On September 30, 2006, as part of the Library School Reunion activities, awards were presented to five outstanding alumni at a special Minerva Awards ceremony held in Milne Library. The Minerva Award recognizes alumni of Geneseo’s School of Library and Information Science (or the earlier Department of Library Education) who have demonstrated outstanding service, contributions or scholarship to the field of library science. A total of five awards are given in each of the following areas: Academic, Public, School, Special and Other.
For the past four years, Pat has been Mt. Holyoke College’s chief information officer and executive director of the library, managing a staff of 75 and an annual budget $7.5 million. Under Pat’s leadership, the library there earned the prestigious ACRL Award for Academic Excellence in 2005. She was previously director of libraries at RIT, where she developed digital image-based collections.
Pat has provided leadership in statewide consortial database purchases and has shown tireless service to the profession, including serving as Chair of the OCLC International Task Force on Elearning and as New York State representative for the OCLC Users Council, to name just two. She also co-founded Partners in Information and Innovation (PI2), which brought many New York state private colleges together in a consortium.
Pat has spoken at every major national conference on librarianship and information technology, and has recently accepted the Gannett chair at RIT, one of five endowed professorships in the Schools of Print Media and Photographic Arts & Sciences.
Marian spent her early career as a school librarian in the Dansville elementary school (where she also excelled), but she received the Minerva Award for Public Librarianship award for her outstanding work as the director of Wayland Free Library. While there, she spearheaded the library’s building expansion, developed an extensive outreach program and implemented more than150 annual programs to meet the needs of both adults and children.
Marian has been the recipient of several awards, including the New York Times Librarian of the Year in 2003. She has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to lifelong literacy and to service to the community.
Claire was the Library Media Specialist for the Peekskill City School District for 42 years, in which time she created and managed modern library media centers at each of the four elementary schools. For 15 summers she organized and coordinated the highly successful “Reading Is Fundamental” summer program, where she renovated an old bus -- called the RIFmobile -- and sent volunteers to provide new books for students to read and keep. She also spent several summers working for the Division of Library Development at the New York State Education Department.
Claire has served as a library consultant for many school districts and as a program advisor for the educational television channel serving New York City. An avid theater-goer herself, she would raise money selling cookies and collecting tin cans to take busloads of students to plays and operas in New York City.
She has received numerous awards from the International Reading Association, the New York State School Librarians, the American Association of University Women, and the Field Library in Peekskill where, in 1998, Clare was honored with the distinguished Chester A. Smith Award. On September 15, 2003, Peekskill proclaimed that day as Claire M. Finnigan Day.
Mary has worn many hats, all of them quite special, and can be called something of an “Ambassador Librarian to the World.” During her colorful career, she has served as a medical librarian at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and as a U.S. Air Force base librarian near Frankfurt, Germany.
More recently, Mary established and managed the Peace Corps Library in South Africa for the “most diverse Peace Corps group in its history,” as expressly required by Nelson Mandela himself. She has spent the last eleven years volunteering at the Cultural History Museum in Pretoria, South Africa researching, exhibiting, and otherwise promoting the Bushman to the rest of the world.
Joe’s career has been so remarkable and his accomplishments so great that it’s very difficult to present an accurate picture in just a few brief sentences. He has served as the State Librarian of three states – Nevada, Ohio and, for 19 years, New York. He also served on the board of OCLC during its early years, when it was establishing itself as an international system, as well as on the planning team for two White House Conferences on Library and Information Services and on the advisory committee for the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book.
Joe has worked with the Indian nations in Ohio to establish public libraries on reservations and as assistant director of the American Library Association International Relations Office, where he secured travel grants and internships for librarians from Africa and the Middle East.
To sum up in the words of his nominators, “Joe Shubert has been an outstanding representative of Geneseo during his remarkable 50-year career, working with people in small and large library systems on local, state and national library concerns.”