The University Libraries’ Employee of the Month award is intended to recognize the special effort of faculty, staff, or student employees. The award is granted at the discretion of the Associate Director for Administration. To nominate an employee, please email a letter of support to John.Culshaw@colorado.edu.
March 2013 Employee of the Month:
Brittany Reed
We would like to nominate Brittany Reed for Employee of the Month. As the first working group coordinator after reorganization, she has set a standard for how these important cross-departmental units should function. Pulling together organizationally dispersed yet similar people, functions, issues, and challenges, she has led the Service Points Working Group through unchartered waters. SPWG's many accomplishments include:
* Putting into place customized routing slips
* Getting USB port locks for the copy/scan machines
* Reviewing and suggesting changes to hours (from and with MT)
* Getting the Norlin Desk/IM hours and schedule compiled
* Changing the time-out length for the copy/scan machines (w/LIT)
* Revising signs for the copy/scan machines (w/Carl Stewart)
* Creating the Norlin Research Desk Team as a subgroup and getting it going
* Working with Norlin Security to create a student position assigned to assisting branches late in the evenings
Brittany has done this while maintaining her high standards in the Earth Sciences Library and continuing her participation in Sciences Department activities. By doing both, we believe she is showing what it means to be a citizen of the Libraries.
Submitted by Katie Lage, Ilene Raynes, Naomi Heiser, Jack Maness, Jennifer Knievel
I would like to nominate Brittany Reed for “employee of the month” for her great leadership as a coordinator for Service Points Working Group. Her organizational and political skills, and her encouragement and optimism leads the group on strategizing and unifying services offered at all University Libraries service points. Thanks to her leadership skills the group achieved several important goals within a short period of time of existence: security presence in branch libraries, circulation policies and procedures, some technology issues, recommendations for unifying hours, etc.
Here are some responses from SPWG members:
“Brittany has displayed patience, organizational skills and diplomacy in her role as coordinator of the initial working group. She has taken on a sizeable additional workload and modeled leadership for all the other groups in the reorg.
-- Stephanie Yuhas
“As the first Chair of the first Working Group to be formed, Brittany has provided crucial and outstanding leadership in an uncertain time. She skillfully prioritized a significant backlog of issues left for the Group by the disbanding of several other committees and groups, making the group productive enough to address matters critical to daily operations across the Libraries. Her facilitation skills were also key to new professional relationships formed by Group members and in the Group's approach to communication with MT and other units.”
-- Emily Fidelman
Submitted by Erika Klein
February 2013 Employee of the Month:
Rhonda Flaningam, Jacob Kidd and Mallory Galey, Administration
Submitted by Shelley Joy, Administration
I would like to nominate Rhonda Flaningam, Jacob Kidd and Mallory Galey for Employees of the Month. All three have cheerfully stepped up to fill in for the vacancy we had when Danielle Haas resigned. They also have gladly helped train Danielle’s replacement, Amy Bolton. All of this extra work has not been easy.
Rhonda has taken on purchases which Danielle would have normally made spending many hours taking care of office supply and library supply requests.
Jacob has stepped in to make sure the Supply Room was manned and walk-in supply requests were filled. He made sure orders were delivered and helped clarify order requests.
Mallory has filled the lead role in managing and scheduling the student workers making sure the mail runs were made every day, mail was delivered within Norlin on time, and mailing/shipping schedules were met for incoming and outgoing mail and packages.
These three individuals have gone “above and way beyond” their normal duties and need to be recognized. I know this transition time has been hard for many departments and I thank them for their patience. But we would have been in much worse shape if they had not worked extra hard for us these past three months.
January 2013 Employee of the Month:
Tasha Funk, Map Library
Submitted by Ilene, Katie and Naomi, Map Library
The Map Library would like to nominate Tasha Funk as employee of the month. Tasha has worked in the Map Library for three years and was our only student employee this past summer. She is incredibly friendly and cheery and always does all the work we give her with a positive attitude and with a smile – no matter how tedious the assignment. She is extremely professional and gets all assignments done with little direction and with incredible efficiency.
This summer we have relied greatly on Tasha. She is always prompt and we counted on her for coverage if we needed to be away from the Map Library. We knew she would answer reference questions accurately and knew she’d give out the best possible customer service in our absence.
This summer Tasha completed a huge amount of outstanding projects in the Map Library. Tasha organized and assessed hundreds of gift aerial photos. She compared them to our current collection to avoid duplicates, she determined the locations of many of the photos (were they photos of Colorado or of some other state or country?), and she made a list of photos that we were not keeping in order to offer them to other map libraries. Tasha was also able to learn to do copy-cataloging very quickly, created hundreds of records for Colorado maps, and learned to work at the level of library staff in order to be sure the records were accurate and complete.
For us, the highlight of her summer work included creating a spreadsheet for our mining maps, so they are now more accessible to the public. Not only did Tasha create a spreadsheet, but she went a step further and made a Google map index to our Boulder County mining maps. She did this with very little direction. She researched how to create this index map and the results were amazing. We plan to showcase this index in Chinook and on our Map Library web page in the near future.
Our summer months would not have been nearly as productive without Tasha’s help. We are pleased to nominate Tasha for student employee of the month.
