Birmingham Public Library Staff Win National Awards

Birmingham Public Library has received three Be Innovative! awards from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. III provides software to public, academic, special and school libraries in the US and 40 countries for managing, ordering, processing, and circulating library materials. This awards program recognizes the creative and outstanding uses of Innovative products. The Birmingham Public Library is the only library, worldwide, to receive this award three times.

Jane Keeton, Acquisitions Department head, received the Most Innovative Staff Module award at the 2004 Innovative Users Group Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, for the introduction of the immensely popular Best Sellers Club. This club allows the patrons of the Birmingham Public Library automatic reserves of newly published books of fiction penned by their favorite authors. Currently, 1,980 patrons use this service and more are added daily.

Melinda Shelton, webmaster for the library, accepted the award for the Most Innovative Marketing of Millennium Products/Features at the 2007 Innovative Users Group Conference in San Jose, California. Shelton designed and linked features from the Innovative Interfaces system to the library’s MySpace page to allow direct searching of the catalog, new materials list, and other online content.

Tobin Cataldo, Information Systems Manager, accepted the Most Innovative Implementation of E-resource Discovery award at the 2008 Innovative Users Group Conference in Washington, D.C. Cataldo created links in the online library catalog to allow patrons to easily access other recommendations for similar titles or genres found on Amazon.com.

All three of these librarians have worked to carry out the mission statement of the Birmingham Public Library to “provide the highest quality library service for lifelong learning, cultural enrichment, and recreation.” Please visit the BPL website at www.bplonline.org or call 226-3600 for additional information.

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