Tari Keller Selected as Recipient of Paul A. Willis Outstanding Faculty Award

I am pleased to announce Tari Keller as the winner of the Paul A. Willis Outstanding Faculty Award.

Perhaps our greatest responsibility as librarians is to ensure students, faculty, and members of the community have access to the information they need to study, teach, research, and grow intellectually.  As a cataloger and systems librarian in UK Libraries Tari has spent three decades doing just that.  She has been indispensible to the university and the Commonwealth of Kentucky as UK and other libraries transitioned from card catalogs to different versions of computerized catalogs and online searching.

In addition to the leadership, creativity, and innovation she has brought to her library career, Tari’s nominator highlighted her spirit of service, saying, “Along with being a consummate professional, and an expert Systems Librarian, I cannot say enough about what a thoughtful, giving, conscientious person Tari Keller is.  We certainly are lucky to have her at the University of Kentucky and the state of Kentucky has benefited greatly by her expertise, professionalism, and by her generosity of spirit.”

I hope you will all join me in congratulating Tari, and urge you to do so as well at the UK Libraries Annual Dinner April 11 where we will officially recognize Tari’s accomplishments.  The 2014 UK Libraries Annual Dinner will be held at the Marriott Griffin Gate on the evening of April 11. A cocktail hour will be followed by a full dinner, punctuated by recognition of Intellectual Achievement Award winner Karl Raitz of UK Arts and Sciences Department of Geography in addition to recognizing Tari.

Tickets for faculty, staff, and their guests are available for the discounted price of $30. Contact Carrie Poll, cpoll3@uky.edu, for more information.

Historical Archives Focus of Viva Mexico Talk

As part of the year-long Viva Mexico program, UK Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences will host a speaker on “Mexico on the Digital Frontier: Creating Access in Archives and Libraries.” Linda Arnold, professor emerita of history at Virginia Tech University, will speak on the topic on Wednesday., March 26, at 2 p.m. in the Niles Gallery of the Little Fine Arts Library. A reception will follow in the Lucille Little Fine Arts Library foyer.

Arnold spent 29 years at Virginia Tech, where she developed and taught more than a dozen undergraduate writing-intensive courses, and directed nearly 30 undergraduate independent studies.  A pioneer in digital history, she and  her students, created the “Mexican-American War and the Media” , a website that makes primary source documents on the Mexican–American War available for researchers.

Florida State hosts The Innovation Conference

Florida State University Libraries and the Panhandle Library Access Network (PLAN) are hosting The Innovation Conference on the campus of FSU-Panama City, August  14-15, 2014. More details are available at: https://www.lib.fsu.edu/innovationconference/. According to the conference planners, “If you are looking for ways to make your library more relevant, dynamic, and creative, you’ll want to attend.”

The event will be part conference and part workshop. Kate Nevins from Lyrasis will be one of the featured speakers. The call for presentation proposals is open until May 16. The workshop portion will be professionally facilitated by The Innovator’s DNA company (www.innovatorsdna.com).

For more information, contact Roy Ziegler at FSU (rziegler@fsu.edu, 850-644-3022).

THATCamp Offered at Clemson

The Humanities and Technology Camp (THATCamp) will be held at Clemson University on April 18. The participant-led “unconference” is designed to bring together faculty, staff, and departments for work on shared topics of interest. The unconference website is here: http://upstate2014.thatcamp.org/ .

The only requirement for attending the  THATCamp is that you propose a session. Sessions are not papers or presentations: they are invitations to a conversation, to teach, to make, or to play.

Michael Poston, editor and encoding architect of the Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Texts, will give a presentation.

Nancy Chambers Lair visits Special Collections

UK Libraries Special Collections had a very special visitor on Monday, March 17.  Nancy Chambers Lair, a member of UK Libraries faculty from 1956 through 1973, travelled from her home in Bloomington, Indiana, to view the current exhibitions related to the King Library Press in the King Building and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. 

Born in 1926 in Maben, West Virginia, Nancy received the M.S. in Library Service from Columbia University in 1956 and accepted a position as a cataloger at UK Libraries in July of that year.   She remembers many of the well-known UK librarians of times past including Margaret I. King, Catherine Katterjohn, Emilie Varden Smith, Jacqueline Bull, and Carolyn Hammer.  Head of Acquisitions from 1968 until 1973, she left UK to accept a position in Bloomington as a school media specialist.

In 1974 Nancy became a lecturer in the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, where she continued until her retirement in 1993.   At IU, Nancy taught cataloging, collection development, and humanities reference.  In retirement she spent time abroad teaching cataloging in Malawi .  She also sponsored a number of international students at Indiana University.  In 2004, Nancy received a Beta Phi Mu service award recognizing her contributions to library and information science.

Along with her dedicated service as a librarian and educator for over 37 years, Nancy was, and is, an avid hand press printer.  She was one of the original printers of High Noon Press, the precursor to the King Library Press founded by Carolyn Hammer in 1956.  Nancy worked on the first book printed here at UK Libraries, the 1956 printing of “The Marriage of Cock Robin & Jenny Wren” at High Noon Press.   She remained lifelong friends with Carolyn and Victor Hammer and, when she moved to Bloomington she took a press with her and continued printing at her home. 

The most recent book printed at Nancy’s press, The Press at Chelsea Court, is a 2014 edition of “Street Haunting:  a London Adventure,” by Virginia Woolf.  Nancy was assisted in this printing by her friend and protégé, Sarabeth Noggle, who accompanied her to Lexington.  Nancy dedicated the book to “Carolyn Hammer, teacher and friend, who opened the doors to the joys of the hand press and to the words of Virginia Woolf.”   Nancy and Sarabeth presented UK Libraries with copy no. 1 of “Street Haunting,” during their visit.

As part of their ongoing project to interview people associated with Carolyn Hammer through the King Library Press or other hand printing ventures, Susan E. King and Gail Kennedy will travel to Bloomington during the summer to conduct an oral history interview with Nancy Lair about Carolyn Hammer, hand printing, and her recollections of UK Libraries.