ALCTS’ Piercy Award to Sarah Potvin

For Immediate Release
Fri, 02/24/2017

Contact:

Keri Cascio

Executive Director

Association for Library Collections & Technical Services

kcascio@ala.org

CHICAGO—The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) named Sarah Potvin, digital scholarship librarian in the Office of Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M University, the winner of the 2017 Esther J. Piercy Award. The award will be presented on Saturday, June 24 at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2017 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago.

Potvin has made exemplary and collaborative contributions to the rapidly evolving field of digital scholarship and non-MARC metadata, with significant work in local, national and international initiatives. Most notable is her leadership and service as founding co-editor of “dh+lib,” a collaborative digital project and online publication. Potvin is raising the profile of librarians’ expertise in metadata, preservation and data curation in the digital humanities to increase the understanding of these areas by academics in the humanities. As an expert in the librarian’s role in digital humanities, Potvin has collaborated in planning and delivering over 20 presentations at regional and national conferences. At the time of her nomination, Potvin’s career included as a sole or co-author five peer-reviewed articles, two book chapters and a number of other publications. Potvin’s nomination also demonstrates the important role that young professionals may have in professional associations. She has contributed to Texas Digital Library committees, three national committees and has been elected or nominated to a half-dozen international committees. Potvin’s international reach is particularly noteworthy with presentations in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Finland and workshops delivered in Cracow, Poland. 

Prior to assuming her current position, Potvin served as metadata librarian for digital services and scholarly communications at A&M, and as a research and scholarly communication analyst at The Tobin Project, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass. involved with scholars across the social sciences and allied fields. She holds a MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Harvard College.

Through her professional service, presentations, publications and leadership in sharing librarian expertise in the digital humanities, Potvin engages with many members of our community and exhibits all the qualities represented by the Piercy Award. The Piercy Award was established by ALCTS in 1968 in memory of Esther J. Piercy, editor of “Journal of Cataloging and Classification” from 1950 to 1956 and of “Library Resources & Technical Services” from 1957 to 1967. The Piercy Award recognizes the contributions to those areas of librarianship included in library collections and technical services by a librarian with no more than 10 years of professional experience who has shown outstanding promise for continuing contributions and leadership. The recipient receives a $1,500 grant donated by GOBI Library Solutions from EBSCO and a citation in recognition of their accomplishments.

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats. ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.