NJ State Library IT Head Receives Award for JerseyConnectRob Zangara recognized for project managementThe New Jersey State Library proudly announces that Director of Technology Rob Zangara has received a Leadership Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Project Management from Government Technology magazine. Zangara's work on JerseyConnect earned the attention and recognition of the magazine, which is associated with the Center for Digital Government based in California. JerseyConnect is a statewide network and technology services organization for public libraries and their patrons. "It's a pleasure to see that Rob's great work on JerseyConnect, which helps public libraries and benefits residents across New Jersey, is getting national recognition," said New Jersey State Librarian Norma E. Blake. The magazine's project management award recognizes "individual staff or managers who have shown extraordinary skill and responsibility in managing a specific technology related initiative through all phases of development from conceptualization to deployment." JerseyConnect grew out of the Hub Libraries Program that consisted of 14 separate networks geographically dispersed throughout the state. JerseyConnect, as a single statewide network and technology services organization, provides broadband Internet access, e-mail hosting, web site hosting, technical support and technology advisory services to public libraries. Two years in the planning and building, this program substantially reduces duplication of effort. JerseyConnect is a significant application of sharing resources and services for the benefit of public libraries and New Jersey residents. American Sign Language Story Hour Receives AwardThe ASL Story Hour, a regular event presented by New Jersey Library for the Blind and Handicapped, received the 2006 New Jersey Distinguished Governmental Agency Award. The award recognizes a "governmental entity that has developed outstanding recreation programs and services that demonstrate a commitment to the integration of people with and without disabilities." The award was presented to LBH May 24 at the Governor's Conference on Recreation for Individuals with Disabilities.  Attending the award presentation were Kindred Souls Canine owner Peter Campione and his therapy dog Toby, Acting Director of NJ Division of Community Affairs Richard Z. Osworth, Director of NJ Library Development Bureau Jeffery A. Kesper, Acting Director of NJ Library for the Blind and Handicapped Faith Lundgren, Traci Burton of Division of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, former Director of Library for the Blind and Handicapped Venetia Demson and Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf Superintendent Dennis Russell. Keresztury Earns Emerald Literati Network Award The Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence has recognized Tina Keresztury, Associate State Librarian, for her article, "Ten tips for advocacy: a look at cash for buildings" that was published in The Bottom Line: Managing Library Finances. Emerald, an internationally recognized company, is a leading English-language publisher of academic and professional literature in the fields of management and library services. Every year it invites each journal's Editorial Team to nominate what they feel has been that title's Outstanding Paper from the previous 12 months. Ms. Keresztury's paper has been selected among these and has been recognized as an Outstanding Paper at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2006 at the Public Library Association Conference.
NJSL's Bonnie Kunzel Honored as New Jersey Librarian of Year State Librarian Norma Blake congratulates LDB Youth Service Consultant Bonnie Kunzel after Bonnie was named NJLA's Librarian of the Year.
Recognized for work on behalf of Young Adult and Children's LiteracyBonnie Kunzel, Youth Services Consultant for the New Jersey State Library, was selected as Librarian of Year by the New Jersey Library Association at its annual conference recently. A pioneer in developing young adult literacy in the Garden State and across the country, Kunzel is recognized as a passionate advocate of library services that support young adult readers and foster literature specifically written for young adults to advance their literacy skills. New Jersey State Librarian Norma Blake, who herself was recognized as Librarian of the Year in 1999, said, "I am absolutely delighted to be working with Bonnie at the New Jersey State Library. She's been an outstanding advocate for youth services in New Jersey libraries for many years." Jeffrey A. Kesper, director of the New Jersey Library Development Bureau, said the new Librarian of the Year is an outstanding member of the Library Development Bureau and an excellent resource for the State of New Jersey. "Bonnie Kunzel is passionate about what she does and how she does it." Kunzel started her career as Young Adult librarian at Franklin Township Public Library and moved on to the New Brunswick Public as their YA librarian where she worked with a then small and relatively new NJLA Young Adult Section to establish the Garden State Teen Book Award program. Eventually Kunzel was asked to run for the NJLA executive board where she "was delighted to bring a youth services point of view." In 2001, while serving as Teen Specialist at Princeton Public Library, Kunzel was elected President of the Young Adult Library Services Association in which she is still active today. Hired by the New Jersey State Library as its Young Adult Services Consultant in the fall of 2002, the Somerset resident set up the New Jersey Young Adult and Children's listserv, which reaches approximately 500 children and young adult librarians across the state. Kesper describes Kunzel as a voracious reader and prolific communicator. "She has an encyclopedic knowledge of children's and young adult literature, and she uses that information to help educate the library field about new books and materials that will have an important impact on today's children and young adults." In her role with the State Library, Kunzel has been charged with running the statewide summer reading program that had been started in 2002. She introduced New Jersey to the Collaborative Summer Reading Program joining the forces of 36 states that share expenses and efforts to provide a high quality program reaching hundreds of thousands of children and youth each summer, including almost 80,000 in New Jersey last year. Kunzel said the collaborative continues to expand and will include 41 states next year. In reflecting on her work, Kunzel said, "My experiences as a Young Adult Librarian have been rich and varied." She's presented programs for Rutgers University including the Best of the Best in Young Adult Fiction and programs for libraries in the various regions of the state, "everything from Young Adult Books to Science Fiction and Literature to Every Child Ready to Read - all for librarians, who can then pass this important information on to the parents of babies, toddlers and preschoolers," she explained. Kunzel worked with the Urban Libraries Committee that put together last year's Statewide Literacy Conference. Her work supports the mission of the New Jersey State Library to help libraries across the state in providing services to the state's residents. In fact, Kunzel's expertise in young adult literacy has been sought by other states. "I have been asked to do other presentations in the surrounding states, New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware," noted Kunzel, who added, "I was the young the Young Adult Keynote Speaker at a recent Michigan Library Conference." She also was the only librarian invited to join a panel that presented to a group of Canadian publishers in Toronto where she helped them to "get a handle on the American market." New Jersey State Librarian Norma Blake noted the value of Kunzel's efforts to the library and the state. "Recently I've had occasion to look through my notes because I was asked to write my memoirs as a past president of the New Jersey Library Association. In looking back over the minutes from many Association meetings, I was struck by how frequently Bonnie's name was mentioned in terms of her work on behalf of children and young adults." A graduate of Rutgers School of Communication Information and Library Studies, Kunzel's passion is reflected in her general attitude toward her work. "I love to read and talk about books. I have loved spreading the word about teens and books, and now about babies and books," she said. "My favorite baby shower gift is a copy of the Jim Trelease Read Aloud Handbook, and a variety of baby books to go with it - board books, cloth books, floating books for the bathtub. You can't start introducing the joys of books and reading soon enough - or continue long enough - as far as I'm concerned." As the NJLA's new Librarian of the Year, Kunzel sees the issue of time as the chief challenge facing the advancement of literacy today. "There's not enough time for teens to read; not enough reading aloud being done in homes and in the schools; not enough males reading aloud to their children and teens." She feels there is too much time devoted to tests and "not enough time devoted to the pleasure to be found in the pages of a good book." Library Development Bureau of the NJSL wins national acclaim
The Library Development Bureau (LDB) of the New Jersey State Library is the 2005 recipient the Association for Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) Leadership Achievement Award presented by the ASCLA, a division of the American Library Association (ALA). This award gives national recognition for leadership and achievement in consulting, multi-type library cooperation and state library development. The honor acknowledges the LDB staff for their record of accomplishment during the past three years in bringing new initiatives for improving the quality of services and programs to libraries throughout the state of New Jersey. More The Successful Seven The Library Development Bureau consultants who made up this award winning team consisted of seven women from varied specializations who came to the New Jersey State Library believing they could make a difference and they have. We've outlined a brief description of their accomplishments. If you would like to learn more about a specific program or service, please feel free to email the responsible consultant. As with all great teams, there are those who work behind the scenes to contribute to the success of a project. Here at the Library Development Bureau our support staff has played that role time and time again. We would all like to express our gratitude to the Library Development Bureau's support staff: Casey Confoy, John Cooper, Laretha Hodge and Janice Holt. Their commitment has been invaluable in helping us to achieve our goals. Congratulations to all of you. Respectfully yours,
Consultant Susan Briant, an experienced public library director, planned the first ever-statewide Trustees Institute in 2003 and was attended by over 150 trustees. The second year of the institute in 2004 was another two-day program that attracted over 200 trustees. Corollary to assisting the trustees is to also provide educational opportunities for directors. A new library directors' orientation is held annually at the State Library in order to acquaint the directors with statewide laws and services. The response to this program has been so enthusiastic that Susan is now planning an additional program for "seasoned" directors. Her final major area of responsibility is to oversee a $500,000 grant that was awarded to the State Library by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to conduct a recruitment campaign in conjunction with Rutgers School of Communication, Library and Information Sciences and the Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative. This grant has allowed ten urban library staff to attend Thomas Edison State College to work on their bachelors' degrees; nine other staff to attend Rutgers to get their masters degree in library science and one staff member to begin work on a Ph.D. at Rutgers. For more information see:
A continuing education consultant, Peggy Cadigan came to the State Library in 2003 from a background of working in a large county library in New Jersey and immediately began making a statewide impact. In addition to assisting her colleagues with their continuing education programs she worked with others in the state (most notably Rutgers University and two of our four regional library cooperatives, INFOLINK and Highlands Regional Library Cooperative) to sponsor the first ever-state Diversity Conference in November 2004. Over 200 attendees were given information on serving patrons from diverse racial, cultural and physical disability backgrounds. She has also been instrumental in the state's Train-the-Trainer annual program, which emphasizes building training skills for librarians to use in conducting sessions with their co-workers and library clientele. Peggy is currently working on plans for a Futures Conference in 2005. For more information see:
Marketing took on a whole new look in 2003 with the launching of the Super Librarian campaign. Coordinated by Susan Kaplan, who previously worked in a special library setting, this statewide effort resulted in a cover story in Library Journal and numerous inquiries about our program from around the nation and the world. As year two begins, an online store of Super Librarian products is being made available and fund-raising expertise is being sought to continue this initiative. In addition, Susan is co-chair of the New Jersey Digital Highway. This was a second $500,000 award from IMLS to Rutgers, with the State Library as a partner, to develop a portal to the rich heritage of materials in NJ libraries, museums and archives, especially as they relate to the immigrant experience in our state. Finally, Susan has been the lead negotiator with database vendors as we launch our Knowledge Initiative, a high-end database collection aimed at the scientific and business community. For more information see:
NJSL Consultant Bonnie Kunzel, past president of YALSA and a sought-after speaker and writer in the areas of children and young adult services, was appointed in 2002. She has been instrumental in the development of a statewide summer reading program. This has been a major step forward in the availability of summer reading opportunities for New Jersey's children, as it has united the efforts of the State Library, the New Jersey Library Association and the state's four regional library cooperatives in order to set a higher standard for the quality of the materials offered and the statewide promotion of this program. Bonnie has also helped develop the program for an Annual Youth Services Forum and has been appointed to numerous advisory boards in the areas of education, after- school programming, the Center for the Book and New Jersey Network (public television). She keeps in constant communication with the field via her listserv, NJYAC, and has now created a Youth Services website, with book lists, book evaluations and award information. Bonnie's current plans include opening a book evaluation center at the State Library and hosting a first-ever Author's Conference, both in the Spring of 2005. For more information see:
Kathleen Moeller-Peiffer began her position at the State Library in 2003 after having worked in the area of grant-writing and information technology in an urban public library. Within four weeks she completed the grant application for the statewide Training Grant offered by the Gates Foundation, which was awarded in late 2003. With the funds from this grant, two technology summits were held for directors and technology administrators on emerging technologies for libraries; sessions were held for trainers on training across cultures and creative training techniques and three "E-rate for beginners" workshops were conducted. Internet training sessions for front-line staff will complete the training program. She wrote a second grant in 2004, and the State Library has now been awarded a Staying Connected grant, which will allow security workshops, audits and fixes to take place at public libraries throughout the state, as well as funding for replacement public access computers in these facilities. In addition to monitoring the state's federal LSTA and state grant programs to libraries, she has continued to work on grant projects with the library's development officer. Another project that was assigned during her first year on the job was the project of facilitating the transfer of librarian certification from the State Department of Education to Thomas Edison State College, which has resulted in the majority of these certificates being issued in just two weeks. For more information see:
Scherelene Schatz, who has an extensive background in interlibrary loan from her long academic library career, and her staff have single-handedly transformed the process of interlibrary loan throughout New Jersey. The previous interlibrary loan system was extremely labor-intensive, since it was a client-based system, so Scherelene and her staff traveled around the state doing the initial installation, and then had to return every time there was a software upgrade. When staff dissatisfaction in the field began to grow, Scherelene's department was charged with finding another vendor (web-based this time), getting buy-in from the library community for a second statewide system in as many years, signing up hundreds of libraries and training hundreds of librarians - all in less than six months! Interlibrary loan transactions are increasingly being filled in state thanks to Jersey Cat, which currently has 700 members and has processed 100,000 interlibrary loans in 2004. To further build on that statewide base, Jersey Clicks is now available. This portal allows federated searching of 15 of the 23 state funded databases. For more information see:
In the area of statistics and state aid, Victoria Rosch has brought us into the computer age. When she arrived in 2003, after spending the previous decade as a director of a county library system, she had to immediately figure out how to use multiple complex computer programs so that state aid checks could go out on time. She achieved this goal in the two months that she had prior to the deadline for the information being sent to the Treasury Department. After that achievement, Victoria began working on the public library statistical data and analysis booklets that are issued annually. In addition to the usual printed volumes that the libraries had been used to receiving, Victoria began posting all statistical information to the State Library's web site as soon as she has it compiled. She has also begun posting Per Capita State Aid information and has streamlined the process of notifying libraries of their award amounts, again using our web site and public library directors' listserv to keep librarians informed. For more information see: |
Susan Briant
Peggy Cadigan
Susan Kaplan
Bonnie Kunzel
Kathleen Moeller-Peiffer
Scherelene Schatz
Victoria Rosch