91´«Ã½

The 2003 recipient of the LexisNexis/GODORT/91´«Ã½ "Documents to the People" Award is Nan Myers, Associate Professor and Librarian, Government Documents, Patents and Trademarks in the Ablas Library at Wichita State University. This award is presented to the individual, library, institution, or other noncommercial group that has most effectively encouraged the use of government documents in support of library service. This award includes a cash stipend to be used to support a project of the recipient's choice. Congressional Information Service, Inc. founded this award in 1977 and LexisNexis is continuing to sponsor it.

This award is being given in recognition of Nan's leadership in cataloging, advocacy for state and local documents, and especially in the development of the Documents Data Miner© (DDM) tool.

Nan's tireless efforts to help depository librarians avoid performing duplicative, labor intensive or confusing work as they managed all aspects of their depository collections -- Item Number checking, cataloging, collection management efforts in coordinated collection development -- resulted in the creation of the interactive web tool, Documents Data Miner© (DDM) ().

Thanks to her ability to work in concert with local experts at her institution, Nan worked from 1995-1997 with experts on her campus, including faculty and graduate students of the university's departments of Electrical Engineering, Decision Sciences and Computer Science. DDM is now a partnership of Wichita State University and the Federal Depository Library Program and is linked from the FDLP desktop at . Work is underway on Documents Data Miner 2.

Nan has also spoken at both federal and state conferences on the strengths and pitfalls of Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLS); has contributed to a toolkit for processing and cataloging federal documents located at ; and has chaired GODORT's Cataloging Committee and State and Local Documents Task Force.

All these activities are indicative of a consummate documents librarian who has dedicated a great deal of her personal time toward making the "behind the scene" lives of her documents colleagues more manageable and efficient.