Jane L. Crocker, Director of Library Services, Gloucester County College received the 2004 NJLA College and University Section Distinguished Service Award. This award is presented to a New Jersey academic librarian who has made outstanding contributions that directly enrich the librarianship of higher education in New Jersey.

Jane was honored for her tireless efforts on behalf of academic libraries, librarians and the library profession in the Garden State. She has a long and distinguished record of service to the library profession on national, state and local levels. She has served as NJLA President and on the executive boards of VALE, the Gloucester County Libraries Automation Consortium, and the South Jersey Library Regional Library Cooperative. Jane’s leadership as chair of the VALE Reference Services Committee has enabled New Jersey academic libraries to extend their services beyond local hours and beyond the walls of the library as participants in an academic QandAnj Electronic Reference project.

The 2004 NJLA College and University Section Research Award was given to John E. Buschman, Rider University, for his book, Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy. The book is an examination of the library field and its relationship to the democratic public sphere. Mr. Buschman challenges current thinking and assumptions guiding libraries and links us back to democratic and public purposes as the core essence of the field.

The Technology Committee declared two winners of the Third Annual NJLA College and University Section Technology Innovation Award: Ronald Jantz of Rutgers University and Edith Sirianni of Bergen Community College.

Ronald Jantz and the FEDORA Implementation Team from Rutgers University Libraries won for their work with the open source Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA), which they have used as a framework for creating a digital library repository for Rutgers University and the New Jersey Digital Highway Project.

Edith Sirianni and her staff at Sydney Silverman Library of Bergen Community College won for devising a system in which Personal Digital Assistant/Palm Operating System based scanners are used to give the Library Collection Inventory Process much greater speed and flexibility than traditional means allow. Honorable mention was given to Alfred Fry of Camden County College Library for his innovative work in using the OPAC to host Electronic Reserves functions and David Murray and the Information Commons Team of Bankier Library, Brookdale Community College, for their groundbreaking work over the past five years in developing their Information Commons and acting as national consultants in this growing field.

Congratulations and thank you to the award winners for their significant contributions to academic librarianship in New Jersey.