SLA, like all associations, must continually ask this question of its members so it can adjust its programs, services, and other offerings to meet changing needs. But in a recent post on SLA’s community platform, Jill Hurst-Wahl, the 2021 recipient of SLA’s highest honor, the John Cotton Dana Award, posed that question to her fellow members in slightly different terms.

“At the recent SLA Town Hall, I was reminded of how being an SLA member benefitted my career,” she wrote. “So, I’m going to tell a story and then hope that EVERYONE who reads this contributes a story of how being an SLA member benefitted their career.”

Several SLA members took up Jill’s challenge; their stories, like Jill’s, are excerpted below. Some wrote about meeting fellow SLA members who later served as mentors; others wrote about new skills they learned that transferred to their jobs. The common thread in all of the posts was that SLA provided value—and is still providing value today—by helping advance their careers.

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About three decades ago, I was in need of information about a wealthy entrepreneur. This person had started several successful businesses, and I needed to know his background and career history. The problem was that he lived in a country that was not covered by the online databases at that time. In addition, he had already been very successful, so new articles about him didn’t capture his history. I used the SLA member directory to find librarians in that country. I emailed them, introduced myself as a member of SLA, told them what I needed, offered to pay for the information, and waited. And the information arrived! If I remember correctly, the information was faxed to me and there was no request to cover the cost. To my boss and client, I had pulled off an awesome deed! And I was able to do it because of SLA.
—Jill Hurst-Wahl

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I have often said I “grew up in SLA.” Initially I was involved with the Environmental Resources Division and SLA Illinois. I rose to leadership in SLA Illinois, thanks to some awesome mentors, and was president at the end of the 1990s. In that chapter I also had the opportunity to be part of the amazing “book team”—we wrote the 4th edition of the SLA imprint Special Libraries: A Guide for Management. I learned so many things running a large chapter, like running efficient meetings, budget planning, ways to work with headquarters staff to get information, how to run and evaluate programs, and how to do strategic planning, to name just a few. These skills usefully transferred to my workplaces.
—Sara Tompson

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I’ve gotten so much out of my membership in SLA, including some of the most AMAZING mentors anyone could ever hope for! Some of those mentorships were formal, but many of them were casual and built on a mutual passion for our profession and the impact specialized libraries and information professionals have on the people we support. SLA is a community of passionate, dedicated and dynamic people. Seek what you need and offer what you have to share. This is how we make SLA what we want and need it to be!
—Richard Huffine

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One of the many ways that SLA benefitted my career was the Middle Management Institute. I had recently been promoted to a management position and realized very quickly that my graduate studies had not included any pertinent courses. SLA’s MMI had four units; one course was offered each January and each June. All four could be completed in two years. I particularly remember the budgeting unit, which gave me exactly what I needed to prepare my first budget, and for all the other budgets that followed over the years.
—Ty Webb

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Within a year of becoming a professional librarian, I joined SLA. SLA gave me the opportunity for leadership positions that I may not have had in other library associations, and I’ve met some of the best folks at Leadership Symposia over the years, when we really got into doing some SLA work (and SLA fun!). When working on the 2017 Diversity & Inclusion Task Force, I got to meet some “way cool folks.” DICE work has been fulfilling and has, I think, led to some positive changes in SLA. All of this work in SLA has also been beneficial to my career advancement.
—Michael Sholinbeck

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At the SLA 2009 Annual Conference, I taught a half-day course for the SLA Engineering Division (now Community) on researching U.S. and international standards. In the audience was someone from a U.S. government agency. She came over afterward and told me she’d been following the work I was doing at my company (we published a lot of current awareness news) and how impressed she was with the course content. We connected on LinkedIn. In May 2010, I was laid off. That summer, the woman I met at SLA 2009 approached me through LinkedIn and asked me if I wanted to bid on a project to conduct an information audit. I put in the bid and won against two competitors. I delivered that project, and then I was brought on full-time as a remote contractor for two years. I worked on a lot of interesting projects and really enjoyed the culture, the people and the work. They then told me they weren’t renewing my contract because they wanted to hire me full-time. I know that I would never be in this super-cool job 8 years later had I not taught a course at that particular SLA conference!
—Karen Reczek

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SLA was the first library association I got involved with, mostly thanks to some classmates and Rebecca Vargha. For a time, I figured I was going to wind up in a special library setting after all, and so I just stuck with it. I moved into academia, but I have always liked how many niche things were in this organization. Having corporate engineering librarians to talk to helps out on my end with the education piece that I do, and several of the other communities that have tangential connections to engineering, like Competitive Intelligence or Legal, have usually put on some fascinating programs. I am not sure I would have found out about some of these fields or topics if it were not for this association.
—Zachary Painter

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SLA and SLA Europe have been great for me to keep believing in our place in the provision of library, information and knowledge (data, insights research, etc.) services. There were difficult times when my role or department was not valued or appreciated for what we did, but having a network of SLA professionals and libraries (physical and virtual) who were still providing important and vital services across the world inspired and motivated me. There are some members who have actually helped or informally mentored me personally and for work-related requests. SLA and its members still inspire me to this day, and definitely will do so in the future.
—Seema Rampersad

Stacey, a librarian in the Health Sciences Library at Virginia Commonwealth University, had submitted an abstract to present a contributed paper at SLA2020, which originally was scheduled for Charlotte in early June. But the COVID-19 pandemic upended that timetable, forcing the conference to be delayed until October 2020. Stacey knew she couldn’t attend an October conference—she’d be on maternity leave then—so she asked to postpone her paper until the 2021 Annual Conference.

The 2020 conference ultimately was moved to a virtual format, but by the time that decision was made, SLA had already approved Stacey’s request to postpone her paper until 2021. As it turns out, SLA2021 also was conducted virtually, so Stacey was able to pre-record her paper presentation from the comfort of her home.

By the time SLA2021 opened, Stacey’s paper, “Bringing Postdocs into the Fold: A Targeted Approach to Reaching an Underserved Health Sciences Population,” had been reviewed by a panel of SLA members and judged the best contributed paper submitted to the conference. The panel’s decision means that Stacey will receive free registration to SLA2022—which, like SLA2020, is scheduled to be onsite in Charlotte.

“Although this project was focused on health sciences, it can apply to any library,” wrote one reviewer who read Stacey’s paper. “The outreach tools used to inform of the services that libraries can provide can be adopted by all types that make up SLA, large and small, academic, hospital, business, etc. The adjustment to switch to virtual during the pandemic was well done.”

SLA2021 Poster Contest
Like the contributed papers, the posters presented at SLA2021 also were reviewed, although by a much larger cohort of judges—namely, SLA2021 attendees. The posters, all 23 of them, covered a range of topics, as these titles suggest:

• Exploring the Information-Gathering Limits of Secondary and Social Media Research;
• A Bibliometric Study of the Literature on Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications in Academic Libraries;
• Cloud Computing Applications in Libraries: A Case Study of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi; and
• Bootstrapping the Virtual Reference Desk: Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Outreach and Research in Post-Pandemic Special Libraries.

The posters were available for viewing throughout the conference and were presented by their authors during dedicated sessions on the next-to-last day of SLA2021. All attendees were encouraged to cast online ballots for the poster they considered the best. At the closing general session on August 13, SLA President Tara Murray Grove announced that a poster titled “E-books Need Call Numbers to be Discoverable,” created by Henrik Spoon, Adam Chandler, and Laura Daniels of Cornell University, had received the most votes.

“It was great to talk to the other poster presenter in my session, who represents McGraw Hill,” Henrik said. “That publisher’s e-book call numbers in the Cornell Library Catalog are quite complete, so she was pleased to see that on the poster and volunteered to relay this back to her colleagues. After the conference, the PAM [Physics-Astronomy-Math] Division main sponsor, IoP [Institute of Physics], inquired whether their e-books had good call numbers in our catalog. The analysis of those records is pending, but I will be happy to share the results with IoP.”

Like Stacey Wahl, Henrik (above) and his fellow poster authors, Adam (right) and Laura (below), will receive free registration to SLA’s 2022 Annual Conference, which is scheduled for July 29th through August 1st. Calls for abstracts for both the posters and contributed papers will be published several months prior to the conference. The paper abstracts are reviewed by a select panel of judges, who determine which abstracts will be approved to develop into papers.

Contributed papers presented at SLA Annual Conferences from 2013 through 2021 are available for viewing here. To learn more about the process of proposing and writing a contributed paper, read an overview here.

The posters that were presented at SLA2021 are being uploaded to the SLA Learning Hub and will be available for viewing later this year. The posters honored at the SLA 2020 Annual Conference can be viewed here.

When Jill receives the John Cotton Dana Award at SLA’s Honors and Awards Ceremony today, it will be a fitting tribute to a career that continues to address information challenges even in semi-retirement. The Dana Award, first presented in 1979, is granted to an information professional to recognize a lifetime of achievement as well as exceptional service to SLA and the library and information profession.

Rare is the SLA member who doesn’t know Jill, or at least know of her because of a quirk of her attire—a backpack. Jill and her backpack have been a fixture at SLA events since she joined SLA in 1990. Part educator, part business owner, part technology enthusiast, and all librarian, Jill has brought her unique mix of energy, idealism and pragmatism to every role she has played in SLA, and there have been many: business manager, archivist, and president of the Upstate New York Chapter; chair of the Association Networking Committee and the Second Life Workgroup; member of the Information Outlook Advisory Council, the Headquarters Building Committee, the Leadership and Management Community, the Baseball Caucus, the Information Technology Community, the Solo Librarians Community, and the Business and Finance Community. Notwithstanding these commitments, she somehow found time to serve on the SLA Board of Directors from 2011 to 2013.

It would be easy to attribute Jill’s service to SLA—and to the many other library and public service groups to which she belongs—to a burning desire to make a difference and improve her profession and her community. And while she has an abundance of desire, not to mention a strong work ethic and an unwavering moral compass, she has something else, something her ubiquitous backpack speaks to: a relentless curiosity. Jill is like an explorer, always seeking to learn more about the world around her, not afraid to ask questions, and always, always, always willing to share what she learns.

That passion for sharing information is evident in her long career on the faculty of Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, where she taught graduate courses on several topics, including copyright, information literacy, and collection development. It is evident as well in the dozens of journal and magazine articles, book chapters, and blog posts she has written, and in the many sessions she has presented and moderated at professional conferences and meetings.

Jill has been honored many times for her accomplishments. For example, she received an SLA Presidential Citation in 2008 for her leadership of the Second Life program, and in 2011 she received the Chapter Merit Award from the Upstate New York Chapter. A year later, in 2012, she received the Grieg Aspnes Outstanding Member Award from the SLA Information Technology Division. And those are just her SLA honors — she was honored by Syracuse University in 2012 with the Jeffrey Katzer Professor of the Year Award, which recognizes a full-time faculty member for outstanding teaching, advising and service.

But those who know Jill understand that the recognition she most cherishes is the respect of her peers and the many students she has taught at Syracuse. That respect was captured by a letter submitted on Jill’s behalf by an SLA member who was endorsing Jill for the John Cotton Dana Award.

“I am not in academia, and we are not in the same community within SLA, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t felt her presence in SLA,” the endorser wrote. “Seeing professionals like her at the helm of projects that I was not qualified for, or ready to participate in, gave me a role model to look at.”

Jill recently retired from Syracuse and has announced that she will be stepping back from SLA, but her relentless curiosity will surely get the best of her, so her retirement will be anything but retiring. She still has her business, Hurst Associates, Ltd., which works with a broad range of organizations to provide research, coaching, and project management services. She’s active in the EveryLibrary Institute and Library Futures, and she still blogs on topics that interest her. And her many former students and fellow SLA members know they can always reach out to her for advice.

All in all, it’s likely that Jill and her backpack will get a lot more wear and tear in the years ahead.

The two new Hall of Famers—James King, who died in March 2020 and is being inducted posthumously, and Penny Leach—will be honored Tuesday, August 3, at SLA’s Awards and Honors Ceremony. They will join more than 150 other special librarians who have entered SLA’s Hall of Fame since it was established in 1959, 50 years after the association was founded. The Hall of Fame recognizes service and contributions to SLA by mid- or late-career members and/or for lengthy distinguished service to an SLA community that has contributed to the success of the association.

James King
If James King had never joined SLA, he would still deserve respect and admiration as a librarian, a volunteer leader, and an innovator. At the National Institutes of Health, where he served as the library’s branch chief and information architect, James spent his career blending his background in information technology with librarianship to enhance and optimize library services. He focused on building partnerships across NIH to meet the information needs of researchers through the application of information tools.

James also volunteered his time and expertise to further the interests of the government library community. He served as chair of the Consortium of Naval Libraries and the National Research Library Alliance and also chaired the Libraries and Emerging Technologies Working Group of the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. In 2014, James was honored as the Federal Librarian of the Year by the Federal Library and Information Network, known as FEDLINK.

But it was his passion for SLA and his family that his SLA peers remember best, and with good reason. James joined SLA in 2003 and quickly became active in several communities, including the Washington, D.C. Chapter, the Maryland Chapter, the Military Libraries Division, the Information Technology Division, the Government Information Division, and the Information Futurists Caucus. He served as president of the Washington, D.C. Chapter in 2010 and convener of the Information Futurists Caucus from 2007 to 2010, and he was serving as chair of both the IT Community and the SLA Technology Advisory Council at the time of his death.

At the association level, James served on the SLA Board of Directors as chapter cabinet chair from 2014 to 2016, as chair of the SLA Nominating Committee in 2012, and on advisory councils for two SLA Annual Conferences—Seattle in 2008 and Philadelphia in 2011. He was named a Fellow of SLA in 2011, and he received a presidential citation from 2018 SLA President Roberto Sarmiento.

James was acutely interested in the intersection of technology and information and was honored in 2006 with SLA’s LexisNexis Innovations in Technology Award. He gave generously of his time to help SLA staff and members address technology challenges, and he spoke at SLA conferences and meetings on topics such as digital asset management and using data. He also took an active interest in advancing the careers of new and younger librarians, serving on the Advisory Board of Catholic University’s Department of Library and Information Science, where he earned his library degree in 2002.

If there was anything that exceeded James’s commitment to SLA and the library community, it was his love for his family. James was often accompanied at SLA events by his wife, Carla, and his daughter, Sarah. He was devoted to both and made a point of carving out time in his schedule to spend with them.

Penny Leach
Penny Leach has been a welcoming and nurturing presence in SLA for many years, helping new members feel at home, offering advice and mentoring assistance, and connecting younger librarians with longtime members who can help further their careers. She has projected that presence throughout SLA, especially in the Europe Community, the Leadership and Management Community, and, more recently, the Business and Finance Community. She chaired the Europe Chapter in 2007-2008 and has held numerous other positions in that community, including event planning and board nominations. She chaired the Leadership and Management Division in 2016 and has also served as that community’s conference planner. Within the Business and Finance Community, she has been especially active in the Corporate Information Centers Section and has supported the creation of a new award specifically to recognize excellence in corporate librarianship.

Penny frequently attends SLA Annual Conferences in North America and is known for her meticulous planning to ensure she makes the most of her time while attending them. Her skills at “working” the exhibit hall and engaging with vendors are legendary, as is her ability to make connections at business and social events and serve as a “walking ambassador” for SLA. When she returns home to the U.K., she makes it a point to share her experiences and insights with her colleagues who could not attend.

Penny is also renowned for her dedication to the information management profession and her support of her fellow information professionals. In addition to her involvement in SLA, she is an active member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and she sometimes “cross pollinates” the two by arranging for a member of one organization to write an article or deliver a presentation to the other. She recommends colleagues for awards or recognition, and she gladly shares advice and lessons learned with SLA and CILIP members who are taking on roles she has held previously.

As she has climbed the career ladder from acquisitions specialist at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies to associate director of business information services at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, she has never lost the “common touch” that endears her to nearly everyone who meets her. She is not only liked and admired but beloved, and she is more than deserving of induction into the SLA Hall of Fame.

The Awards and Honors Ceremony is free of charge and requires registration. It will be presented virtually on the Remo platform.

No wonder, then, that SLA Fellows typically are passionate about advancing the interests of their fellow information professionals, both through their service to SLA and to the profession at large. This is especially true of the 2021 class of Fellows—five special librarians with different backgrounds and interests but a common desire to expand opportunities for others.

The five—Parveen Babbar, Clara Cabrera, John DiGilio, Michael Sholinbeck and Laura Walesby—will join the ranks of SLA Fellows on August 3 during SLA’s Awards and Honors Ceremony. The ceremony is free of charge and requires registration; it will be presented virtually on the Remo platform.

Fellowship in SLA is bestowed on active, mid-career SLA members in recognition of their past, present and future service to the association and the profession. Individuals receiving this honor are able to use the title Fellow of the Special Libraries Association. The 2021 class of Fellows comprises the following SLA members:

Parveen Babbar
Parveen Babbar joined SLA in 2008, but his accomplishments over the past 13 years would easily fill a much longer career. He received the SLA Asian Chapter Award to attend the SLA 2010 Annual Conference in New Orleans. Three years later, he was presented the Bonnie Hilditch International Librarian Award by SLA’s Sci-Tech and Engineering Divisions to attend our 2013 conference in San Diego. In 2016, he received the Ann Koopman Sci-Tech Division Achievement Award to attend the annual conference in Philadelphia, then was honored with the 2019 SLA Engineering Librarian of the Year Award at SLA’s 2019 Annual Conference in Cleveland.

What has he done to deserve these honors? For starters, he has published and presented dozens of papers and posters on various aspects of librarianship and information management. He also has edited conference proceedings, designed learning modules and teaching courses, helped organize conferences, and served as a subject matter expert, reviewer, and panelist.

Within SLA, Parveen has been active in the Asia Community, serving as treasurer and secretary and this year as president-elect. Earlier this year, he and other leaders of SLA Asia received presidential citations for presenting a webinar series last year that drew thousands of attendees and promoted SLA to new audiences.

When he’s not writing, speaking, teaching, or otherwise spending his time and talents advancing SLA and our profession, he’s busy working at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where he is the deputy librarian. Or you’ll find him studying—he has earned a master’s degree in computer science and a doctorate in library science in addition to his master’s degree in library science.

Clara Cabrera
Like many SLA members, Clara got her first taste of SLA as a student, serving as an officer in her student group at the Pratt Institute. After receiving her degree, she immediately became active in the New York Chapter, volunteering as joblog coordinator and library school liaison and helping organize individual events, then becoming diversity co-chair in 2013. In 2019 she became events coordinator, a position she still holds today.

In 2017, then-SLA President Dee Magnoni tapped Clara to chair a task force on diversity and inclusion. That effort ultimately led to the creation of SLA’s Diversity, Inclusion, Community and Equity Community, also known as DICE, which Clara helps lead. She is now serving on two SLA task forces, one focusing on membership recruitment and the other on mentoring.

Clara’s work with the diversity and inclusion task force earned her a presidential citation in 2018, one of several honors she has received. She was named the Dana Gordon Special Librarian of the Year by the New York Community in 2017; that same year, the SLA Legal Division presented her with the Thomson Reuters Westlaw Award for Outstanding Achievement. In 2011, she was named an SLA Rising Star and received the President’s Award from the New York Chapter.

When Clara isn’t working at WilmerHale as a reference and research supervisor, she can sometimes be seen leading walking tours for the SLA New York Community. And speaking of walking—a few years ago, Clara spearheaded an effort to include the New York Community in the annual Queens Pride Parade. She even created a banner for community members to hold while walking in the parade.

John DiGilio
John DiGilio is probably best known for his service as treasurer of SLA from 2013 to 2015, when he helped lead the association through the transition to a new operations management model. His term as treasurer, however, was just one of many examples of John’s selfless dedication to SLA and the special librarian community.

John’s SLA journey reads like a “Who’s Who” biography entry: president of the Pittsburgh Chapter in 2002-2003; chair of the Legal Division in 2011; webmaster for the Baseball Caucus; chair of the Nominating Committee; ethics ambassador; convener of the Gay, Lesbian & Transgender Issues Caucus; member of the Leadership Advisory Council; and, of course, treasurer of SLA.

Along his journey, John has earned the respect of his colleagues, as evidenced by the many awards and honors he has received. He was given the Dialog Member Achievement Award in 2003 and the H.W. Wilson Company Award in 2005, and he was the inaugural recipient of the SLA Legal Division and Thomson Reuters Career Achievement Award in 2015. He also received a presidential citation for his leadership of the Finance Committee in 2015.

In addition to his service to SLA, John has shared his expertise with the information community through his many articles and blog posts for outlets such as The Lawyer’s Journal, The Information Management Journal, The Internet Lawyer, and iBraryGuy.com. His writings have addressed topics such as spotting fake news and validating information, the evidentiary acceptance of digital images, and the ethics of competitive intelligence.

John holds a law degree as well as a library science degree and has taught undergraduate courses in business law and ethics in addition to the legal research training he has delivered at the law firms where he has worked. He is now the firm-wide director of library services for Sidley Austin, where he manages a global team of more than 30 professional librarians and analysts.

Michael Sholinbeck
Michael Sholinbeck joined SLA in 2003 and got involved in the Environment & Resource Management Division, ERMD, now known as the Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Resources Community. He chaired ERMD in 2009 and later served as its archivist; in 2011, he received the division’s outstanding member award.

On the chapter side, Michael has been active in the SLA San Francisco Bay Area Community. He chaired the Bay Area’s Government Relations Committee for several years, publishing the Intersect Alert, a weekly compilation of stories on information policy, access, and other issues. He also helped organize an “Open Justice” event with speakers from MapLight and the California Attorney General’s Office. Michael served as president of the Bay Area Community in 2019 and led successful efforts to increase engagement in SLA and the San Francisco Community.

Like Clara Cabrera, Michael was tapped to serve on the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force in 2017, which led to the creation of DICE. He remains a co-leader of the DICE Community and has received SLA Presidential Citations for his efforts with the community and the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. As part of his volunteer work with DICE, Michael helped institute the inaugural SLA climate survey, which was sent to the membership in February 2020 and has already begun to result in changes in our processes and perspectives.

Since 2002, Michael has worked at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now the public health librarian at the Marian Koshland Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library. When he isn’t working or volunteering for SLA, he’s often cooking, walking around and collecting found objects, or pretending to be a rock ‘n’ roll drummer.

Laura Walesby
Laura Walesby has been working in libraries for almost 20 years, but she is still a new librarian at heart and is keenly interested in improving the experience of new librarians. She got involved in SLA as a student, she served as mentoring chair for the SLA Business and Finance Community for several years, and she chairs SLA’s Students and New Professionals Advisory Council. At the Gast Business Library at Michigan State University, which she heads, she mentors upcoming business librarians and advises them in their career decisions, work strategies, and professional development.

Laura is also deeply interested in learning and leadership, and her SLA experience speaks to both. She has served in conference programming roles with the Social Sciences and the Business and Finance Communities, and she has presented learning programs on topics ranging from vendor negotiations to leveraging technology to information literacy in the workplace. She served on the SLA Board of Directors from 2017 through 2019 and has held numerous leadership positions with the Business and Finance Community, including chair and secretary.

While on the SLA Board of Directors, Laura led a task force that developed recommendations for restructuring the association to make it more effective and efficient. She received a presidential citation for her efforts, as she did for her work in 2017 to help create a year-long set of training, conversation, and engagement opportunities.

Emma Antobam-Ntekudzi and Amy Stubbing will be honored by their peers, friends and family at SLA’s 2021 Awards and Honors Ceremony, which will take place virtually on August 3. They will be presented with the James M. Matarazzo Rising Star Award, which recognizes outstanding new SLA members who show exceptional promise of leadership and contribution to the association and profession. Nominees must have at least one but no more than five years of professional experience as an information professional, and must have been an SLA member for five years or fewer.

The award was first presented in 2009 and was called simply the SLA Rising Star Award. Beginning in 2019, the award was named for Jim Matarazzo, a longtime and beloved SLA member who died in 2018. Jim served on the faculty of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College for more than four decades, nurturing the careers of many aspiring librarians, and the Rising Star Award is a tribute to his dedication and passion.

Emma Antobam-Ntekudzi
Emma Antobam-Ntekudzi joined SLA only two years ago, and in that brief time she has already made a lasting impact on the association’s DEI programming. She leads a reading group in the Diversity, Inclusion, Community and Equity Community that focuses on black, indigenous, and people of color scholarship and the experience of marginalized communities. The group goes beyond just reading and discussing, however—it brainstorms actionable take-aways so other SLA communities can translate ideas into activities. That emphasis on actionable take-aways was also evident in two sessions Emma helped lead at the SLA 2020 Annual Conference, one titled “Witnessing Whiteness” and the other titled “Brainstorming DEI Programming.”

On the local level, Emma participated in a 2019 panel discussion about diversity and inclusion in library and information environments, sponsored by the SLA New York Community. This and other efforts prompted the New York Community to present Emma with its own Rising Star Award last year.

Attendees at SLA’s 2021 Annual Conference, which opens August 3, will see Emma’s name on the agenda again. She’s participating in a panel presentation titled “Compassionate Librarianship: Reframing Reference for the Virtual Space.”

Amy Stubbing
After joining SLA in 2017, Amy Stubbing quickly made her mark on the SLA Europe Community, serving as webinar coordinator and digital communications chair before becoming president-elect last year and president in 2021. She received the 2018 Early Career Conference Award from SLA Europe and the SLA Academic Community, and she received a scholarship from SLA to attend the 2019 Leadership Symposium in New Orleans.

Amy has also made a mark in the information profession, presenting at conferences on the topics of making data-driven decisions and managing collections. She writes about those topics as well—in fact, she has written a book, Data Driven Decisions: A Toolkit for Library and Information Professionals, that is due to be published in January 2022. And when she isn’t speaking or writing, she is busy mentoring colleagues and volunteering with other professional development groups.

The Awards and Honors Ceremony is free of charge and requires registration. It will be presented virtually on the Remo platform.

These and other initiatives were shared June 21 during SLA’s Mid-Year Committee Forum, which brought together leaders of SLA’s committees, advisory councils and task forces to present status reports on their 2021 activities. These groups are separate from SLA’s 50-plus communities, which represent geographic areas (such as the Maryland Community and the Southern California Community) and disciplines (e.g., the Engineering Community and the Taxonomy Community), but they are similar in that they provide SLA members with volunteer opportunities and undertake projects to enhance the member experience.

SLA’s Content Advisory Council, for example, has formed volunteer task forces to identify the many content resources within SLA pertaining to diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) and the evolving role of special libraries. These resources can take many forms, including the following:

• webinars presented by SLA or its communities;
• posts on SLA’s website or the websites of its communities
• education sessions at SLA annual conferences;
• papers or posters presented at conferences;
• articles in SLA’s magazine, Information Outlook; and
• posts on SLA’s community forum, SLA Connect.

“We often lose sight of all the great content everyone’s making,” said Brian McCann, systems and knowledge management librarian at Stinson LLP and co-chair of the Content Advisory Council. “We want to assess what we have in key content areas and consolidate access to what has been created.”

SLA’s Membership Recruitment Task Force, which was created by SLA’s Board of Directors and charged with reaching new and untapped audiences of potential members, has developed several recommendations, including creating a new-member portal on SLA’s website that would feature content and a “road map” specifically for new members. The road map would help new members understand how SLA is structured and what it has to offer and provide guidance on how to engage with fellow members and learn new skills and information.

“We really strongly believe that good recruitment efforts start with SLA showing its support of new members,” said task force chair JonLuc Christensen, records management specialist and lead FOIA liaison at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We want people to feel that when you join SLA, you’re going to be robustly supported from Day 1.”

To learn more about these and other committee, task force, and advisory council initiatives, visit the SLA Learning Hub and view the recording of the Mid-Year Forum.

A champion of forward-looking competencies for librarians and other information workers, Sylvia was a prolific writer and speaker and took a particular interest in mentoring and coaching women in the library profession, especially women in developing countries such as Vietnam and Laos. She also pushed for improved electronic access to information resources and made “virtualization” the theme of her tenure as SLA president.

Sylvia earned her library science degree from McGill University in 1979 and later worked as a librarian at the university, where her husband was a professor of linguistics. She enjoyed a long career in corporate librarianship, working with the Bank of Montreal, Canadian National Railway, and the World Bank, among others. She also served as a consultant to major North American companies on managing information and reengineering information services.

Within SLA, Sylvia served in leadership roles in a wide range of committees, councils, and communities, including Eastern Canada, Social Science, Business & Finance, Sub-Saharan Africa, Information Technology, Strategic Planning, and Leadership & Management. She was also active in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), presenting several papers and chairing conferences, and served on the board of directors of Librarians without Borders.

SLA’s Eastern Canada Chapter honored Sylvia as its Information Professional of the Year in 1995. In 2000, Sylvia was named a Fellow of SLA in recognition of her past, present and future service to the association and the profession.

Sylvia remained active in the profession and SLA long after she retired from full-time employment, speaking and writing on topics such as “Career Management for the Evolving Workplace” and “Advocating for the Role of Knowledge Management in Organizations as the Catalyst for Supporting the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.” She pushed for librarians and information professionals to take the lead in adopting new information technologies and using them to enhance their information management capabilities.

“The sky is the limit for librarians if they want to grab it and take charge of it and not let the technology people take it over from them,” she said during an April 2019 SLA webchat on the future of SLA. “We have a big role to play, because that’s what a lot of the disruptive technology is doing—it’s looking after information, and that is really our area of responsibility and expertise.”

Neither Thea Warner nor Vicky Bellon saw the pandemic coming, but both came out of it better prepared than when they entered it thanks to SLA’s certificate program in competitive and decision intelligence (CDI).

“I’m always looking to add to my learning and my skill set,” says Thea, a law librarian at Niles, Barton & Wilmer, LLP, in Baltimore. “I went to a mini-conference and heard a woman from a larger law firm speak, and she said that primarily what she did was competitive intelligence. It just sounded really interesting, so I started looking into it.”

What appealed to her about SLA’s CDI certificate program were its flexibility and its opportunities to interact with other special librarians who don’t work in legal environments.

“I could listen to the lectures at my convenience,” Thea says. “I would frequently go back and listen to lectures a second or third time, that was that was really helpful. And I got to interact with a lot of people that I never would have—a lot of people in the corporate world. And that really added to the experience, getting those different perspectives, not just from other law information professionals.”

The CDI certificate program offers two certificate options:

• the Competitive & Decision Intelligence for LIS Professionals “Core” Certificate, which requires 14 courses; and
• the Competitive & Decision Intelligence Information Function Certificate, which requires 9 courses.

Like Thea, Vicky Bellon appreciated the flexibility of the CDI program—it allowed her to apply her newfound skills as she was learning them, as opposed to learning them in a concentrated dose at a three-day conference or workshop. Vicky also felt that learning about competitive intelligence from a librarian would provide her with insights she couldn’t obtain from a corporate trainer.

“I knew that Cynthia had been a librarian at one point before she moved into competitive intelligence, so I felt this would be a good entry for me into the area,” says Vicky, a senior technical & business insights researcher at Land O’Lakes in Michigan. “She’s probably the most supportive teacher I’ve ever known, even in my college career. She’s always there to answer questions that you might have, but she does it in such a positive way. You never feel like what you’re asking is a stupid question, even if it might be.

“And rather than spending many thousands of dollars going away for a four-day course somewhere, I thought, let’s take this step by step—let’s take the two years to gradually work through this course. I really feel like that was the best decision, taking the two years to gradually develop the skills and then use them along the way. It gave me the confidence to move into the area fully.”

The courses in the CDI certificate program can be taken in any order. The introductory course, INTEL-01, “Competitive & Decision Intelligence: Essentials, Ethics, & Current Practices,” will be offered in July, as will INTEL-13, “Establishing & Managing an Intelligence Program.” In August, two more courses—INTEL-07, “Human Source Intelligence,” and INTEL-04, “Intelligence Published Source Collection: Research 1,” are being taught. INTEL-01 costs just $295 for SLA members; other individual courses are $495 for SLA members. The courses are also available to non-members.

With its online format, à la carte approach, and supportive, librarian-led instruction, the CDI certificate program offers more for less than other competitive intelligence trainings. And then there are the intangible benefits, including the confidence that comes not just from learning new skills but also from applying those skills in ways you never expected.

“There’s something very satisfying about being involved with scientists and engineers and pushing ideas up through your organization and giving presentations at the executive leadership level, which I never thought I would be doing before,” Vicky says. “And this program gave me the confidence to do that.”

The candidates who are elected will serve three-year terms, commencing in January 2022. The 2023 president will serve as president-elect in 2022 and immediate past president in 2024.

The candidates for president are as follows:

Nabi Hasan is head of the Central Library at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and immediate past president of the SLA Asia Community. He previously served as the university librarian of Aligarh Muslim University, one of India’s leading multi-disciplinary institutions, whose library system is the second-largest in Asia and the largest in India. He was part of three different teams that received SLA Presidential Citations earlier this year for their leadership in 2020: the 2020 Annual Conference Advisory Council (for its success in transitioning the 2020 Annual Conference from an in-person to a virtual event), the Task Force on Reopening Specialized Libraries (for developing resources and presenting roundtable discussions on safely reopening libraries), and the SLA Asia Community (for presenting a webinar series that drew thousands of attendees and promoted SLA to new audiences).

Richard Huffine specializes in providing strategic direction and high-level perspective on the acquisition, management and delivery of information in the government sector. He has worked the past three years at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), where he is chief of the library and public information center; previously, he was an adjunct instructor at Catholic University’s School of Library and Information Science, a librarian at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a senior director at ProQuest, library director at the U.S. Geological Survey, and national library network director at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is president of SLA’s Washington, D.C. Community, was the founding chair of SLA’s Government Information Division, chaired the 2018 Annual Conference Advisory Council, and served on the SLA Board of Directors from 2010 through 2013. He was named a Fellow of SLA in 2017.

Seema Rampersad is senior business researcher and service manager at The British Library, where she has worked since 2012. She previously worked as a systems manager at the Greater London Authority, as a business research executive at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and as a librarian at Coopers and Lybrand. She chairs SLA’s Task Force on Reopening Specialized Libraries, served as president of SLA’s Europe Community in 2020, and served as a moderator of SLA InfoTrends in both 2020 and 2021. She has received SLA presidential citations for her work in 2018 on the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force and her leadership of the Task Force on Reopening Specialized Libraries in 2020.

Shelly Ray is principal transportation planner for research and records information management at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where she supports the development and integration of electronic records management systems. She is the immediate past president of the SLA Southern California Community, a member of the SLA Membership Advisory Council, and a member of the SLA Governance and Strategy Subcommittee. While an MLIS student at UCLA, she served as webmaster and later as president of the SLA student group at the university. Prior to becoming a librarian, she worked in business publishing. Since earning her library degree, she has worked as a consultant in e-learning program development, digital asset management, and database engineering.

The candidate who receives the most votes will serve as president-elect of SLA in 2022, president in 2023, and immediate past president in 2024. The election will be conducted by online balloting in September 2021.

In addition to the candidates for 2023 president, eleven other SLA members are competing for four director positions on the board:

• Anne Barker (United States)
• Jonathan-Lucas “JonLuc” Christensen (United States)
• Eugene Giudice (United States)
• Zahra Kamarei (United States)
• Debal Kar (India)
• Jessica King (United States)
• Heather Kotula (United States)
• John Kromer (United States)
• Kendra Levine (United States)
• Ty Webb (United States)
• Craig Wingrove (United States)

Members can vote for up to four director candidates. The four candidates who receive the most votes will serve three-year terms beginning in January 2022.