This year the UFS Programs & Awards Committee will be looking at re-writing the guidelines for the Distinguished Librarian rank. Of over 1,000+ Distinguished (Teaching or Service or) Professorships, librarians have only had 5 total, with 2 currently active (Trudi Jacobson and Constantia Constantinou). This rank is for both community colleges and state-operated campuses. If you read the descriptions, you'll see that the Librarian one is antiquated and needs to be updated. Ophelia Morey from UB is also on the committee and we will be in charge of drafting something to take back to the committee.
Action Item for meeting:
Have council members submit names of anyone at full rank (Librarian or Professor) who would like to help us with this job.
Here's the current wording (for reference):
The Distinguished Librarian is conferred upon librarians whose contributions have been transformational in creating a new information environment by providing access to information, sharing or networking information resources, and fostering information literacy. The Distinguished Librarian rank honors and promotes the achievement of personal excellence, groundbreaking professional progress, and wide-ranging benefit to the academic community.
Academic Rank – Candidates must have attained the rank of full librarian or, for community colleges, the rank of full professor with clear and direct full-time responsibilities pertaining to library service.
Length of Service – Candidates must have completed at least five years of full-time service at the rank of full librarian (or full professor with direct library responsibilities at a community college) on the campus that recommends the appointment and at least ten years of service within the State University of New York.
Criteria for Selection – The scope of librarianship extends beyond the library's physical walls to the opening of limitless electronic networks and to the fostering of information literacy and skills in navigating the information universe. Through such endeavors, librarians create a new place and new roles for themselves in the academy. Librarians demonstrate unique talents and skills as faculty who promote and facilitate access to information for the widest community and assist all sectors of the community to make informed judgments about the nature and quality of the information they seek, find, and use. The pathways to the rank of Distinguished Librarian are many and diverse. To attain the rank of Distinguished Librarian, a candidate must exhibit all of the following qualities and levels of accomplishments.
Candidates must have made contributions to the profession of librarianship that are of national or international significance.
They must have achieved stature and distinction beyond their own library, beyond their own college or university, and indeed, beyond SUNY to offer leadership. They may achieve this stature and distinction through formal scholarship, research, and publications, but other paths include extended efforts toward forging alliances, networks, and cooperative programs that advance resource sharing and significantly improve access to information or enhance its usefulness to the community.
In all cases, the impact of the contributions of candidates must be transformational. Candidates' achievements at this level must have contributed to transforming the profession of librarianship and the work of librarians to engender and stimulate the "age of information." Candidates must have broken boundaries, expanded potentials, and engendered positive change in academe.
Candidates must have demonstrated leadership in realizing the potential for access to world-wide information resources, in changing the nature of information seeking, and/or designing or developing systems which facilitate navigation and effective use of the burgeoning information environment.
Candidates will have performed with excellence and innovation in the traditional areas of librarianship, such as technical services, services to the public, system or facilities design, or administration.
Candidates' careers will be models for librarians and will provide inspiration to their colleagues. They will have earned the respect of members of the information professions as well as their academic professorial counterparts by the quality, vigor, and innovative nature of their thinking, their standards of performance, and the effectiveness of their initiatives.
