-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Nancy Kandoian wins award
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 16:49:17 -0500
From: [log in to unmask]
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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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