I've had the list of Fall 2007 Spirit of Librarianship nominees sitting in my e-mail in-box for over a month but finally got around to updating my Spirit of Librarianship page last night.
If you click through to the nominees page, you'll see that the SoL organizers added another new innovation last semester by choosing to include the nominees' “stalker page” photo in addition to the nomination blurbs that had been sent out for the past few semesters.
I think this is a great idea – when I was nominated, all that got sent out was a list of names and you might know who half of the people were if you were lucky. I pushed for the blurbs to be sent out and that helped you to know a bit about the person and why they were nominated. Now, the photos give a visual cue to who you are voting for – “oh, that's her name. Yeah, she's always helping me in the computer lab” or whatever.
Students jokingly refer to the FIMS intranet student directory as the “stalker pages” but I did have a bit of an internal debate about including the photos on my page.
I'm probably close to the line as it is by putting up nominee's names and the blurbs about them without their permission so I know that putting up a photo potentially crosses that line in a big way.
I thought about trying to contact the seven nominees but a combination of UWO's unique e-mail naming policy which means I might not find the people I'm looking for (I was “jhammon2@uwo.ca” which would be all but impossible for someone to guess unless they started “shotgun spamming” every combination – jhammon, jhammon2, jhammon3, etc.), the knowledge that my page isn't even in the Top 10 of a Google search for “Spirit of Librarianship“, and yes, a bit of lack of time/laziness, made me decide that I could let this slide.
[Edit: as you see in the comments, a former classmate who still had access to the stalker pages sent me a list of e-mail addresses for some of the nominees. But that made me realise there are other factors that will prevent me from contacting all nominees in the future beside the fact that it's hard to guess the e-mail address they use – some have e-mail addresses that aren't reflective of their given name at all if they go by an alternate – ie. middle or maiden – name. Some were in their last semester and have convocated so aren't on the stalker pages anymore. And so on.]
With that said, if any of the nominees read this and want their picture removed, I will gladly do so. If anybody still at FIMS reads this and wants to pass on word to the nominees that I've done this, I'd appreciate that as well.
In happier news, this term saw the first tie ever for the award. Gloria Liu and Iona Reid were the joint recipients. I'm happy to report that Iona was part of my starting cohort and, along with Lindsay Holdsworth, means that three different people from my cohort won this award which I think may be a record for total awesomeness.
Iona is a deserving recipient – a lot quieter than the usual outspoken loudmouths who tend to win the award 
. (Er, I know that two other previous winners, Michelle L. and Barb J. read this blog regularly so I hasten to add that the loudmouths are probably the exception.)
Anyhow, one of my personal favourite memories of Iona is her telling a bunch of people early in our first semester that she's always been known to have a calming effect on the people around her. That comment popped into my head one day as I prepared to give a particularly stressful 503 presentation near the end of our first term. I went and crouched beside Iona during a break and said “Are you really able to calm people just by your presence?” That's what they tell me. “Okay, I need calming now, please.”
I crouched there for awhile as Iona rubbed my head, laughing. But lo and behold, the stress did lift and I was able to do my presentation, play the Alex Trebeck role in a Jeopardy game at the end of it plus convince the instructor to extend our time past the allotted period for the first time in any presentation that semester.
Congrats to Iona and Gloria and here's hoping that one of the few remaining soldiers from my original cohort wins the award this semester to make my cohort even more awesome than it already is and was.
