-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Nancy Kandoian wins award
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 13:46:05 -0500
From: pga2 <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: Maps and Air Photo Systems Forum <[log in to unmask]>
------------------
Congratulations Nancy! I was VERY pleased to read this news,
and Alice's wonderful nominating letter about you and your
accomplishments. You richly deserve this award, and more! As
a fellow map cataloger I know how valuable our work is
towards putting new information at the fingertips of
researchers of all kinds. So it is gratifying to know that
our work is being recognized.
I hope the award came with some kind of stipend and
certificate! I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Paige Andrew
Faculty Maps Cataloger
Penn State University
p.s. Alice, THANKS to you for taking the time to write a
fantastic nominating letter on Nancy's behalf, none of us
would be so recognized with these types of awards, or those
that our organizations offer as well, without someone taking
the time and energy to sit and write down what is needed.
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Nancy Kandoian wins award
> Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 16:49:17 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
>
>
> ------------------
> It is a pleasure to announce to all of you that Nancy
> Kandoian, Senior Map Cataloger, Map Division, NYPL, has
> won the Bertha Franklin Feder award given to two
> outstanding staff members each year. Portions of the
> following nominating document were read today in a
> ceremony in NYPL President LeClerc's office.
>
>
> Nancy Kandoian
> Nominee for Bertha Franklin Feder Award
> September 2004
>
>
> Nancy Kandoian is one of the country's premier map
> catalogers. She has a chapter in Maps and Related
> Cartographic Materials, Cataloging, Classification, and
> Bibliographic Control, Haworth Press, 1999. She makes
> maps more accessible to the public through her own
> cataloging, teaching others about cataloging practices,
> writing for publications, and participating in
> professional activities. She is an outstanding, talented
> employee and a gracious, hard-working colleague.
>
> Despite having a Masters in Library Science from Rutgers,
> Nancy began her career at The New York Public Library as a
> technical assistant in the Map Division because she wanted
> to work with cartographic materials as research tools.
> Her BA was in geography, and she wanted to combine that
> undergraduate area of interest with her library work. She
> soon was promoted to a Librarian I/II position as the
> Senior Map Cataloger. Nancy's efforts to catalog and make
> accessible the many maps of New York City and its
> neighboring communities, in order to serve the public need
> for information, has been strong and continuous. New York
> City maps have priority for acquisitions and cataloging,
> as the Map Division endeavors to meet the needs of its
> local constituency. After several years as a cataloger at
> the beginning level, Nancy was promoted to Librarian III
> in 1982.
>
> Nancy's 20+ years of map cataloging have brought some
> 10,000 maps to the public's eye, via CATNYP and the union
> catalogs RLIN and OCLC. The integration of these formerly
> little known materials into the national databases brings
> NYPL map collections to the attention and accessibility of
> researchers around the world. She is sensitive to the
> access issues of the public, since she also assists the
> public at the reference desk, and this enhances her
> cataloging and its goal of increased access to Library
> materials via useful subject headings. Nancy's cataloging
> is particularly notable for the innumerable notations to
> further sources for research on particular antique maps, a
> feature that is of great interest and use to scholars and
> researchers.
>
> When the Map Division received a multi-million dollar map
> collection as a gift, Nancy eagerly began the intricate
> process of cataloging hundreds of antiquarian maps. A
> totally different sort of work, most often generating
> original records, not copy cataloging, antiquarian
> cataloging is time consuming, but Nancy finds great
> pleasure in the beauty of the materials. She made certain
> that many maps from this gift appeared in CATNYP soon
> after they were acquired, so that the gift is now
> accessible to researchers nearby and also known via the
> Internet to researchers around the world. Nancy wrote
> about her antiquarian map cataloging experiences in an
> article for the American Library Association's Map &
> Geography Round Table journal Meridian 13, 1998 and also
> in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Summer 1999, and
> Maps and Related Materials?, in order to share her hard
> won expertise with other map catalogers. Prior to these
> publications she had shared her love of Maine and Mt.
> Desert Island with a long bibliographic essay, "'Supreme
> and Distinctive' on the East Coast: The Mapping of Acadia
> National Park," published in Exploration and Mapping of
> the National Parks for A.L.A.'s Map & Geography Round
> Table Occasional Papers Series, No. 4, 1994. She was
> awarded a one week research grant from the American
> Geographical Society in Milwaukee, enabling her to use
> their research collections as she develops a cartographic
> reference tool for Armenian genealogical studies.
>
> Her current long term research involves the use of early
> map resources to enable Armenians to do intensive family
> history and research centered on their former homelands
> now in Turkish hands. She uses older maps which still have
> Armenian terminology, along with older gazetteers, to
> locate and identify villages and other geographic and
> political areas, which now have non-Armenian names and
> identities. Her goal is to create a website and/or a book
> to serve as an aid to research in the lost history of
> Armenia.
>
>
>
> A recent outstanding achievement has been Nancy's
> cataloging of over 1,400 maps and atlases in 2002-3, to
> fulfill the requirements of a NEH grant. Nancy cataloged
> antique maps of the Middle Atlantic colonies and states up
> to 1850 and taught and then supervised another staff
> member assigned to the project. As maps were cataloged,
> they were forwarded to the conservation lab for treatment
> and then to the digital imaging lab for scanning for the
> Library's digital repository. Nancy contributed hours and
> hours of her own time to make sure deadlines were met and
> maps were cataloged properly so they could go to the next
> step of the process. The end result of this hard work is
> now the "American Shores" website. It focuses on these
> early maps of the Middle Atlantic region, from New York
> south to Virginia, providing CATNYP links and digital
> imagery of hundreds of maps from NYPL's collections.
> Without Nancy's diligence and professionalism, the website
> would be of little account.
>
> In addition to cataloging, Nancy also works at the
> reference desk in the Map Division, answering in person,
> on the phone and occasionally by letter or email, all
> sorts of cartographic reference enquiries. She is rarely
> stumped by questions, and can assist with research topics
> that range from finding a shtetl in Poland to abandoned
> subway tunnels in 1930s New York. In a single afternoon,
> Nancy may help one researcher discover the paths of old
> underground waterways flooding basements and construction
> sites in Manhattan while assisting another Library user in
> finding the exact location of the address of her
> grandfather's jewelry store on Jane Street in the 1880s.
>
> Within the Library she has served on a variety of
> cataloging committees and taskforces, bringing to the
> book-oriented discussions the perspective of the non-book
> cataloger. Nationally, she chairs the ALA Map and
> Geography Round Table Cataloging and Classification
> Committee. Her expert knowledge has been called upon via
> the map library and librarians electronic discussion list,
> "Maps-L." Nancy has also shared her map cataloging
> expertise by consulting with and advising map collections
> at the New-York Historical Society and the Osher Library
> at the University of Southern Maine.
>
> She has given remarkably practical and useful two-hour
> workshops on map cataloging to students from Pratt School
> of Library and Information Science over the last three
> summers, in the Map Librarianship course taught by Map
> Division Chief Alice Hudson. Nancy is a natural teacher,
> able to bring to life, in an interesting way, the
> fundamentals of map cataloging as they differ from those
> for geographies and atlases.
>
> Nancy is a most wonderful colleague; she is generous,
> courteous, mannerly, and kind. She is precise and careful
> in her work, but open to new and exciting programs, as in
> the digital efforts described above, teaching map
> cataloging to others, serving on ALA cataloging committees
> , training and guiding fellow staff, and always, always
> being a guide and inspiration for her colleagues as well
> as her supervisors.
>
>
> Respectfully submitted by
> Alice C. Hudson
> Chief, Map Division, NYPL
>
>
>
>
>
> Alice C. Hudson
> Chief, Map Division
> The Humanities and Social Sciences Library
> The New York Public Library
> 5th Avenue & 42nd Street, Room 117
> New York, NY 10018-2788
>
> [log in to unmask]; 212-930-0589; fax 212-930-0027
>
> http://nypl.org/research/chss/map/map.html
>
> The true meaning of life is to plant trees,
> under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
> - Nelson
> Henderson
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