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For Immediate Release
March 2004

2004 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award winner announced

Susan McGlamery is the 2004 Recipient of the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award. Susan has spent the last five years developing the national online reference service , known as 24/7. The service can be accessed via the web at http://www.247ref.org.

This LITA award will be given for the first time in 2004 to recognize a librarian (or a library) that demonstrates exemplary entrepreneurship by providing an innovative product or service designed to meet the needs of the library world. Sponsored by Thomson Gale, and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association, the award includes a check for $5,000 and a certificate of recognition.

Susan McGlamery was given this award based on the relevance and usefulness of the technology she implemented and the significance of its contribution to the functioning of the library cooperatives she serves. Ms. McGlamery obtained LSTA grant funding through California's Metropolitan Cooperative Library System (MCLS) to develop the technology necessary to establish a round-the-clock live reference service. This project allowed library users to access a librarian over the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and receive the same quality of service that they would get at their local library’s reference desk.

California libraries participating in the initial project include members of the Metropolitan, Santiago and South State Cooperative Library Systems, three consortia representing forty-four public library jurisdictions (including Los Angeles Public Library and the County of Los Angeles Public Library) and twenty-five multi-type libraries in Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura Counties. In the first phase of the project, MCLS received funding to evaluate web contact center software as a means of providing reference services to remote users. This software was enhanced to provide live interaction (text chat) and collaborative tools, including routing (to better network with subject specialists in remote locations) and collaborative browsing (allowing the reference librarian to guide the patron's browser to the appropriate URLs).

Under the grant, the service was available only to California libraries. Through ongoing development the California segment of the project is now a state wide service accessible at http://www.asknow.org. The attractiveness of 24 hour reference to libraries from states other than California proved so great that Ms. McGlamery developed a pricing model for licensing. It was marketed so successfully that it now serves more than 300 libraries nationwide, and earnings from the licensing are used for support, upgrades, and enhancements. 24/7 Reference is believed to be the first service of this type .

Milestones in the development of 24/7 reference include:

• The first collaborative virtual reference service (July 2000)
• The first collaborative reference service to provide 24 hour coverage (June 2001)
• The first nationwide cooperative of public librarians available 24/7 (September 2001)
• The first nationwide cooperative of academic librarians available 24/7 (August 2002)

Diane Kachmar, LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award Committee chair, said “we as a committee feel Susan’s work on this project reflects the exceptional entrepreneurship we sought and exemplifies the vision that Brett Butler provided for extending automation to library processes and services. We therefore feel that Susan McGlamery is a fitting recipient for this Award.”

The award will be presented at the LITA President’s Program on Monday, June 28, 2004 at the American Library Association Conference in Orlando, Florida.