91´«Ã½

Grace York, Coordinator of the Documents Center of the University of Michigan Libraries, is the 2006 recipient of the James Bennett Childs Award.

This award is being presented to Grace for her distinguished and sustained contributions to documents librarianship. Grace not only recognized the potential value of networked telecommunications to librarianship as a member of the GODORT Ad Hoc Committee on the Internet from 1993 to 1995, but she was one of the earliest people to put it to work for us and our patrons' benefit, first in the form of Gopher and then as the mighty Documents Center website.

Since its inception in 1995, the award-winning Documents Center website has been an invaluable reference tool. It remains groundbreaking in its use of new technologies including web feeds and video casting. One of Grace's nominators pointed out that the Documents Center's home page and many internal pages are individually cataloged in OCLC. Grace has also always used the Documents Center and its predecessors as a springboard for providing service to other librarians.

Grace has hosted the 91´«Ã½-GODORT Handout Exchange since 1994. She also provided services to the depository community such as hosting searching of and back issues of the Government Printing Office's Administrative Notes from September 1995 to December 2004.

All of Grace's nominators also noted her national reputation as an expert on Census statistics and the tools to use them. Indeed, she was providing Census data free on the Internet in 1991. Grace also served as the GODORT liaison to the Census Bureau on DVD software and American FactFinder issues for the 2000 Census.

Additionally, Grace represented the United States at the International Conference on Government Information and Democracy, St. Petersburg, Russia in May 2000 and coordinated reciprocal visits by Russian librarians to Ann Arbor in August 2000 and June 2001.

Grace's enthusiasm for sharing government information and good humor in doing so have made her the quintessential quotable librarian. She's been known to tell new acquaintances "I'm a Government Documents Librarian. It's my job to know where the bodies are buried and ensure the public's right to know" or to ask for scanning advice for historical documents on Govdoc-L and define historical as "yesterday or older".

Therefore, in honor of her years of leadership, her gift for using technology to facilitate public access to information and her future as a recipient of FULL Social Security benefits, GODORT presents Grace York with the 2006 James Bennett Childs Award.