Duncan
Principal Librarian for Technical Services and Systems at the New York State Library
About
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She provides leadership within her unit and works across all sections of the New York State Library to increase access to government information.
The focus of her nomination has been her work with the government information produced within her state. As her nomination letter states, "Under Ms. Duncan's leadership and direction, the New York State Library has scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of New York State documents and downloaded thousands of born-digital New York documents. "Even with staff shortages, digitization efforts have continued showing an increase of nearly 200,000 in FY 2008/2009.
Support letters refer to the efforts previously used by libraries in New York to collect and catalog similar publications. This was a very time consuming effort. The letter goes on to say, "Ms. Duncan's digitization project makes that huge effort unnecessary The digitized documents are very well organized. Users access them by searching the entire New York State catalog, by searching the digital collection, or by browsing list of agencies." The documents that are being added to the collection contain large numbers of current documents as well as numerous historical publications of the state dating back to the early 1800's.
These efforts in digitization are among Ms. Duncan's other duties that include the management of New York's Regional Federal Depository Library, the oversight of the New York State Document Depository Library Program and her overall responsibility for other sections of Technical Services and Systems. She has been active in government information related organizations within her state with a recent term as President of the New York Library Association's Government Information Roundtable.