2010 SLA Conference Stipend Award Winner Michael Chesnes

by Diane Schnurrpusch

As chair of the 2010 Awards Committee, it is my honor to announce that the winner of the $1,500 SLA Conference Stipend Award is Michael Chesnes, a reference librarian at NASA Goddard Library. Michael has been active in the DC Chapter and SLA. He served as the Chapter Cataloging Committee Chair, organizing three Dine-Arounds and one program for the group. The Physics-Astronomy-Math Division (PAM) benefited from his talents as he assisted and later took over as full editor of the PAM Bulletin. Michael's latest accomplishment was his selection to share his poster, "A Year of Mobile Librarianship at NASA Goddard," at the SLA "All Sciences Poster Session" in New Orleans.

Michael and his colleagues (also SLA members) planned and executed the project that placed reference librarians at several locations throughout the Goddard campus. The project succeeded in increasing the number of reference questions, as well as serving patrons who had stopped coming to the physical library. As Michael explained in his stipend application, "The project fulfills two of the Poster Session's three broad themes. It is a project that expresses a new strategic alignment for Library services within our parent organization and it created a new tool for information literacy, user instruction, and e-learning."

Michael's leadership and innovative spirit made him an ideal choice for the 2010 SLA Conference Stipend award. If you are going to the SLA Conference, be sure to visit him at the Poster Session on June 15. And, watch for more on Michael's conference experience in a future issue of Chapter Notes.