Library Journal’s annual “Movers & Shakers” list recognizes professionals who are shaping the future of libraries in a variety of ways. The recently released 2013 class of Movers & Shakers includes two GSLIS alumni, Annette Bailey (MS ’01) and Maurice York (MS ’03), who have been recognized in the category of tech leaders.
Bailey is the assistant director for electronic resources and emerging technology services at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Libraries. She is a co-creator of LibX, an open-source browser toolbar that allows patrons to search library resources from the web.
An excerpt from the Library Journal article:
Around Virginia Tech University Libraries, Annette Bailey is known for her “determination, drive, intelligence, technical skills, and sheer moxie in serving end users,” in the words of nominator Carl Grant, who is executive advisor to the dean of university libraries Tyler Walters. These characteristics served Bailey well in steering a drive to deliver digital collections and services, launched when Walters came on board in March 2011. With no staff reporting to her at the time, Grant says, Bailey coordinated a diverse team within Virginia Tech’s technical services department to transform workflows and internal processes, as well as implement the library’s discovery tool.
Far beyond Virginia Tech, Bailey is hailed as the creator (with colleague Godmar Back) of LibX, the open source tool providing a solution for an all-too-common conundrum, i.e., library patrons scanning for web-based resources usually miss scholarly and library-owned materials altogether. A browser toolbar, LibX lets patrons search library resources—catalogs, databases, and more—directly from the web.
York is the head of information technology at North Carolina State University Libraries (NCSU). He is being recognized for his role as the head of a team that spent two years designing, prototyping, and testing cutting-edge technology before the opening of the high-tech James B. Hunt Jr. Library at NCSU in January 2013.
An excerpt from the Library Journal article:
When the cutting-edge James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University (NCSU) opened in January 2013, the media went mad for BookBot, the high-tech library’s robotic book retrieval system, which in less than five minutes can locate an item requested from the library’s 1.5 million–volume catalog, stored in 18,000 metal bins that use only one-ninth of the space of conventional shelving.
BookBot frees up a lot of space in the design of the library (which is larger than a football field) for features like a Visualization Lab, Game Lab, Maker space, large-scale displays, and 3-D printers and scanners. The school invested $9 million in these technologies at Hunt for collaboration and for creating and visualizing information and media.
These innovative features had an equally unique proving ground: the Technology Sandbox, a 1,700 square foot space on the NCSU campus where for two years Maurice York, head of IT for Hunt, and his 22-member team tested experimental and leading-edge technology with gaming and engineering students to learn how they’d interact with them and what it would take to support them. Without York—his “vision,” his “guidance,” his “pioneering collaboration,” says Kristin Antelman, NCSU director for the digital library—none of this would “have gotten out of the gate.”