by The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that August’s Contributor of the Month is Sylvia Orner. Sylvia is the Head of Technical Services at the Scranton Public Library, which is part of the PaILS Consortium. Sylvia also currently serves as the Chair of PaILS’s Cataloging Committee.
One of our reasons for highlighting Sylvia this month is that she is a great example of someone whose local and state-level work have larger ramifications in the Evergreen Community — she has been able to effect changes that benefit all Evergreen users. “Just show up,” she says. “If there’s things that you can participate in, in your own state or consortium, get involved that way.”
Sylvia mentioned being particularly proud of the improvements to Patron Requests, released in 3.2. This project, funded by PaILS and Evergreen Indiana, ported the Patron Requests interface to the web client and addressed several bugfixes in that area. “It was great to see how something we wanted for a long time took shape and came together,” she said.
Sylvia joined Scranton library in 2015, shortly after they migrated to Evergreen. As she became more proficient with Cataloging in Evergreen, she has been able to use that knowledge to train libraries joining the PaILS Consortium. She notes, “Migrations can be stressful – and I can ease their worries about the Cataloging side of the process.”
The PaILS Cataloging Committee has been working to educate Consortium members about Cataloging in Evergreen, including holding quarterly information meetings for Consortium members to learn or refresh knowledge about a particular process. Sylvia has also encouraged Catalogers to take the first steps to participate in Launchpad, by doing things like adding heat to bugs.
Sylvia is the first Cataloger to be nominated for Contributor of the Month, and she was thrilled to hear that. “This is awesome for me as a public librarian, because Catalogers are often overlooked,” she said. “I’m doubly honored [to be the first cataloger nominated] and hopefully the first of many.”
Sylvia has shared her knowledge directly with the larger community as well, presenting at both the 2018 and 2019 Evergreen International Conferences. “I really think that this is a great community, everyone is so approachable and eager to share. I love that about librarians – we are all super helpful. Librarians have this aura of helpfulness.”
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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.
Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.