“We need to elevate & recognize”: Past ACRL-OR Awards for Excellence revisited!

The ACRL-Oregon Award for Excellence recognizes a project that demonstrates excellence in the field by significantly improving Oregon academic libraries or librarianship. Help us recognize the great work of our colleagues — your nominations matter!

This year’s nominations are open! We’re checking in with past recipients to get project updates and hear what the award meant for them. One of the 2012 awards went to the Journal for Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. We asked project rep Isaac Gilman to reflect on the award and to give us an update on the status of the project.

What did receiving this award mean to you or your team?

We received the award about a year after we started the journal, so it was great to have some early affirmation that others saw what we were doing as interesting and important (it wasn’t just us!)

How has this project evolved or changed since receiving the award?

The journal is still being published, although it is in the hands of new editors now. The fundamental structure and approach of the journal haven’t changed, but we did migrate publishing platforms in 2016.

What’s happening in or around our profession that you’re really excited about?

There is (rightly) concern about the consolidation of scholarly communication infrastructure (e.g. publishing, repositories, activity tracking, citations, research metrics, etc) in the hands of large commercial interests, and the movement that has started to create an alternative, collaborative open infrastructure is quite interesting. But I’m excited about another kind of consolidation that I think is good—more and more, we’re seeing academic libraries take on responsibility for additional academic student services. Bringing these into the library creates new opportunities to better coordinate traditional library services with these other areas, which can have a positive impact for students, and can help ensure students know about, and use, services that can help them succeed.

Why should someone nominate a project for the ACRL-OR Award for Excellence?

There are, of course, exceptions, but I generally find that people who work in libraries are quite humble about their achievements. There is incredible work going on all around us, and we need to elevate it and recognize it, especially for our colleagues who would never dream of doing that for themselves! And nominating projects for this award brings them additional visibility, which can lead to new collaborations as well.

More information on the nomination process and past winners can be found on the ACRL-Oregon website. The nomination period closes at 11:59pm on August 31, 2018.

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