The Distinguished Librarian Award is presented annually by the University of Washington Libraries to a librarian whose contributions advance the mission of the Libraries and the University.
Robin Chin Roemer
Robin Chin Roemer serves as the Director of Learning Services & Social Sciences, providing leadership and strategic vision for personnel across six units including Curriculum Support, Instructional Design & Outreach Services, Odegaard Library Access & Building Services, Undergraduate Student Success, and Reference Services. Robin first joined the UW Libraries in 2013 as the Instructional Design & Outreach Services Librarian, later becoming the Head of Instructional Design & Outreach Services. In these roles, she helped develop the Libraries’ approach to scalable information literacy and support for online, professional, and non-traditional UW students. Robin’s focus on inclusive collaboration, values-centered design, and the importance of building empowered teams have continued to shape her work as a manager and librarian.
What would you like to tell the next generation of librarians?
I would tell them that librarianship is a wonderful and ever-changing profession. Each generation of librarians has faced its own unique set of challenges and opportunities and has each has found success in translating our field’s core values into actions and services that meet the evolving needs of users. Equally, I would remind them that there is wisdom and strength in connecting with colleagues new and familiar, and in seeking to achieve your goals collaboratively, inclusively, and with an eye toward the kind of change that is truly strategic and sustainable.
Reed Garber-Pearson
Reed Garber-Pearson has served as liaison to the Integrated Social Sciences (ISS) degree program since 2017. Reed’s colleagues in ISS have described them as “truly exceptional” and “the embodiment of what it takes to create a strong UW Community through the libraries: integrity, respect, collaboration and care for all.” In addition to supporting ISS students through consultations and research services, Reed works closely with ISS instructors and has developed and revised course modules focused on using library resources and conducting social science research. Reed also developed and teaches a credit course on media literacy. Beyond curriculum development and teaching, Reed serves on various ISS staff committees and recently co-wrote a successful seed grant to develop a peer mentoring group, which is completing its first year with three student employees as project leads and mentors.
As Online Learning Librarian, Reed is an important member of the Instructional Design & Outreach Services team. Reed’s contributions include the Graduate Research Institute (GSRI), which is an annual high impact teaching program that reaches graduate students in all disciplines. The team assesses and improves on the institute every year and has worked to ground the online workshop in anti-racist pedagogy and support for BIPOC students. Even before the pandemic, Reed has been a strong advocate for students who engage in remote forms of learning, by ensuring that online students were represented in the Libraries’ Professional Student Advisory Board, and by leading a cross-departmental participatory design project for online students. Reed is currently serving as the Interim Head for the Libraries Instruction Design and Outreach Services unit.
Reed has embedded their commitment to equity and anti-racism in all aspects of their career, positively impacting the UW community and the library profession in countless ways. Their work is varied, and examples include researching fair and equitable hiring practices for the ISS Diversity Committee, improving course content accessibility, creating an Immigration Resources guide, and advocating for changes in transgender inclusion and decriminalizing libraries. Recently, Reed and a group of library workers wrote and published “Confronting White Nationalism in Libraries: a toolkit” to “proactively push against white nationalist and bigoted attacks on our communities and libraries.” They are co-leading a Washington Library Association workshop in April 2025 titled “Political Disaster Preparedness: Prioritizing Community Safety,” using the toolkit as a base for actively engaging libraries in policy and programming changes.
What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
I am proud to follow my values as a librarian, even if full change cannot be seen yet. I support and empower others through critical information skills, and those one-on-one relationships are what I enjoy most.
Johanna Jacobsen Kiciman
Johanna is Head of Research Services at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is known for her people-first approach to her work, with a focus on mentorship and an active engagement in the profession. Johanna has served as Editor in Chief of Alki – the open access, peer-reviewed journal of the Washington Library Association – where she was responsible for achieving peer-review stats for the journal. As President of the Washington Library Association, Johanna organized the highly successful Neurodivergence in Libraries Presidential Summit.
This commitment to social justice work is evident in her many contributions to the UW Tacoma campus community, including the development of a sensory room and a capsule collection of books in the UW Tacoma Library to support neurodivergent students. Johanna was instrumental in creating UW Tacoma’s Real Lit[erature] fiction-based book club, which has been widely recognized, receiving the UW Tacoma Staff Association Team of the Year Award for 2020 and
UW Tacoma Student’s Choice for Community Impact in 2021.
Johanna has been nominated for her exemplary support of student learning and success, for treating “every interaction with care, patience and respect” and for making a lasting impact on student’s professional and academic growth.
What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
It is such an honor to mentor new professionals who are beginning their journey and career as librarians. Because of their interests, I get to explore so many areas of this field, which means work is always interesting! The collaborative justice work that the graduate students I support engage in daily helps me be a stronger advocate. In turn, I hope I am able to offer them a strong foundation of hands-on, project based learning as foundations for their growth. My approach has always been people-first, and the friendships and collegiality that has developed with long graduated students is joy-bringing!
Verletta Kern
Verletta Kern, Director, Open Scholarship & Publishing and Arts & Humanities, has been nominated in recognition for her outstanding work in planning the strategy, programming, and spaces at UW Libraries’ new Open Scholarship Commons (OSC). The OSC advances open, public, and emerging forms of scholarship through workshops, events, and consultation services. Verletta expertly navigates partnerships and coalition building, fostering collaborations between the UW Libraries, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the e-Science Institute, Learning Technologies, the UW-QUAL Program, and the UW Press. In developing the OSC, Verletta “identified and built upon synergistic activities and initiatives that benefit and serve” the community.
Digital scholarship programming celebrates new knowledge creation and dissemination. Notably, Verletta founded and organized several successful programs including Hacking the Academy, an open scholarship program series designed to raise awareness around the new ways scholarship is being produced, shared, archived, and reused. The Going Public annual symposium is dedicated to expanding faculty and graduate student skills in sharing research with wider publics. An intensive Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program expanded digital scholarship skills for UW students, faculty, and staff.
Verletta is lauded for her commitment to open and community-engaged work, and described by colleagues as a trusted leader, innovator and connector. She is the “key advocate” and “leading voice” of UW Libraries for open scholarship. She models excellence and shared decision making, inspiring others in her vision.
What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
What I enjoy most about being a librarian is bringing people together to tackle tricky questions. Sometimes these questions come from Libraries’ users and require bringing multiple colleagues into the fold to answer those questions collaboratively. Sometimes the questions are related to program building like we’ve done building our digital scholarship program or, most recently, our open scholarship initiative. Each of these questions is its own unique puzzle and best solved collectively rather than as a solo enterprise. With each of these tricky questions or puzzles I’ve worked on with students and colleagues, I learned a great deal and it keeps me coming back for the next.
Stephanie Lamson
Stephanie Lamson is Director of Preservation Services at the University of Washington Libraries, where she is responsible for developing and managing services to support the preservation and stewardship of materials across the UW Libraries. With her colleagues, Stephanie works to care for, and enhance access to, the UW Libraries collections that support and advance research, teaching, and learning at the University of Washington.
Stephanie and her team work to provide preservation services for materials in all formats to maintain their usability and integrity for as long as they are needed. Preservation services include monitoring and advocating for improved storage environments, binding and conservation, digitization and reformatting, disaster planning and response, training and outreach, media preservation, and digital preservation.
Over the last decade, Stephanie has led several initiatives to build conservation capacity and conservation services at UW. Most recently, she has served as the project coordinator for Sustainable Cooperative Conservation Services (2020-2026), which provides conservation services for the UW Libraries, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
I enjoy continually learning from my colleagues who bring deep expertise into so many areas of our work. It is a privilege to support the preservation of the exceptional collections at the University of Washington and to help ensure that they are available to everyone, both now and in the future.
Lisa Oberg
Lisa Oberg has led Special Collections as its Director since 2019 and is also the History of Science and Medicine curator in Special Collections since 2013. She has been lauded for her leadership of all aspects of Special Collections, including and especially during the challenging time of the pandemic. Colleagues have noted that as leader of Special Collections, Lisa has emphasized ease of access for researchers, and that the Special Collections Reading Room has become more “welcoming” and “user-centered”.
Lisa has undertaken extensive research and curated several noteworthy exhibits for Special Collections to highlight its historically significant holdings. These include exhibits pertaining to UW students who served and died in WW1, and exhibits devoted to the pop culture of the WW1 era. She has also developed popup exhibits pertaining to Armistice Day and to the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Her peers have characterized these exhibits as “outstanding”, “spectacular”, with “a high level of creativity” in “making history come alive”.
Lisa has served on several library committees and on UW Faculty Councils. She was the co-chair of the University of Washington Common Book Selection Committee in 2009 and 2010. She has taught, and guest lectured for several courses on the Seattle campus. She has also served as a liaison to community cultural organizations. In short, as one colleague put it, Lisa Oberg exemplifies “exceptionally high personal standards of performance” with an “extremely high level of integrity”.
What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
I did not set out to be a librarian but as fate would have it, it is exactly where I was meant to be. After more than 30 years as a librarian, I continue to be excited by the prospect of learning something new every day. I enjoy the vicarious journeys I make helping others with their research. I learned about Gold Rush-era canned butter from an Alaska archeologist and a hidden WWII-era bunker in West Seattle from a local writer and geologist, and so much more. The opportunity to work with artifacts and documents relating to early UW and Pacific Northwest history reminds me every day of our responsibility to preserve history for current research and future generations. Every day brings new challenges and new technology to make our collections more accessible. I genuinely look forward to the unexpected questions and stories I will encounter every day!
Madison Sullivan
Madison Sullivan is the UW Libraries’ Fine and Performing Arts Librarian, a role she has held since 2019. This is not her first position at the University Libraries, as Madison also was the Business Research and Instruction Librarian from 2017 to 2019. In all her capacities Madison is praised as showing extreme care and dedication to the success of the students and faculty who come to her for support. This care is not limited solely to providing superb resolutions to her patrons’ information and research needs – Madison is noted as being extremely attentive to the overall well-being of her users both in interactions and through organized events such as end-of-quarter “stress busting” activities.
Madison’s passion for the success of her user community is also evidenced in the impact of her undergraduate instruction, where her library sessions and consultations for Art History students have been unanimously praised by attendees as being both memorably enjoyable and rich in content that will serve them well for the remainder of their academic careers. She also has been incredibly proactive in collection development, securing over $100,000 in extra grant funding to bolster arts collections since 2019. Through this, Madison has been able to develop an inclusive collection that supports her users’ education and research via thoughtful dialog and active anticipation of their needs.
Madison’s mentorship, leadership and service are also notable, with her colleagues praising her commitment to fostering the growth of emerging professionals and her tireless work on furthering core Libraries’ values and in the area of EDI. Madison planned and led a series of transformative open conversations as a member of the Libraries’ EDI committee, volunteered for the Task Force on DEI and Anti-Racism in Collections and used her expertise to conduct a full EDI audit of the Libraries’ art collections. In every aspect of her work Madison is having an impressive impact, and she is aptly noted by one of her patrons as “a true blessing for our community.”
What do you enjoy most about being a librarian?
It’s hard to pick one thing! I genuinely love all the different facets of librarianship – from instruction, to collections, to reference, to outreach, to research support. If I had to pick one thing, I might say that I love working with students and faculty who are passionate and curious, especially those in the arts. Their interests don’t have discipline specific boundaries, and their perspectives toward research are unique and enlightening. Artists are interested in EVERYTHING. I mean everything! Science, psychology, technology, philosophy, the built environment, international studies, politics, mathematics, public policy, gender & sexuality studies.
Helping them find library resources feels like going on a treasure hunt across the entire library system. Their curiosity ensures that every day as a librarian is different & exciting, and they teach me so much about what is going on in the world. I’m always acquiring new knowledge and they keep me on my toes. Seeing the joy or excitement in their eyes when we’ve found something inspirational or aspirational, or perhaps they’ve identified something that reflects back a little surprising part of themselves. Through exploring the library, maybe some of these students have come to the recognition that they aren’t alone in their thoughts or experiences or interests… it opens up and connects people, worlds, and ideas. To play even a small role in helping people find that – it has to be one of the best feelings in the entire world for a librarian.
John Vallier
John is curator of the UW Ethnomusicology Archives and UW’s PI for Native Northwest Online, the Libraries largest archival repartition project to date. He has been nominated for the Distinguished librarian award for his significant contributions to the Ethnomusicology program and, as one of nomination letters state, “in fields across the interdisciplinary humanities, notably including Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Comparative History of Ideas, American Indian Studies, and the Jackson School.” As another one of his nomination letters states, “Through his writing, teaching, and archives-related practice, Vallier has advanced efforts to embed ethics of community-engagement, ethical curation, and repatriation in the library and archives profession.” Since assuming the role of curator for the renown Ethnomusicology Archives in 2017, John’s work has been centered around preservation and outreach to constituents in and beyond the UW, whether it’s archiving Pacific Northwest Indigenous language recordings or archiving unique music recordings from Afghanistan. In addition to this work, he regularly teaches quarter long courses on topics such as Seattle music history, and holds faculty appointments in a variety of departments, including Honors, Music, Museology, and the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID). As another of his nominating letters states, “his work in the UW Libraries is profoundly creative, represents impressive leadership, is aimed at an intersection of service and scholarship, and deeply demonstrates UW values of integrity, diversity, excellence, collaboration, innovation, and respect.”
What would you like to tell the next generation of librarians?
“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future.” – Jacques Derrida