By Marcelo Rodríguez (Follow us on LinkedIn)
In time to celebrate our second-year anniversary, we are launching our first NBU Awards. YAY! From the beginning, the intention behind Notes Between Us (NBU) has always been to create a space for us to share our perspectives and conversations in a personal, inspiring and unapologetic way. We are very proud of we have been able to achieve and the content we have produced over the past two years. And the best way to celebrate our achievements is by launching our NBU Awards.
This year’s winners for each of the three NBU Awards categories are as follows:
NBU Blog Posts of the Year. This award is given to our favorite posts shared on our website over the past year. Winners are chosen from each NBU contributor’s feedback and the main editor.
This year, we selected four posts as our favorite ones. They reflect in their own way the inspiring, personal and insightful conversations our blog stimulates. In a two-parts post, Marlena Okechukwu (Minneapolis, MN) shares a few powerful personal stories and how they all shaped her in to the person she is today. Deferring A Dream and Deferring a Dream – Part II are both an inspiring plunge on how a recount of events in our past can influence our current realities and how our current self can also change that past history. Speaking about honoring our past and the people who came before us, Lynie Awywen (Toronto, ON) wrote a beautiful and heartening celebration of our elders. An Ode to My Elders: On The Value of Intergenerational Connections is a great example of how we can all support meaningful intergenerational programming in our libraries and places of work to celebrate everyone and their life experiences.
“Missing White Women Syndrome” and Invisibility by Zanada Joyner (Baltimore, MD) is one of the first posts we shared in our blog two years ago. Zanada tells the story of how we can go beyond the current news media cycle and spot the people left out from the stories. This is a perfect example of the type of pressing conversations who prompted this blog in the first place and will continue to do so. Combatting invisibility is also linked to Mikayla Redden’s (Toronto, ON) fantastic post. We Are Not History is a call to all readers, specially those of us working in libraries to reckon why how we engage with cataloging practices and categories which ultimately do not represent our voices and realities.
NBU Blogger of the Year. This award is given to the blogger selected by their peers as well as the number of posts written.
Thanks to her unwavering enthusiasm and positive perspective, Jenny Silbiger (Honolulu, HI) is our NBU Blogger of the Year. Jenny has written a total of eight fantastic posts over the past two years on topics such as gratitude, empathy, reflection, and anti-racism. Living BIG in our Law Libraries (and beyond), “Americans and the Holocaust”: Libraries Keeping the Lights On and Review of CAE’s The Right to Be Safe: Upstander & Self Defense Response to Anti-Asian Harassment & Violence Workshop are some of my favorite posts personally. However, I invite all readers to consult all of her posts and concur with us on why we selected her as our NBU Blogger of the Year.
NBU Honorary Member Award. This award is given to NBU contributors who have left our blog over the past year.
Clanitra Stewart Nejdl (Nashville, TN) and Elizabeth Graham (Baltimore, MD) departed our NBU adventure over these two last years. However, they have both impacted our blog and their posts continue to inspire our current contributors. They will always be part of our NBU adventure.
These are this year’s recipients for our 2023 NBU Awards. Of course, if you haven’t already, I invite you to read all of these posts and bloggers and also others. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. We can’t wait to share with everyone the new contributors joining us and other projects for NBU in the coming months.
Again, congratulations to the winners!
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Notes Between Us (NBU) is a blog about conversations and topics of interest to the writers. The writers are expressing their personal opinions solely. The essays represent their personal beliefs and not that of their workplaces or any organization they are associated with.