This article profiles Allison Sloan, the 2010 winner of "LJ"'s Paraprofessional of the Year Award, sponsored by DEMCO, Inc. Her outstanding service and her championship of the term paralibrarian illustrates her passionately held and most fundamental belief: "This is not just a nice job, this is a career." When she launched that…

This article features Naturita Community Library (NCL), winner of "LJ"'s 2011 Best Small Library in America Award, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The library is the largest straw bale library in America. It sits on the western slope of the Rockies, across the Uncompahgre Plateau from the county seat in Montrose,…

No one other than Nancy Pearl has so convinced Americans that libraries, books, and reading are critical to our communities. Her passionate advocacy has done that nationwide for thousands of individual readers and library workers in the trenches at the local level. She has spread book lust via broadcasts to the nation on National Public Radio's…

This article profiles Steven L. MacCall, winner of "Library Journal's" 2010 Teaching Award. An associate professor at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, MacCall was nominated by Kathie Popadin, known as "Kpop" to the members of her cohort in the online MLIS program at SLIS. Sixteen of…

This article profiles Rebecca Knuth, winner of the LJ Teaching Award for 2009. The way she plans a class she's teaching illustrates why she was nominated by her students and won the award. The award, which comes with a $5000 honorarium and a celebration at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, is sponsored by ProQuest. For…

This article profiles Toni Samek, associate professor at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS), University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, who has been chosen as the recipient of the first annual "Library Journal" Teaching Award, sponsored by ProQuest. Samek's work goes far beyond the three standard measures of academic…