The Technology Innovation Award: 10 Years and Going Strong!

 

By Ray Schwartz

This year is the tenth anniversary of the NJLA/ACRL Technology Innovation Award, recognizing the leadership of librarians in developing innovative technologies for academic libraries.  The Award honors a librarian or group of librarians for innovative use and application of technology in a New Jersey academic library, whether from a small or large institution. The award may be given either in recognition of a specific project, or for ongoing delivery of innovative technology applications. The purpose of the award is to recognize distinguished leadership in developing new technologies for academic libraries.  Selection criteria center upon the benefits and impacts of the innovative use of technology in four areas: a) library users, b) the information community, c) librarians and library operations, and d) the perception of the library/librarians in the academic setting.  The NJLA/ACRL Technology Committee is taking the opportunity of the NJLA’s Academic Luncheon on June 6th to commemorate this moment by having the former chair of the committee, Mary Mallery, and two former winners of the Award, Marie Saimbert and Kurt Wagner, speak about what they have learned since their work, achievements and where they intend to go from there.

This year, the Committee is pleased to announce that the NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Technology Innovation Award winners for 2012 are RUanalytic: Video annotation tool: enabling learning, transforming scholarly publication, led by Chad M. Mills, Rutgers Digital Library Architect, Grace Agnew, Associate University Librarian for Digital Library Systems and, Yang Yu, Rutgers Library Database Architect

The RUanalytic Team will demonstrate their project at the Technology Innovation Forum on Tuesday, June 5th, at the NJLA Conference in Atlantic City, NJ, along with the other four nominees for the Award, who will also demonstrate their individual projects:

  • Creating a Library Community in Blackboard Project – Steve Shapiro and Shunfa Li (Montclair University)
  • Embedding LibGuides into SOCS Project – Sharon Whitfield and John T. Oliver (The College of New Jersey)
  • The Implementation and Application of CORAL: An Open Source ERM System Project - Yongming Wang and Jia Mi (The College of New Jersey)
  • UMDNJ University Libraries—Going Mobile Project – Jenny Pierce and Yingting Zhang (UMDNJ)

The past ten years of winners of the Award are:

 *(2011) The NJVid Commercial Video Collection Project Team, a multi-institutional statewide effort led by:

  1. Sandra Miller, Co-Principal Investigator, NJVid IMLS Grant (William Paterson Univ.);
  2. Grace Agnew, Co-Principal Investigator, NJVid IMLS Grant (Rutgers U.);
  3. Sujay Daniel, NJVid Manager, NJEdge Senior Information System Architect; and
  4. Jane Hutchison, Chair, VALE Digital Media Committee (William Paterson Univ)

*(2010) Gary Golden and John Gibson, Rutgers University Libraries, Camden, for their "Access in the Stacks" remote touchscreen reference tool. To see their PowerPoint presentation and a listing of the other award nominees and their presentations, visit the Web page at: http://www.njla.org/njacrl/2010TechInnovForum.html.

*(2009) Kurt Wagner - Coordination & Project Management, James DeRose - System Administration, Tony Joachim - Application Development , Mark Sandford - Application Development, and Ray Schwartz - Application Development, at William Paterson University for the "Cheng Library Information-on-Demand Project.”  To see their PowerPoint presentation and a listing of the other award nominees and their presentations, visit the Web page at: http://www.njla.org/njacrl/2009TechInnovForum.html.

*(2008) Choong Hoong Liew, Web Designer; and Mei Ling Lo, Math/Computer Science Librarian, at Rutgers University for their "Rutgers Library Toolbar" project that extended and customized the LibX toolbar application, a free, open source extension for the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.  To see their PowerPoint presentation and other award nominees from 2008, visit the Web page at: http://www.njla.org/njacrl/2008TechInnovForum.html.

*(2007) Marie Konyne Saimbert, UMDNJ, for her "Creating New Library Spaces" projects that integrate new technologies in the instruction of medical information literacy in nursing and pharmacology. To see her PowerPoint presentation and a listing of the other award nominees and their presentations, visit the Web page at: http://www.njla.org/njacrl/2007TechInnovForum.html.

*(2006) Edward Corrado, Heather Moulaison, and Eric Thul, The College of New Jersey, for "Integrating RSS Feeds of New Library Acquisitions into a Course Management System" project;

*(2005) James Robertson, New Jersey Institute of Technology, for "Next-Gen Integrated Library Systems" project;

*(2004) Ronald Jantz and the FEDORA Implementation Team, Rutgers University Libraries. (Co-winner) for "FEDORA: A Framework for Creating a Digital Library Repository" project and

Edith Sirianni, Sidney Silverman Library, Bergen County Community College (Co-winner) for "Library Inventory System using PDA/Palm Scanner" project;

*(2003) Edward Corrado, System Administrator, Rider University Libraries, for his groundbreaking work in using Open Source Software (OSS) in library applications; and

*(2002) Sr. Anita Talar (Project Director), Beth Bloom, Marta Deyrup, and Xue-Ming Bao, Seton Hall University, for “Information Literacy in the Wired University” project.

Ray Schwartz, Chair of the NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Technology Committee, is a Systems Specialist Librarian at the David and Lorraine Cheng Library at William Paterson University.