an online environment has been swift and effective, benefiting School of Nursing students, staff and faculty during a time of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Caitlin has created podcasts and tutorials in addition to her guest lectures in School of Nursing to highlight the library’s role of Evidence Based Practice. The Health Sciences Library is fortunate to have Caitlin as a valuable team member. Her colleagues have an appreciation of her collegiality and willingness to support her team and the interdisciplinary research that goes beyond the health sciences.

We are all very excited about this nomination and proud of Caitlin’s dedication to students and colleagues!

What I enjoy most about being a librarian is connecting users to the information and resources that they need. I have the privilege of working with a huge variety of users with unique research projects. I don't have the skills to solve the problems they're investigating, but I can be a part of the solution by helping to point them in the right direction.

(author Electra Enslow)

Michael Moore

Michael has served as the Grants Administration and Special Projects Librarian at the UW Health Sciences Library since 2017, a unique position that has allowed him to collaborate with colleagues, faculty, and students across a range of diverse projects. These include researching and authoring a 44-page “how-to” primer for academic health sciences libraries interested in implementing virtual reality, working with UW Medicine to provide support for the Leaf clinical cohort discovery platform, and co-writing HSL’s successful five-year proposal to host the Network of the National Library of Medicine’s Region 5 office. In 2021, Michael was named co-winner of the Association of American Medical Colleges Group on Information Resources Excellence Award for REDCap support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

Every time I work with UW students, I am in awe of their talent, their ingenuity, their drive, and their enduring commitment to others. It is a privilege to play a small role in their growth and watch them blossom into the leaders of tomorrow.

Lisa Oberg

Lisa Oberg leads Special Collections as its Interim Director since 2019 and is also the History of Science and Medicine curator in Special Collections since 2013. She has been lauded for her leadership of all aspects of Special Collections, including and especially during the challenging time of the pandemic. Colleagues have noted that as leader of Special Collections, Lisa has emphasized ease of access for researchers, and that the Special Collections Reading Room has become more “welcoming” and “user-centered”.

Lisa has undertaken extensive research and curated several noteworthy exhibits for Special Collections to highlight its historically significant holdings. These include exhibits pertaining to UW students who served and died in WW1, and exhibits devoted to the pop culture of the WW1 era. She has also developed popup exhibits pertaining to Armistice Day and to the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Her peers have characterized these exhibits as “outstanding”, “spectacular”, with “a high level of creativity” in “making history come alive”.

Lisa has served on several library committees and on UW Faculty Councils. She was the co-chair of the University of Washington Common Book Selection Committee in 2009 and 2010. She has taught, and guest lectured for several courses on the Seattle campus. She has also served as a liaison to community cultural organizations. In short, as one colleague put it, Lisa Oberg exemplifies “exceptionally high personal standards of performance” with an “extremely high level of integrity”.

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

I did not set out to be a librarian but as fate would have it, it is exactly where I was meant to be. After more than 30 years as a librarian, I continue to be excited by the prospect of learning something new every day. I enjoy the vicarious journeys I make helping others with their research. I learned about Gold Rush-era canned butter from an Alaska archeologist and a hidden WWII-era bunker in West Seattle from a local writer and geologist, and so much more. The opportunity to work with artifacts and documents relating to early UW and Pacific Northwest history reminds me every day of our responsibility to preserve history for current research and future generations. Every day brings new challenges and new technology to make our collections more accessible. I genuinely look forward to the unexpected questions and stories I will encounter every day!

Madison Sullivan

Madison Sullivan is the UW Libraries’ Fine and Performing Arts Librarian, a role she has held since 2019. This is not her first position at the University Libraries, as Madison also was the Business Research and Instruction Librarian from 2017 to 2019. In all her capacities Madison is praised as showing extreme care and dedication to the success of the students and faculty who come to her for support. This care is not limited solely to providing superb resolutions to her patrons’ information and research needs - Madison is noted as being extremely attentive to the overall well-being of her users both in interactions and through organized events such as end-of-quarter “stress busting” activities.

Madison’s passion for the success of her user community is also evidenced in the impact of her undergraduate instruction, where her library sessions and consultations for Art History students have been unanimously praised by attendees as being both memorably enjoyable and rich in content that will serve them well for the remainder of their academic careers. She also has been incredibly proactive in collection development, securing over $100,000 in extra grant funding to bolster arts collections since 2019. Through this, Madison has been able to develop an inclusive collection that supports her users’ education and research via thoughtful dialog and active anticipation of their needs.

Madison’s mentorship, leadership and service are also notable, with her colleagues praising her commitment to fostering the growth of emerging professionals and her tireless work on furthering core Libraries’ values and in the area of EDI. Madison planned and led a series of transformative open conversations as a member of the Libraries’ EDI committee, volunteered for the Task Force on DEI and Anti-Racism in Collections and used her expertise to conduct a full EDI audit of the Libraries’ art collections. In every aspect of her work Madison is having an impressive impact, and she is aptly noted by one of her patrons as “a true blessing for our community.”

What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?

It's hard to pick one thing! I genuinely love all the different facets of librarianship - from instruction, to collections, to reference, to outreach, to research support. If I had to pick one thing, I might say that I love working with students and faculty who are passionate and curious, especially those in the arts. Their interests don't have discipline specific boundaries, and their perspectives toward research are unique and enlightening. Artists are interested in EVERYTHING. I mean everything! Science, psychology, technology, philosophy, the built environment, international studies, politics, mathematics, public policy, gender & sexuality studies.

Helping them find library resources feels like going on a treasure hunt across the entire library system. Their curiosity ensures that every day as a librarian is different & exciting, and they teach me so much about what is going on in the world. I'm always acquiring new knowledge and they keep me on my toes. Seeing the joy or excitement in their eyes when we've found something inspirational or aspirational, or perhaps they've identified something that reflects back a little surprising part of themselves. Through exploring the library, maybe some of these students have come to the recognition that they aren't alone in their thoughts or experiences or interests... it opens up and connects people, worlds, and ideas. To play even a small role in helping people find that - it has to be one of the best feelings in the entire world for a librarian.

(author Andrew Weaver)