Derek McDowell (right) received his award at the Library of Congress on May 7, 2019, pictured here with Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress (left) and his fellow award winners.
Congratulations to Derek McDowell on being named the 2018 Federal Library Technician of the Year.
The Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) announced the winners of its national awards for federal librarianship, recognizing the many innovative ways that federal libraries, librarians and library technicians fulfill the information demands of government, business and scholarly communities and the American public.
Derek McDowell, a Reference Assistant at the NIH Library, was named the FEDLINK 2018 Federal Library Technician of the Year. He was recognized for his innovation and dedication as a technical resource for NIH Library multimedia services and for his superior customer service to the Library’s customers.
You may know Mr. McDowell as one of the faces of the NIH Library. He often sits at the NIH Library Information Desk, where he and fellow reference assistants consistently receive high marks for their courtesy, timeliness, completeness, accuracy and satisfaction. If you visit the NIH Library in the evening or the weekend, you will likely interact with Mr. McDowell, who regularly manages the NIH Library’s onsite services at those times.
Mr. McDowell is also the primary point of contact and technical lead for the NIH Library’s Digital Production Studio (DPS). He trains and assists NIH staff in their use of the Library’s high-quality audio and video recording and processing tools. In this role, he has helped create a series of oral history videos profiling notable NIH staff scientists, training videos for the NIH Clinical Center Nursing Department, an interview video for the National Institute on Aging’s Alzheimer’s Disease Preclinical Efficacy Database, and many other multimedia projects for NIH customers. Mr. McDowell even developed and taught the NIH Library’s first Adobe Premier Pro class.
When he’s not helping a customer at the Information Desk or recording video, Mr. McDowell supports the Library’s bioinformatics analysis tools, and contributes to librarian-led projects. For example, he prepared over 450 items for analysis for the CounterACT Program, which identifies better therapeutic medical countermeasures against chemical threat agents. Mr. McDowell also supported the Indian Health Service’s 4,000 clinical and tribal staff from across the country by facilitating online access and fulfilling document requests.
These are just a few examples of the exceptional work Mr. McDowell does every day to help the NIH Library achieve its vision of being the premier provider of information solutions that enable discovery and improve health.
Congratulations Derek!
FEDLINK honored the 2018 award winners at the FEDLINK Spring Exposition on May 7, 2019, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The names of the winners will remain on permanent display in the FEDLINK offices at the Library of Congress.
