By Jennifer Brown

On the 6^th July 2017 we held our 11^th Year Library Staff conference based upon the theme of “Excellence in Customer Service”.

Once more our staff awards categories was based upon our Values. Thank you to all those who submitted nominations and well done to all those who

• were nominated,
• were runner ups
• and those who were chosen as the winners

It was a difficult decision for the judges to pick the winners from a selection of really strong nominations.

Category for Collaboration

The nominees for this category were:

• Bernadette Flynn
• Sally Perry
• Subject Liaison Librarians
• Special Collections, Archives and Records

Winner – Subject Liaison Librarians [Adam Miller, Emily Selvidge, Giulia Garoli, Jacqui Smith, Kieron Jones, Liz Lawes, Robbie Lumsden, Sarah Burn, Suzanne Traue, Vanessa Freedman and Francine Wood]

Runner up – Sally Perry

 

Category for Empowerment

The nominees for this category were:

• Alan Bracey
• Angela Young

Winner – Angela Young

Runner up – Alan Bracey

 

Excellent Service

The nominees for this category were:

• Study Service Assistants (SSA’s)
• Simon Coates – Enquiry Services Manager
• Open Access Services
• Lass Library: Robbie Lumsden, Gillian Mackenzie, Sharon James, Simon Beesley, Nadia Marks, Max Pinarello & Makeba Adero
• IOE Information Literacy including Nazlin Bhimani, Rozz Evans, Francesca Ezzelino, Dan O’Connor, Sally Perry & Barbara Sakarya
• Liaison & Skills Support Team led by Cecile Dubuis
• Library Finance team
• Nadia Marks
• Open Access Team
• Dianne Stacey

Winner – LASS Library [Robbie Lumsden, Gillian Mackenzie, Sharon James, Simon Beesley, Nadia Marks, Max Pinarello, Makeba Adero].

Runner up – IOE Information Literacy [Nazlin Bhimani, Rozz Evans, Francesca Ezzelino, Dan O’Connor, Sally Perry & Barbara Sakarya]

 

Innovation

Nominees for this category:

• Research Data Support (Myriam Fellous-Sigrist & Daniel VanStrien)

• Daniel Kordik

Winner – Research Data Support Service [Myriam Fellous-Sigrist & Daniel Van Strien]

Runner up– Daniel Kordik

 

Mutual Respect

Nominees for this category:

• Bill Martin

• Queen Square Library

• Andy Pow

 

Winner – Queen Square Library – [Kate Brunskill, Rosanna Rizzo and Sandra Bamborough]

Runner up – Andy Pow

 

Above and Beyond

Nominees for this category:

• Daniel O’Connor
• Ken On
• Cumar Amerasingam
• Matthew Reynolds
• Freddie Linares

 

Winner – Daniel O’Connor

 

Further details regarding the nominations for the staff award 2017 runner-ups and winners are available on Moodle. Congratulations to all involved!

I consider myself very fortunate to be able to collaborate with some of the most wonderful people in the world – not just researchers who I work with regularly but also the librarians who I work with everyday. My most recent collaboration has been with the UCL IOE cataloguers, Christina Egan and Dianne Stacey.   Christina and Dianne have just finished cataloguing one of the most interesting of our Special Collections, Jerome Bruner’s MACOS or Man: A Course of Study Curriculum Project. The materials were donated to the library by Mr. Barry D.Varley-Tipton (see: http://newsamnews.ioe.ac.uk/2013/07/24/curriculum-project-macos-man-a-course-of-study/) in July 2013.

Man:  A Course of Study (commonly referred to by the acronym MACOS or M.A.C.O.S) is the brainchild of the American psychotherapist and Harvard academic Jerome Bruner.  Bruner believed that it was possible to teach children to be more humane and eliminate racism and ethnocentrism by studying another culture closely. He also believed that you can teach children complicated ideas using the ‘spiral curriculum’ method which introduces the same theme in increasing complexity over a period of time.

The successes of this collaborative Special Collections project have been partly due to the interest we all shared in the material but also because of the regular discussions Christina (who was tasked with managing the project) and I had over the course of several weeks. I am particularly indebted to Christina for masterminding the inclusion of additional terms which enhance the catalogued records and which will make it easier for users to find additional relevant content. Not only did Christina and Dianne ensure that the catalogue records contain all the necessary bibliographic and descriptive information as is custom and practice – but they also included information about content that we have which the MACOS site lacks and vice versa. We hope this additional information will be useful to other researchers and librarians.

MACOS is an example of one of the many curriculum projects that were devised in what has been referred to as the ‘Golden Age of the Curriculum’ in the US and in England. Now that the collections is fully catalogued, I hope researchers will be able to explore these materials which demonstrate so clearly Bruner’s pedagogic theories. The accompanying LibGuide at http://libguides.ioe.ac.uk/macos has been updated to provide links to the catalogue records.

Christina Egan who was in charge of this project has written about how she decided on what information to include in the catalogue records in the next post on Newsam News.