Harris County Public Library
Recipient: Linda Stevens, Materials Selection
I nominate Linda Stevens for Administrative Professional of the Year.
Linda has provided guidance, expertise and practical tips to our staff at the Clear Lake Freeman Branch Library.
She has created enormously large gap lists of music CDs, fiction and non-fiction DVDs and CD audiobooks for our branch and by doing so, helped us fill a large need for new book and music CDs and DVDs for our community.
Teamwork: Linda worked with the Branch Librarian, Assistant Branch Librarians in Children's and Adult Services, the Young Adult Librarian and other staff members at FM to create gap lists for Music CDs, Sports media DVDs, Travel DVDs, Children's Language CDs and DVDs, History and British mysteries DVDs and Adult Audiobooks on CD. The total dollar value of these lists is over $32,000. Linda created the lists after consulting with us, and checked back with us on numerous occasions to get our feedback about our collection needs. She understood that our needs are immediate, and worked diligently to finish compiling the lists in a very timely manner and placed the orders promptly. Our customers are enjoying the new media immensely.
Innovation: Linda Stevens created a one page list of tips to assist staff members in Circulation, Children's and Adult Services. She came to spend an entire day at our branch working with our staff and explaining the hows and whys of weeding and replacing audiovisual media. She gave the staff guidelines and specific examples of the HCPL way to handle collection development for our music CDs, non-fiction videos and DVDs, fiction videos and DVDs and children's kits and CDs. The CREW manual from the Texas State Library that librarians use for weeding guidelines does not address all the concerns and questions that staff members have about audio-visual media.
Linda gave us guidelines for us at HCPL about how many checkouts should be
expected from a VHS tape. Linda provided our staff with her interpretation
of how audiovisual weeding should be done including number of checkouts, timeliness, number of copies available and the availability of other subsitutes.
Job Performance: Linda Stevens is eager to assist our staff with media questions at any time. She consults with us to be sure she is locating titles that will fit the needs of our customers. Linda is cheerful, courteous, humorous, intelligent and hardworking. The day she came to spend the day at our branch, the electricity went off for over 4 hours. Linda stayed upstairs and kept working at weeding our collection even though the working conditions were not comfortable. She inspired our staff, and to this day, we continue to weed our media collections with confidence.
Leadership: Linda was invited to spend the day at the Clear Lake Freeman Branch. We set up a meeting where she met with about 10 staff members who work the most directly with weeding audiovisual materials. She created a quick tips sheet with guidelines for weeding. She then spent the rest of the day going through our adult non-fiction videos and DVDs, our audiobooks, our music CDs, children's kits and books on tape/CD and our fiction videos and DVDs. She calmed the staff by listening to their concerns about replacing popular videos and cassettes, and she encouraged them to put DVD and CD replacement copies on gap lists for our branch. The staff responded very positively to Linda's suggestions and guidance. All areas of the library's audiovisual collection have been weeded. The FM staff feels empowered to continue to monitor the A-V collections here - largely due to Linda Stevens' impact here.
Customer Service - Linda Stevens worked with the Branch Librarian and other staff members to weed the non-fiction videos and DVDs, and then encouraged us to move that collection to the first floor of the library. The FM customers have been delighted at discovering that our DVD collection is much larger and accessible to them on the first floor near the self check out stations. The media checkouts here are close to the Children's collection checkouts, and we know how important the DVD and music and book CDs are to our customers. We thank Linda for helping us provide better customer service by helping us get the a-v collection in shape so we could move more of it downstairs for easier access.
Recipient: Linda Stevens, Materials Selection
I nominate Linda Stevens for Administrative Professional of the Year.
Linda has provided guidance, expertise and practical tips to our staff at the Clear Lake Freeman Branch Library.
She has created enormously large gap lists of music CDs, fiction and non-fiction DVDs and CD audiobooks for our branch and by doing so, helped us fill a large need for new book and music CDs and DVDs for our community.
Teamwork: Linda worked with the Branch Librarian, Assistant Branch Librarians in Children's and Adult Services, the Young Adult Librarian and other staff members at FM to create gap lists for Music CDs, Sports media DVDs, Travel DVDs, Children's Language CDs and DVDs, History and British mysteries DVDs and Adult Audiobooks on CD. The total dollar value of these lists is over $32,000. Linda created the lists after consulting with us, and checked back with us on numerous occasions to get our feedback about our collection needs. She understood that our needs are immediate, and worked diligently to finish compiling the lists in a very timely manner and placed the orders promptly. Our customers are enjoying the new media immensely.
Innovation: Linda Stevens created a one page list of tips to assist staff members in Circulation, Children's and Adult Services. She came to spend an entire day at our branch working with our staff and explaining the hows and whys of weeding and replacing audiovisual media. She gave the staff guidelines and specific examples of the HCPL way to handle collection development for our music CDs, non-fiction videos and DVDs, fiction videos and DVDs and children's kits and CDs. The CREW manual from the Texas State Library that librarians use for weeding guidelines does not address all the concerns and questions that staff members have about audio-visual media.
Linda gave us guidelines for us at HCPL about how many checkouts should be
expected from a VHS tape. Linda provided our staff with her interpretation
of how audiovisual weeding should be done including number of checkouts, timeliness, number of copies available and the availability of other subsitutes.
Job Performance: Linda Stevens is eager to assist our staff with media questions at any time. She consults with us to be sure she is locating titles that will fit the needs of our customers. Linda is cheerful, courteous, humorous, intelligent and hardworking. The day she came to spend the day at our branch, the electricity went off for over 4 hours. Linda stayed upstairs and kept working at weeding our collection even though the working conditions were not comfortable. She inspired our staff, and to this day, we continue to weed our media collections with confidence.
Leadership: Linda was invited to spend the day at the Clear Lake Freeman Branch. We set up a meeting where she met with about 10 staff members who work the most directly with weeding audiovisual materials. She created a quick tips sheet with guidelines for weeding. She then spent the rest of the day going through our adult non-fiction videos and DVDs, our audiobooks, our music CDs, children's kits and books on tape/CD and our fiction videos and DVDs. She calmed the staff by listening to their concerns about replacing popular videos and cassettes, and she encouraged them to put DVD and CD replacement copies on gap lists for our branch. The staff responded very positively to Linda's suggestions and guidance. All areas of the library's audiovisual collection have been weeded. The FM staff feels empowered to continue to monitor the A-V collections here - largely due to Linda Stevens' impact here.
Customer Service - Linda Stevens worked with the Branch Librarian and other staff members to weed the non-fiction videos and DVDs, and then encouraged us to move that collection to the first floor of the library. The FM customers have been delighted at discovering that our DVD collection is much larger and accessible to them on the first floor near the self check out stations. The media checkouts here are close to the Children's collection checkouts, and we know how important the DVD and music and book CDs are to our customers. We thank Linda for helping us provide better customer service by helping us get the a-v collection in shape so we could move more of it downstairs for easier access.