Three staff members recognized by peers for their achievements and contributions
Local, national, student, and international media regularly report on the activities of Yale Library staff and on the library’s resources, programs, exhibitions, and events. Most recently, peers within the academic and library communities have recognized the achievements of three library staff members: Amauri Serrano, Charles Riley, and Kim Copenhaver.
October 3
Amauri Serrano, head of Collection Strategy, is co-author of the new book “Streaming Video Collection Development and Management,” written with Michael Fernandez, head of Technical Services for Boston University Library and former E-Resources Acquisitions Librarian at Yale Library. The book provides practical guidance for library professionals of all types and sizes of institutions on selecting, acquiring, and managing streaming media. The book, published by Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited, grew out of the authors’ hands-on experience managing streaming collections at Yale. Serrano and Fernandez discussed their book in an interview published in “Library Resources & Technical Services” and also featured on the “New Books in Library Science” podcast channel.
August 4
In August, the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) at the University of California, Berkeley, published an interview with Charles Riley—catalog librarian for African languages—on its blog. Riley was in conversation with university staff about his recent work to include more African writing systems in the Unicode Standard.
Riley has been working with the SEI since 2004. Most recently he has been researching and facilitating the encoding proposals of the Loma and Bété scripts and some Kpelle. Both Loma and Kpelle are spoken in Guinea and Liberia. Bété is spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. According to the SEI team, “Chuck’s work sits at the intersection of language documentation, community engagement, and information management.”
In 2010, Riley became the first cataloger in the United States to add Ethiopic script to a bibliographic record—information he also shared with Emory University, which has an active country office in Ethiopia. Read more in this Yale Library spotlight about Riley and his work.
March 31
Kim Copenhaver, director of Bass Library and director of Access and Public Services, was acknowledged in a news feature on the American Library Association (ALA) website. Copenhaver was one of the five members serving on the 2025 EBSCO Information Services Library Staff Development Jury. The jury awarded the money prize and citation to the Library Freedom Project—a network of “value-driven” librarians working together to build “an information democracy.” The award recognized the project’s excellent staff development program, March for Libraries, which furthers the “goals and objectives of the library organization.”
Read also about the recent media coverage of “Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan” and “Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books,” the two new exhibitions on view in Beinecke Library.
—Deborah Cannarella
