Two Teaching Assistants from MERIT have recently been honored with awards.  We are honored to have them on staff!

Matt Jabaily, Teaching Assistant for Course Integrated Instruction, was given a Library Staff Service Award.  This award recognizes staff members who demonstrate exemplary working relationships with colleagues or other people in the libraries, contribute to a welcome learning and researching environment, exhibit high-productivity along with teamwork, leadership and cooperation. Staff members that show creativity, initiative,  independence, and whose achievements and work significantly benefit the library are also intended to be recognized with these awards.

Catherine Phan, Teaching Assistant for Information and Instructional Services was named as the Outstanding Student Scholar from the School of Library and Information Studies.   From the news release, "Catherine received a B.A. in Chinese from UW-Madison in 2000. In addition to her academic achievements over the last two years, she has excelled in a variety of positions working in campus libraries including the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center metadata unit, the Southeast Asian bibliographer's office at Memorial Library, and the circulation unit at MERIT . She spent last year as the reference and instruction TA at MERIT. Additionally, Catherine serves as current chair of the WLA Support Staff Section. She has been involved with the Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums project since it began in April 2008."

In addition to the Oustanding Student Scholar award, Catherine was also selected as winner of the Dianne McAfee Hopkins Diversity Award.  From the news release, "This award was created in honor of Dianne McAfee Hopkins, the first African-American SLIS faculty member and committed leader in school library education, intellectual freedom, and diversity in the library profession. In 2004 the School, through its Diversity Committee, set forth a formal mission statement: to promote diversity within the profession through recruitment, curriculum, and programming at SLIS. This award is intended to recognize a student who's SLIS and extra-curricular activities support this mission. This year’s award is given to Catherine Phan for her work on the Tribal Libraries project and her work on an outreach project with the Evergreen Education Foundation to develop a book creation program for Tibetan middle-school students in China. In nominating Catherine, Gabe Gossett said, “While it would be easy to overlook her efforts at increasing diversity and serving diverse communities because she is modest by nature, few people are more deserving of recognition for their efforts and ability to see projects to fruition.”