Weekly Review

Gail Kennedy Named SLIS Outstanding Alumna:

Gail Kennedy, Director of the Lucille Little Fine Arts Library, will receive the 2011 School of Library and Information Science Outstanding Alumna Award. It will be presented during the SLIS alumni and awards banquet, to be held Friday, April 29. Gail was nominated by Professor Lois Chan, who wrote in her nominating letter: “In addition to her numerous important assignments in UK Libraries, Gail Kennedy has an extensive record of university service, including adjunct faculty member to what was then the College of Library and Information Science, when she taught cataloging and classification, library networks, and technical services.

Nationally, she has been active in ALA’s Library Leadership and Management Association, and currently is President of LLAMA. She has served as Chair of the Resources Section of the Resources and Technical Services Division received the KLA Outstanding Academic Librarian of the Year Award and has been President of the Kentucky Library network.”

For additional information and to make a reservation for the April 29th awards dinner please visit: http://www.uky.edu/CommInfoStudies/SLIS/students/banquet11.htm


UK Libraries Supports DanceBlue:

In a last-minute effort that was far beyond the typical laptop loan service, UK Libraries Audio-Visual Services provided laptops for students participating in the annual DanceBlue 24-hour dance marathon on February 18-19. The laptops allowed participants to connect with the outside world and share experiences from marathon. Nearly 700 dancers completed DanceBlue, and the sixth annual no-sitting, no-sleeping dance marathon raised $673,976.60 to benefit children with cancer and their families and cancer research.


Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History Receives War on Poverty Oral History Transcription Grant:

This grant from the Kentucky Oral History Commission will fund transcriptions for the War on Poverty Oral History Project which helps document the War on Poverty in the Appalachian region of Kentucky. Topics include the Appalachian Volunteers, Head Start programs, the Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program, conflicts between natives and “outsiders” and charges that volunteers were spreading communism, among other things. The War on Poverty was an important period in Kentucky history and this project has effectively documented many different facets of that major economic and cultural initiative.

UK Libraries Help Host Chinese Students and Faculty:

This past Tuesday UK Librarians Carla Cantagallo and Toni Greider hosted a group of faculty and students from Yangzhou University for a tour of the William T. Young Library. The group is part of the Yangzhou University Art Troupe visiting Lexington to celebrate the Spring Festival, which is the end of the Chinese New Year. On Tuesday evening the group performed at the Lyric Theater and before the performance UK Libraries was thanked for providing the official university gift to the President of Yangzhou University, a hand printed page from a woodcut by Victor Hammer of Lao Tzu along with a verse from the poem Tao Te Ching. The gift was much appreciated by our Chinese visitors and after the performance Toni Greider was greeted by the student who expressed their appreciation for the tour and the time they spent in Young Library.


Nancy Lewis Leaving UK Libraries:

Nancy Lewis has resigned from her position of Database Integrity & Special Projects Coordinator in the Collections and Technical Services Division. She heads the Binding and Shelf Prep Unit as well as the Database Integrity/Special Projects Unit. Nancy has a long and successful record of planning, managing, and implementing major technical processing projects with the goal of providing users with accurate bibliographic records and holdings information for UK Libraries collections. She makes the process of keeping track of our nearly 4 million volumes invisible as materials are transferred from one location to another within UK Libraries as well as the Print Archives. We thank her for her 15 years of excellent work for UK Libraries. Nancy's last day will be May 9.


Kate Hesseldenz Begins New Position In Special Collections:

Kate Hesseldenz has accepted the position of Staff Support Associate II in Special Collections and began work February 28. Kate is not new to Special Collections, where she was an editor in the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History since 2009 and, most recently, has been assisting with administrative duties for the division. She came to UK Libraries from the Kentucky Historical Society where she worked with education programs. Kate holds a B.A. in Art History from Indiana University and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Denver. Welcome, Kate!


Hold the Phone for InfoKat:

Two new features Tari Keller has recently added to InfoKat for patrons with mobile phones are a mobile interface for searching the catalog, and QR codes for searching the stacks. Users wishing to run a quick search on InfoKat from their mobile devices may now use a mobile friendly interface for running quick keyword, title, journal, author or subject searches which provides functions and results formatted for handheld screens. Patrons may also use their mobile devices to check their accounts for convenient, quick renewals on items already charged out. For QR codes, if users are searching InfoKat on a computer and cannot find a pen, pencil or paper to scrawl the location and call number on, now when viewing a record of the desired item they can use their QR enabled mobile device to quickly pull that location and call number onto their mobile device from the computer's screen. They may now point, click and dash to the stacks to pull their desired research material.


Thanks to Kelly Vickery, Toni Greider, Judy Sackett, Doug Boyd, Stacey Greenwell and SLIS for their contributions to the Weekly Review.


Terry Birdwhistell
Dean of Libraries