July 30,
2007
Librarian wins inaugural Messinger award
Suzanne Bell is the recipient of the first Messinger award, a $5,000 prize that honors the contributions of library staff.
Starting this year, the top performing River Campus
Libraries staffer will get the same kudos as his or her counterparts on the
University’s faculty.
For years a recognition award was given to the
employee who went the extra mile for the River Campus Libraries, but this
year a $5,000 award was attached to the honor, according to Ronald Dow, the
Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries.
The Messinger Library Recognition Award is named for
senior trustee Martin E. Messinger ’49, who is funding it. It was
modeled after the Goergen Awards that are given each year for
accomplishments in undergraduate learning in the College.
“I wanted to afford the library staff the same
level of recognition as the faculty,” says Messinger. “This
demonstrates that the work that they do in the library is as important as
any in the academic setting.”
The first recipient of the Messinger award is
librarian Suzanne Bell, who has enhanced the University’s use of
databases in a number of ways. She’s the main reason there are more
than 4,100 items in the University’s institutional repository, UR
Research, which holds papers and publications created by faculty and
students. She provides assistance and guidance to those using the
University’s subscription databases, and is the University’s
representative on campus for the largest collection of social science
datasets in the country, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and
Social Research. She has even written a textbook, The Librarian’s Guide to Online Searching, about combing through databases.
Bell impressed Messinger recently when she created a
specialized guide to all of the business databases available on campus. Dow
also notes that Bell was the first person on the library staff to take part
in an outreach effort by the library to hold office hours in academic
buildings around campus. Bell, who is the librarian for economics and data,
used to hold office hours Tuesday evenings at the Simon School’s
Career Resource Center. Her visits became a template for other subject
librarians who now hold similar office hours in their respective academic
departments.
Dow says Bell is the ideal recipient to receive the
first Messinger Award for all that she contributes to the academic
community.
“She’s incredibly energetic, personable,
intelligent, and a real model and inspiration in the library,” he
says. “She’s really someone you want to emulate in terms of her
spirit and the way she works with students and faculty.”
The Messinger award will be given annually to a River
Campus Libraries employee selected by the River Campus Libraries dean,
associate deans, and director of the Carlson Science Library. They will
consider contributions that advance the educational mission of the library
or the library profession.
Bell says she is very honored to receive the first
Messinger award and thinks it’s great recognition of the work she and
her colleagues do on campus every day.
“I think it is a wonderful development for the
River Campus Libraries in that it provides a tangible expression of the
value we bring to the academic life of campus,” she says.
Messinger is a major supporter of the
University’s library system. In addition to funding the new award,
he’s also given the University gifts to renovate one of the
periodical reading rooms in Rush Rhees Library in 1998 and the reference
and circulation desk area of the library in 2005.
Kate Perry is a social sciences publicist in the
Office of Communications.
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