Trevor Sandgathe

We celebrated our fabulous library staff last week and SCARC’s own Trevor Sandgathe won the Outstanding Classified Employee of the Year award! This post comes from Anne Bahde’s award presentation speech for of Trevor — after reading it I think you’ll agree that we are lucky to have him on staff.

Trevor has played a critical role throughout the Special Collections and Archives department merge, especially in regard to collection management and public services operations. Over the numerous months of this process, he has worked hard to articulate and advance both departmental and library goals, and has contributed significantly to the development of merged processes and policies.

As the plans for the departmental merge began, Trevor initiated the process of preparing the 5th floor facilities to accommodate the anticipated move of a very large volume of third floor collections. In doing this, he identified numerous collection management problems in both departments, and presented creative ideas for solutions to these issues. Trevor worked to maximize space for collections, to identify and solve preservation and facilities issues, and to simplify shelving and retrieval. He subsequently led the work on a major shift of the rare book collections, carefully consolidating them to conserve stack space, streamline paging operations, and to identify volumes in need of special preservation care. Because of this vital work, the department is poised to better serve our patrons, and to better manage and preserve our merged collections for future research and teaching.

Trevor contributed significantly to the procedures and policies related to public services operations. As the combination of public service points began, Trevor worked on the Public Services Merger Team to explore issues related to services for patrons. Once again, he identified problems with current practices, and proposed resourceful and innovative solutions to these issues. In consultation with the Public Services Merger Team, he developed several new processes related to patron registration and orientation procedures, collection retrieval, and recording of statistics. He drafted a comprehensive Public Services Manual that outlined the combined policies for the departments, circulated this to all staff, and contributed to the training of staff members on these new desk operations. In addition to this work, Trevor has also served countless hours on our public services desk. He continually takes the extra time needed to teach visitors to better locate and evaluate our collections, ensuring a rewarding research experience for our patrons. His fine work with public services operations recently led to him being named Public Services Coordinator for SCARC.

In both collection management and public services areas, he has provided excellent service, and created resources and processes that are enabling SCARC to better serve its patrons. Trevor’s accomplishments, as well as his good nature, team spirit, and willingness to engage with problems to work towards solutions, have promoted a much-needed collaborative spirit between the two merging departments. His practical, sensible ideas for improvement have made the daily work of the department easier and more fluid. He continually goes above and beyond for both SCARC staff and patrons, and for that we truly thank him.