2020 awards: Library staff recognised

Victoria University Library staff were recognised at the 2020 Vice-Chancellor's Awards and the 2020 Library Awards.

Congratulations to Frances O’Neil, Associate University Librarian, Education & Research Services, for her Career Achievement Award at the 2020 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards.

Congratulations to Sarika Singh and Bradley Gatt, also recognised at the 2020 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards, with a Citation for Excellence in Engagement and a Citation for Excellence in Professional Services and Innovation respectively.

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2020 Library Awards for their outstanding contribution, service and innovation. Thank you to VU staff and students for submitting nominations to recognise Library staff.

2020 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards

Career achievement award

Frances O’Neil, Associate University Librarian, Education & Research Services, received the Career Achievement Award, for her significant contribution to Victoria University and to her field over the course of her career. As Associate University Librarian, Frances leads VU Library engagement with students and faculty.

During her distinguished career, she has led various projects to:

• enable students to work with the library such as the ‘student as staff’ program and the Research Ambassadors program
• build successful work cultures by contributing to a range of mentoring programs
• bring workplace change with the common safe OHS program and the emergent technologies in education seminar series
• identify options for university authors to retain rights to reuse their content as the team leader of the Council of Australian University Librarians retaining authors' rights project team.

Frances has also published and presented on VU library services innovations.

Citation for excellence in engagement

Scholarly Information Services Librarian Sarika Singh received the citation for Excellence in Engagement, as part of The Light Volley VU Team (Loretta Konjarski, Sarika Singh, Jodie Gibbons, Igor Asmaryan, Michael Sturmey, Simon Lismann). The team developed a Light Volley facilitator education package for Volleyball Australia. Sarika contributed to the project by creating various interactive H5P modules and assessments, organising content on VU Collaborate (the learning management system) space and experimenting with various digital tools to create engaging and rich learning objects.

Citation for excellence in professional services & innovation

Bradley Gatt, Manager Technical Services, received the citation for Excellence in Professional Services and Innovation as part of the Transition to Campus Group (TTC) Team.

2020 Library awards recipients

Outstanding contribution award

This award recognises the sustained contribution that Library individuals or work groups make to VU learning, teaching or research support, or to a specific project.

Winner: Linda Forbes for outstanding and sustained support of staff, students and curriculum development in the Colleges of Engineering & Science and Sport & Exercise Science.

Service Award

This award recognises outstanding customer service provided by an individual or team to users of the Library.

Winners: Greg Neilsen and Tom Nemeth for outstanding service and support to clients of Footscray Nicholson campus library and St Albans campus library respectively.

Innovation Award

This award, via nominations by VU Library staff, recognises achievements in generating ideas, being entrepreneurial, developing workplace relationships and turning ideas into the introduction, or improvement, of a university process, product or service.

Winners: Tracy Dexter-Ingram, Sally Hand, Cindy Mohammad, Bruce Stubbs, Alexandra Tretiakova, Nadia Ghaly, Jessica Cork, Enza Panariello, Emeka Anele, Alex O’Connell-Bello, Meg Weller, Cameron Barrie, Angeera Sidaya, Murray Greenway, Peter Loh, Marina Malinovitch, Gabe Thomson and Peter O’Connell for the design and implementation of DigiChat, the new frontline LibChat training suite to support the LibChat team.