The Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) at the Library of Congress announced the winners of its national awards for federal librarianship at the FEDLINK Spring Exposition on May 1, 2018, in Washington, D.C.

The awards recognize the many innovative ways that federal libraries, librarians and library technicians fulfill the information demands of the government, business and scholarly communities and the American public.

The names of the winners will remain on permanent display in the FEDLINK offices at the Library of Congress. Federal libraries and staff throughout the United States and abroad competed for the awards.

The 2017 FEDLINK award winners are recognized in the following three categories:

2017 Federal Libraries/Information Centers of the Year

This category acknowledges both a small library/information center with a staff of 10 or fewer employees and a larger library/information center with a staff of 11 or more employees.

Large Library/Information Center

The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Library (ERDC) at Vicksburg, Mississippi, is recognized for modernizing its knowledge-management services by collecting, digitizing and making rare and one-of-a-kind knowledge products of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) visible to common search engines.

This new, innovative digital repository, KnowledgeCore, hosts a variety of formats, including datasets, models, computer programs, images and video and audio recordings. ERDC’s metadata and site maps increased the discoverability of repository materials by 400 percent, with more than 100,000 views from 131 countries. It also responded to nearly 6,000 reference requests and offered citation assistance, archival consulting and the editing and digital publishing of more than 200 technical reports.

The ERDC also launched a new archival and oral history program to preserve and digitize historical knowledge materials from all USACE laboratories.

 

Small Library/Information Center

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Library at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, is recognized for its outstanding service as one of the lead library within EPA’s National Library Network. The library’s staff of five served a campus of 2,000 and maintained an overall customer-service rating of 98.8 percent. Its new service, research-impact reports, are designed to highlight the impact of EPA research and expand on traditional bibliometric methods, organizational information and visualizations in a portfolio-style product.

The library also provided customized, on-demand library training for teams and divisions on-site and online and produced short, task-based instructional videos as part of its desktop video series. Using a creative staffing model, the library developed a unique internship program for library science students earning their master’s degrees to gain professional work experience by providing key services at the EPA Library.

 

2017 Federal Librarian of the Year

Edward J. Poletti, chief of Learning Resources at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System, John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, is recognized for his dedication and his willingness to work on behalf of federal medical librarians to ensure that others, especially administrators, are aware of the value these librarians contribute to patient quality of care.

His innovation and promotion of a medical library value survey of more than 1,100 patient care providers, researchers and health administrators gathered data from nearly 80 medical facilities. His survey results demonstrated that federal health science libraries produced valuable information that positively affected practitioners’ choice of procedures and medication, ultimately improving patient care at federal medical facilities.

In addition to his work as the lead librarian for 16 regional libraries, he also volunteered to assist the Veterans Affairs (VA) Library Network’s Central Office Literature e-Alerts Program. As part of the programs committee, he helped establish and revise the search strategies for the alerts and, one day each week, he produced a current-awareness alert about articles written by VA authors and/or about veterans that appeared in PubMed MEDLINE articles.

 

2017 Federal Library Technician of the Year

Ozella Lee Gates, library technician at Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Command in Fort Gordon, Georgia, is recognized for her exemplary commitment and dedication to providing library services to a multitude of different medical center customers. She successfully and efficiently continued to support the research, educational and medical readiness of the medical center’s staff without additional staffing support for the library.

She served as the library’s only reference services provider and offered advanced reference and literatures searches. Well-known throughout the center for tirelessly resolving requests, she played a critical role in support for clinical training programs in allied heath, nursing and professional health care.

She also managed the library, its holdings and internet site. Gates catalogued all resources, taught monthly library resources classes to nursing staff, managed resource purchasing and updated licensed resources access. Dedicated to the center’s efforts, she fully supported the center’s mission to provide high quality, complex, patient-centered health care services and deliver military readiness through sustained medical education and multidisciplinary care.

 

For the latest information on the awards, please see the FEDLINK website at loc.gov/flicc/.

The Federal Library and Information Network is an organization of federal agencies working together to achieve the optimum use of the resources and facilities of federal libraries and information centers by promoting common services, coordinating and sharing available resources, and providing continuing professional education for federal library and information staff. FEDLINK serves as a forum for the discussion of the policies, programs, procedures and technologies that affect federal libraries and the information services they provide to their agencies, Congress, the federal courts and the American people.

The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States - and extensive materials from around the world - both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.  Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.