Magda El-Sherbini receives 2020 Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award

CHICAGO—The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is pleased to name Magda El-Sherbini, Professor/Middle East & Islamic Studies Librarian at The Ohio State University, as the 2020 recipient of the Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award. This award honors the memory of Ross Atkinson, a distinguished library leader, author and scholar whose extraordinary service to ALCTS and the library community-at-large serves as a model for those in the field. The citation and monetary award, generously sponsored by EBSCO Information Services, will be presented at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony on June 27 during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition in Chicago, IL.

Magda El‐Sherbini is an outstanding and recognized librarian and scholar with a distinguished record of leadership, service and scholarship to ALCTS and to the profession. Her career began when she worked as a cataloger at Cairo University Library. In 1982, she received a Foreign Students Fellowship from America-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST) to attend the School of Library and Information Sciences at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Following her degree, El‐Sherbini worked as an assistant librarian at Bahrain University Library and then an Arabic Materials Specialist at Georgetown University. In 1987, she began working for The Ohio State University Libraries, first as a Middle East/General Cataloger, then as the Head of the Original Cataloging Section, and later as Head of the Collection Description and Access Department. El‐Sherbini is currently Professor/Middle East & Islamic Studies Librarian at The Ohio State University Libraries.

El‐Sherbini’s extraordinary service and achievements can be seen in her long history of exceptional service and leadership within ALCTS, her research and implementation of multi-lingual aspects of cataloging, her publications, and her awards and recognition of her peers.

El‐Sherbini’s contributions to ALCTS and to the profession span more than three decades. She has served on or led fourteen ALCTS committees, discussion groups, juries and interest groups, as well as serving on the Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS) Editorial Board. Drawing on her language and cataloging expertise, as well as her group facilitation skills, she chaired groups such as the ALCTS Steering Committee to oversee the Implementation of the Non‐English Task Force Recommendation, the ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Research and Publications Discussion Group, the ALCTS Catalog Management Discussion Group, the ALCTS Research and Publications Committee and the CaMMS Faceted Subject Access Interest Group. 

Beyond ALCTS, El‐Sherbini has served on and led committees organized by the Middle East Librarians Association, OCLC, Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC; now the Big Ten
Academic Alliance), Fulbright Office, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), OHIONET, OhioLink, and the American Library Association’s International Relations Committee and RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign Project (3RProject).

El‐Sherbini’s professional focus has been on cataloging and metadata with an emphasis on multilingual subject retrieval, improving resource discoverability for non-roman language collections, Resource Description and Access (RDA) and BIBFRAME. Her publications have appeared in some of the leading library journals, including Library Review, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and LRTS. In addition, she has received numerous honors including a 2009 ALCTS Presidential Citation for her work as chair of the Steering Committee for Implementation of Non-English Access Task Force Recommendations, the 2014 ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award for her book RDA: Strategies for Implementation, the 2015 ALCTS Margaret Mann Citation for professional achievement in cataloging and two U.S. Fulbright Scholars Program Grants. She holds a B.A. degree in Library Science, from Cairo University, and an M.A. in Library and Information Science, from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

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.