Barbara Halbrook

Committee Member Donna Arnold presents Barbara Halbrook with the Outstanding Performance Award

With passion, and in the words of the nominator, Barbara Halbrook “is willing to risk failure for the hope of success, invests time to review outcomes in depth and always remains flexible about tweaking the systems to improve.”

Some specifics of her impressive activity are:

1. Streamlining circulation functions and making them easier for staff to learn and use.
2. Increasing application of standardization of catalog records for greater convergence with other libraries worldwide, so positioning us to transition to a vendor-supplied catalog system if this becomes necessary in the future.
3. Identifying and highlighting the library’s unique assets, particularly the digitization projects occurring in Archives and Rare Books that present Becker Library to the world as a resource for scholarly and popular study in many disciplines.

Brian Herbeck

Brian Herbeck receives his Community Spirit Award from Committee Member Lilla Vekerdy

Though Brian Herbeck of the Facilities Management Department has many other assigned responsibilities throughout the Medical Center, he has made responding to calls from the Archives and Rare Books a priority. His work provides the peace of mind that the old manuscripts, records, books, and images are protected.

The special climate control systems for the 7th floor areas are particularly sensitive to weather changes and require periodic inspections. Brian goes above and beyond the recommended schedules for inspecting the systems and is innovative in heading off potential problems inherent to the systems and their installations. He makes the extra effort to check with ARB staff a day or two after a service has been completed to ensure that the systems are functioning optimally. Brian does not assume a problem has been resolved until it actually is.

For his outstanding assistance to the Library in meeting its service mission, Brian Herbeck is invited to accept the Community Spirit Award presented as part of the library’s peer recognition program.

Betsy Kelly

Betsy Kelly accepts her Bright Idea Award from Carol Coplin

Planning for any program or project is not easy work and making sure the program or project reaches its goals is hard work. Coming up with ways to determine quantifiable outcomes in order to ensure best activities and achieved goals is a particular challenge.

A logic model approach, that is a plan backwards to implement forwards methodology, was suggested by Betsy Kelly as a means for our library liaison program as we struggled to establish proper parameters for the program that would best serve our user community.

The usefulness of the “logic model” is borne out by the successful poster/paper presentation at the MLA 2006 conference where many librarians had great praise for this approach, and the relative success of the program so far in identifying the important values our users see in us as librarians and in determining the key traits we see in fostering collaborations. Such a model, and its key features, also made it is easier for us to plan and create an “Activity Reporting Database” for the liaison program.

For suggesting this bright idea and leading the logic model approach, Becker library colleagues recognize Betsy Kelly with the Bright Idea Award.

Neville Prendergast

Neville Prendergast receives his Bright Idea Award from Library director Paul Schoening

Somebody wrote that “the Peer Recognition Program is inspiring, and motivates fellow colleagues to work in our daily operations much better than the expected way.” Because of this program staff members have been recognized, who may not have been otherwise acknowledged, for their extraordinary accomplishments.

The creation or establishment of this staff recognition at Becker Library demonstrates a viable link between passion and enthusiasm for one’s work and how it is played out in the workplace as seen by others. Even the best administrators easily overlook those who contribute more to the institution than what they are expected to produce on the job – and a program of this nature helps to make a balance and to ensure that these folks are not lost in the shuffle.

For his initiative and hard work in developing and promoting staff recognition of the contributions of their peers, Becker library presents a Bright Idea Award to Neville Prendergast.

Kathy Ray

Felicia Watkins accepts the Outstanding Performance Award for Kathy Ray's parents from Committee Member Neville Prendergast. (Kathy Ray passed away in August 2006)

In May 2006 Kathy Ray was nominated for a Quality Service Award at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in recognition of outstanding customer service and professionalism.

As a Becker library staff member she continues to make brave efforts to serve her community and to make life-long learners of all the folks she comes across. She is lauded constantly by the Neonatal Nurse Practitioners for extraordinary service beyond duty, in providing them with needed resources, especially spending valuable time to track down obscure titles.

As one colleague said, “Having Kathy as a resource has made us all better clinicians and more knowledgeable practitioners.”

Lili Wang

In just a few short years, our fledgling Bioinformatics program has grown through the efforts of Lili Wang. At the recent MLA 2006 conference in Phoenix, the poster presentation describing our program was well received by librarians from some of our peer institutions. Also, WUSM’s Fall 2005 OUTLOOK magazine, in a lead article, featured the efforts of our Bioinformatics program to connect the library with our researchers through the efforts of classes developed specifically to address biomolecular and genetic research information tools and resources.

In early 2005, Lili was instrumental in the Becker Library’s collaborative effort to train researchers to use the “Spotfire” DecisionSite for Functional Genomics software. Lili Wang gladly took on the task to quickly get training and be ready to train others. Over a period of two months the library was able to successfully train close to 100 research faculty and lab staff – each person requiring six hours of training over two sessions. In between the planned classes, additional training for “independent straggler”s who could not make those sessions was readily arranged.

During that time Lili was also chosen as one of 25 (from among approximately 200 scientist and librarian applicants) for a NLM Fellowship in Medical Informatics training, at the prestigious Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, which she attended in May 2005.