IWR Information Professional of the Year: Dave Pattern

I’m delighted to report that Dave Pattern has been announced as the Information Professional of the Year in the annual Information World Review awards which took place at the Online Information 2010 conference.

As a former winner of the award I was on the judging panel. As I know (and like and admire) Dave I felt that when I took part in the judging process I should document the reasons why I felt Dave would be a worthy winner of this award.

I felt that the award should be given to someone who not only demonstrated their value within their hist institution (there are a great many librarians and ‘shambrarians’ for whom that would be true) but also could be shown to have had an impact across the wider community.

Dave has demonstrated his impact within the wider community in two areas.  Dave has been active in supporting the Mashed Libraries series of one day events  whoch have aimed to to “bring together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology“. The original idea was conceived by Owen Stephens in a blog post on “Mashed Libraries? Would you be interested?” on 1 July 2008. The second response was from Dave, who showed his enthusiasm together with an example of his normal self-deprecating humour: “I’ve love to see a library unconference in the UK… I’m just too lazy to try and organise one myself! Count me in and, if nothing else, I can guarentee there’ll be two of use sitting in a room with our laptops!“.

Dave certainly wasn’t lazy in his support for the events as two of the six events have been held at Dave’s host institution, the University of Huddersfield: Mash Oop North on 7 July 2009 and Chips and Mash, on 30 July 2010.

Before Dave got involved with Mashed Libraries he was demonstrating the value which can be gained from mashing up library data. As you might expect from someone who is committed to sharing best practices across a wide community Dave has a blog (which was launched way back in May 2005) . On the blog you can read his posts on usage data, which includes a post entitled ”2008 — The Year of Making Your Data Work Harder” in which Dave described his “code primarily designed for our new Student Portal — course specific new book list RSS feeds“. Dave was just giving talks about ways of exploiting data, he was writing code and implementing services which demonstrated the value of the approaches he was encouraging the library community to adopt.

The benefits of openness of library data are now much more widely accepted than when Dave began his work at the University of Huddersfield Library – and it was good to see the profile of his institutional work getting a higher profile through his work on JISC-funded projects.

It is clear that Dave has been a real asset to the University of Huddersfield.   It is pleasing that his value to the wider library community is now being appreciated through the award of the Information Professional of the year.

I’m sure that those who know Dave will join in with me in expressing congratulations on a richly deserved recognition on both the value of the work Dave has done for the sector and the warmth and esteem which many of us feel for Dave.

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