LSU Libraries’ Faculty & Staff Awards celebrate excellence and dedication within our library community. Each award comes with a $1,000 cash prize, recognizes a remarkable LSU Libraries employee, and underscores their contributions to the advancement of the Libraries and LSU. Join us in honoring Sigrid Kelsey, John Miles, and Dana Taylor for their leadership, tenacity, and exceptional efforts.

Sigrid Kelsey, Carolyn H. Hargrave Faculty Leadership Award 

The Carolyn H. Hargrave Faculty Leadership Award recognizes an LSU Libraries faculty member who has demonstrated exceptional leadership through job responsibilities, research, and service. The award is named in honor of Dr. Carolyn H. Hargrave, whose outstanding academic leadership in higher education provided a statewide network cooperative for resource sharing among Louisiana academic libraries.

Sigrid Kelsey, the 2024 Carolyn H. Hargrave Faculty Leadership Award recipient, is the head of Scholarly Publications & Analytics at LSU Libraries. She has worked in various capacities in the Libraries since 1998. During that time, she has mentored tenure-track librarians, launched a successful diversity residency program, edited six books, and written numerous articles. 

Kelsey is a recipient of the Baton Rouge Business Report’s Forty under 40 award (2010), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) College Libraries Section (CLS) ProQuest Innovation in College Librarianship Award (2010), the Louisiana Library Association (LLA) Anthony H. Benoit Mid-Career Award (2010), and the ACRL-Louisiana Scholar Librarian of the Year Award (2009). Kelsey has also served on the ALA Publishing Committee, the American Libraries editorial advisory board and is a member of the LSU Institutional Effectiveness Council. Kelsey leads the LSU Libraries research group and is spearheading the efforts to integrate ORCiD, a unique identifier for researchers, across campus.

John Miles, Early Career Librarian Award

The Early Career Librarian Award recognizes an LSU Libraries faculty member who has demonstrated exceptional accomplishment in the LSU Libraries through initiative, creativity, and the ability to make a significant contribution to the Libraries within the first six years of their career.

This year’s recipient is John Miles, who began working as curator of books in Special Collections in the fall of 2018. Some of his most notable accomplishments at LSU include the acquisitions of the Nuremberg Chronicle (published in 1493) with a grant from the Breslauer Foundation, and two important late-sixteenth American travel narratives with a natural history focus, as supported by grants from the Coypu Foundation. Undoubtedly the largest acquisition that he has been a part of is the partial gift/partial purchase of the Wyatt Houston Day Collection of African American poetry in 2022. 

Miles has also been involved in expanding Special Collections teaching efforts, which saw almost 90 class visits in the fall semester. He has two articles forthcoming, “Forgetting the Fall: Violence, Voter Suppression, and the End of Reconstruction in Tensas Parish, Louisiana” in Louisiana History, and “Studying the Physical Book across Collections,” co-written with Brittany O’Neil and Lauren Coats, in the Teaching with Primary Sources “Case Studies” series. 

Dana Taylor, Library Staff Award

The Library Staff Award recognizes an LSU Libraries non-classified professional staff member who has demonstrated exceptional accomplishment in the LSU Libraries through job responsibilities, service to the Libraries, and service to LSU. The recipient must have demonstrated outstanding achievement and maintained excellent relations with library employees and library users in their service to the LSU community.

This year’s recipient is Dana Taylor, director of Collection Services. She oversees the acquisitions, budgeting, and processing of library materials for LSU’s main Library. Taylor has been a full-time staff member of the LSU Libraries since January 1989 when she began working as a binding associate. Before working as a full-time staff member, Taylor was employed as a student assistant for the library. She has spent her entire career in positions related to library technical services.