Seen at ALA Annual 2017: Two ALA presidents and the Nittany Lion

two African-American professional women holding vertical poster composed of hundreds of digitzed images from Penn State University Libraires' special collections, forming a composite image of Penn State's Nittany Lion Shrine stone sculpture. Poster is signed in silver ink by many Penn State Libraries employees.

Courtney Young, head librarian at Penn State University Libraries’ Kelly Library and professor of women’s studies at Penn State Greater Allegheny, as well as the 2014-2015 president of the American Library Association (ALA), presented a Penn State Libraries-employee-signed Nittany Lion Shrine composite-image poster to the current Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, at the 2017 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago (June 22-27). Hayden also was ALA president, during the 2003-2004 year.

On Sunday, June 25, Hayden received ALA’s 2017 Melvil Dewey Medal, in recognition of “creative leadership of high order, particularly in those fields in which Melvil Dewey was actively interested: library management, library training, cataloging and classification, and the tools and techniques of librarianship.” 

The Nittany Lion Shrine poster is composed of more than 750 digitized images representing several artifacts from among the University Libraries’ Special Collections. According to Young, Hayden loves it!