D4D 2023 Awards

FIRST TIMER AWARD WINNERS

Charlene Brewer
User Experience & Digital Services Librarian
Southern Utah University

As an Information Specialist, Charlene connects the dots to maintain order amidst chaos. She enjoys making connections between a myriad of subjects and finds it thrilling when each draws upon the next, like a giant puzzle. She often finds this to be the case with research as well, where thinking outside of established parameters and using unique resources to make things come together is a great asset. Charlene's professional interests lie within the convergence of Information and Culture and particularly the investigation of the Digital Divide.

About Southern Utah University

Located in beautiful Cedar City, Utah, Southern Utah University is a rural, state university offering associate, bachelor, and master degrees in over 100 programs. Within a 5-hour drive of five national parks, home to the Southern Utah Museum of Art, and host to the Tony-award-winning Utah Shakespeare Festival, Cedar City provides a plethora of scenic, historical, and cultural opportunities.

Heather Cribbs
Systems Librarian
California Polytechnic State University

Heather Cribbs joined Robert E. Kennedy Library at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo as a tenure track faculty member and Systems Librarian in the fall of 2020. She previously held a similar role as Systems & Electronic Resource Management Coordinator at CSU Bakersfield from 2017 until 2020. She has worked in libraries for over 15 years, including as a school librarian for Daniel E. Lewis Middle School of Paso Robles Joint Unified School District and within the public services department of the Peachtree Branch of the Atlanta Fulton Public Library. She holds an A.S. in Chemistry from Bakersfield College, a B.S. in Biochemistry from UC Santa Barbara, and an M.L.I.S. from San Jose State University.

Her research interests include improving users’ experience with library technology and ensuring equitable access to research and scholarly materials. Recently, she collaborated with several CSU colleagues to explore user searching behavior within the Primo VE discovery layer (branded as OneSearch) and co-authored the article, To Pre-filter, or Not to Pre-filter, That Is the Query: A Multi-Campus Big Data Study, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09610006221124609 in the Journal of Librarianship & Information Science.

She was born and raised in the Central Valley of California and currently lives in Morro Bay, California with her chihuahua and orange tiger cat.

Stephanie Garrett
Catholic Distance University

Stephanie Garrett earned a Master of Science in Information Sciences (MSIS) from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and a Bachelor of Arts in Theology (m. Philosophy) from Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee. Stephanie believes that the Catholic faith and its teachings on human dignity provide a full and generous lens to view interpersonal engagement as a librarian. She is passionate about integrating her faith with her professional life and believes that it strengthens and supports her contributions to the field of librarianship. She seeks to recognize in everyone the human person “for whom Christ died” (1Cor 8:11; Rom 14:15) (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2014. SS 105). Her personal objective is to focus on the sacredness of every individual. Stephanie enjoys helping students with research and paper writing and assisting both faculty and students with the use of technology in the digital learning environment.

About Catholic Distance University

Catholic Distance University, a pioneer in distance education founded in 1983 to teach the Catholic faith to adults, offers its programs completely online. The non-profit university offered its first-degree program in 1997 and its first online program in 2000. Today, CDU is the only exclusively online Catholic university, and it is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. With a mission to communicate the mind and heart of the Church in a digital world, the university educates students worldwide in Catholic theology, the liberal arts, and faith development for the growth of faith, ecclesial service, and leadership for the Church. The university is known for its active educational outreach to the incarcerated Church and underserved Catholics without access to local Catholic institutions of higher education. 

STUDENT AWARD WINNER

Danielle Daugherty
Institutional Repository Coordinator
California Polytechnic State University

Danielle Daugherty earned her B.A. in History with a minor in Graphic Communication from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her career in libraries started with an undergraduate internship in the Special Collections and Archives department of the Robert E. Kennedy Library, performing metadata quality control on a digitized historical campus publication. In 2018, she brought her career full circle when she accepted the role of Institutional Repository Coordinator at Cal Poly.

She began to pursue her M.L.I.S. at San Jose State University in Fall 2020, focusing on information organization and retrieval and information architecture. In Spring 2022, she and three fellow classmates were nominated by faculty for inclusion in the SJSU iSchool Exemplary Student Showcase for their work in information architecture and website redesign, found here. She plans to complete her degree in December 2023.

She currently lives in Los Osos, CA with her husband, son, and three fur babies.