The New York Chapter | Chapter Award Recipients

Chapter Award Recipients

The Awards Committee is very pleased to announce our 2011 Chapter award winners:

The Mergent Outstanding Achievement Award: Toby Lyles

The Mergent Outstanding Achievement Award is presented to members of the New York Chapter to recognize recent outstanding work on specific projects and activities (within approximately the last two years). The Outstanding Achievement Award can be given to one person or to a group of people who worked together on a project.

We award the Mergent Outstanding Award to Toby Lyles for her fine job of reincarnating and reinvigorating ChapterNews which was dormant for a couple of years before she took over as editor, much to the dismay of the Board and membership. Since Toby assumed this volunteer position, she published the newsletter right on schedule four times per year. Toby has been assertive about asking via and in person for articles from SLA-NY professional and student members. The result has been a steady flow of interesting writing on Chapter events, info pro conferences, and other topics such as job hunting and even life in Alaska where a former NY chapter member moved to accept a new position.

Toby is the first ChapterNews editor to publish it in blog format on the SLA-NY website. This format allows for new features such as reader comments. After Toby publishes the entire newsletter, she features most of the articles in email on the SLA-NY discussion list, one at a time over a period of days, to bring greater attention to each contribution. The articles in ChapterNews also provide excellent content for the vastly improved new SLA-NY website, created in WordPress. Toby is working closely with the Website Manager Stan Friedman on the integration of ChapterNews into the SLA-NY website.

We also award a Mergent Outstanding Achievement Award to the Web Redesign Committee.

[ Pam Rollo, Stan Friedman (Webmaster), Davis Erin Anderson, Seth Bookey, Vida Cohen, Kathy Cray, Michelle Dollinger, Robert Drzewicki, Leigh Hallingby, Moy McIntosh, Bacilio Mendez ll, Lynn Schlesinger, Donna Severino]

The Web Redesign Committee functioned under the excellent leadership of Pam Rollo, who brought a vision for the website to provide SLA-NY members not only with the up-to-date information they want about Chapter events and job openings, but also with much more by serving, for instance, as a marketing tool to recruit new members and as a place for the SLA-NY to strengthen its relationships with its vendor partners. Pam also brought to the process a keen understanding of the technical side of website redesign and development.

The Committee initially had an intense schedule of 4 meetings in a month in August/September 2010 during which they drew up an extensive list of all the content that the Chapter website should include. They then organized the list into a structure and developed wire frame models of template pages for the site. The Committee looked at other websites for role models and decided what they did and did want to emulate from them. They came up with their choices for the colors, style, look, and feel of the site.

The project then moved into the building stage. A Website Construction Committee, under the leadership of the 2010 Webmaster Seth Bookey, worked to create the test version of the site, based on the design the Committee came up with, in late 2010. The website builders used WordPress which SLA Global selected and purchased as the platform for all the Chapters to use for their websites.

In 2011, Stan Friedman took over as SLA-NY Webmaster and using the work of the Website Redesign Committee and Website Construction Committee, set up and rolled out the official new SLA-NY website in WordPress. It has been well received by the Board, Advisory Council and members. The new SLA-NY website will continue to grow in content and to serve the New York Chapter’s members, partners, friends, and visitors in more ways.

The President’s Award: Clara Cabrera.

The President’s Award recognizes members of the New York Chapter for outstanding contributions to SLA and/or for professional excellence.

The President’s Award: Clara Cabrera for her contributions to the Chapter. Clara has done so much for the chapter first as job blog coordinator and then as Library School Liaison. She has taken this most recent role to another level. She has spearheaded the organization of two outstanding and unprecedented events: the Student Swing at Poet’s House in September 2010 and the Career Kick-Off in March 2010. Both of these events accomplished so much for library students throughout the metropolitan area to become more familiar with SLA-NY and meet young professionals who are recent graduates and already in the field. Besides this, she regularly organizes casual Sunday brunches throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens for information professionals to get together very informally on a Sunday afternoon to network. She is a leader and people-connector and knows how to take great ideas and execute them for the good of the chapter, SLA as a whole and info pros generally.

SLA NY Awards’ Committee

Sarah Warner

Joan Morris

Judy Moseley

Previous Award Winners

2010: Stephen Kochoff, The Centennial Celebration Team, Rita Ormsby, Janet Peros

2009: Carol Ginsburg, Guy St. Clair, Vida Cohen, Donna Severino

2008: Pam Rollo, John Ganly, Bill Noorlander, Winter Shanck, Jamie Russell

2007: John Ganly, Kae Wells, Ellen Miller

2006: Lisa Ryan

2005: Sandra Kitt, Michael Rivas, Vandana Ranjan

2003: Agnes Mattis, Ellen Miller, Cliff Perry