Category: Recognition

I hope you’ll consider nominating a great Library colleague!!

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2022 YB Staff Award for Extraordinary Service

Oberlin College seeks to recognize an employee who has gone above and beyond in service to the institution and the Yeworkwha Belachew Staff Award provides an opportunity for this type of recognition.
The YB Award is named in honor of the extraordinary service of the late Yeworkwha Belachew, or YB, as she was known among Oberlin’s students, faculty, staff, and residents. YB served the Oberlin community for more than 35 years in a
variety of posts, most notably as ombudsperson and founder of the Oberlin College Dialogue Center (OCDC). The center was renamed to the Yeworkwha Belachew Center for Dialogue (YBCD) upon her retirement in 2016. Her legacy continues to touch, directly or indirectly, the lives of many people on campus.
YB was deeply proud of Oberlin’s history, and reminded us that Oberlin’s historic milestones—admitting students of all races, coeducation, civil rights in the 1960s, environmental sustainability—were produced by long, complex, and sometimes contentious political and social processes here and in the wider world.
The award was established in 2015 to recognize a non-faculty, institutional employee of the college or conservatory who demonstrates daily commitment and performance in advancing the college’s strategic goals through exemplary service to the college. It is said that one of YB’s precepts is that all of us at Oberlin need to be accountable for our words and our actions every single day. YB embodied Oberlin’s commitment to constantly struggling to overcome the world’s imperfections through education, hard work, and dialogue. She was the first award recipient and was presented with the award in April 2016, during the annual Continuous Staff Awards Dinner.
Criteria for Eligibility 
  • Administrative and Professional Staff (A&PS), Confidential, UAW union, OCOPE union, Safety and Security union, and Carpenter union employees are eligible for nomination.
  • Nominated employees must have been employed by the college for a minimum of one (1) year, at the time of nomination.
  • Past recipients are not eligible.
Past Recipients
  • 2016:  Yeworkwha Belachew, ombudsperson; founder of the Oberlin College Dialogue Center
  • 2017: Forrest Rose, science center biology department manager
  • 2018: Megan Mitchell, digital initiatives librarian
  • 2019:  Leondist DuVall, Campus Safety supervisor
  • 2020: Michael Rainaldi, Director of International Programs and Study Away
  • 2021: Andre Douglas, Area Coordinator for Multicultural and Identity-Based Communities
Know of someone who should be considered for this award? Nominate your candidate by March 31, 2022. The winner will be announced later this spring during the annual Continuous Service Awards presentations. To nominate someone, use this form.
For questions, please contact Beth Gonzales, Employment Operations Representative at 5-5576 or bgonzale@oberlin.edu.

Tim Keller presenting at ER&L 2022

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Tim Keller will be participating as speaker at the 2022 ER&L (Electronic Resources & Libraries) conference on Wednesday, presenting “This Presentation Will Make You Uncomfortable: Flagging Problematic Language in Discovery Tools” with Sarah Schaff and Ben Daigle. They will be talking about the Five Colleges (OH5) subject heading flagging project (detailed in Library Perspectives issue 65, ”Libraries participates in DEIA Flagging Project”).  In their own words:

The critical cataloging (#critcat) movement has shone new light on problematic language in our controlled vocabularies. This presentation highlights a collaboration by liberal arts college libraries to confront systemic bias in our discovery tools, not by “fixing” it, but by calling attention to it and inviting dialogue with our communities.

Congratulations to Tim and co-presenters!

Grace Hammond ’04 Wins Prestigious ALA Award

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Some people may remember Grace Hammond, class of 2004, who participated in the Libraries Mellon Librarian Recruitment Program and was named a Mellon Library Associate for 2004/05 academic year.  YALSA has selected her as the 2022 Innovation in Teen Services Award.   The program she created sounds really wonderful and has helped many teens through the stressful years of online and hybrid learning.

There is a note about her (with a photo) in Library Perspectives, Fall 2004 issue, page 4, which you can find in the Digital Commons.  Grace is the daughter of Mary and Steve Hammond, formerly co-pastors of Peace Community Church in Oberlin.