“A great opportunity to promote impactful work ”: 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. The 2009 award went to the Library Faculty Association Open Access Policy at Oregon State University Libraries. We asked one of the project reps, Michael Boock, 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?

Receiving the ACRL-OR Award for Excellence in 2009 for passing an open access policy came as a huge surprise. We were thrilled that academic librarians in Oregon not only had heard about the passage of our Library Faculty Association Open Access Policy, but that they found the project to be worthy of such an auspicious award. I can safely say, on behalf of the many, many people at OSU Libraries and Press involved in passing and implementing this policy and the college-level and institution-level policies that followed, that the award signaled its importance, not only to fellow faculty and staff within our library, but to the wider community of academic librarians across the state.

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

Constantly and extensively. The Library Faculty Association open access policy served as a model for policies passed by the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (now the College of Earth, Oceanic, and Atmospheric Sciences) and the College of Forestry over the next two years. In June 2013, OSU became the second land grant university in the country to pass a Harvard-style institution-wide open access policy. The library served in a lead role in the passage of these policies and has been responsible for their implementation. As of March 1, 2018, there are over 8,000 Oregon State University faculty articles available open access in the ScholarsArchive@OSU institutional repository. We hope that universities, libraries, students, and citizens across the state have benefited from having immediate access to this research.

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

Related to this award specifically, I’m thrilled with the increase in the number of university open access policies that have been passed over the last several years across the country and the world. I’m also pleased with the increase in the number of open access journals in the LIS field, including the open access Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication whose editorial board includes several Oregon librarians.

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

As academic librarians, much of our work often happens behind the scenes. This award provides a great opportunity to identify and promote some of the impactful but not always well-recognized, work of our colleagues on behalf of our patrons.    
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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

css.php