Following a conversation in a pub (where the best ideas almost always come from) and some slight prodding, I nominated Dave Pattern for IWR Information Professional of the Year – and was really pleased that the judges agreed with me. Brian Kelly (one of the judges and a previous winner of the award) has blogged why he believes Dave to be “a worthy winner of this award”, and I thought it would be nice to share my reasons for nominating him – so here is the text of my nomination (with a few links added). I could have gone on, but nominations were limited to 250 works 😛

I would like to nominate Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager at the University of Huddersfield, as IWR Information Professional of the Year 2010.

Dave is a constant source of inspiration to those of us working on the join between libraries and technology using creativity and a sense of fun to bring to life ideas such as the “Library 2.0 idea generator” (follow @library2 on Twitter) and the “HotStuff 2.0 blog“.

Dave does not just innovate for the sake of it, but looks carefully at the impact of what he does, as his outstanding work on ‘activity data’ shows. By analysing the usage of library resources at the University of Huddersfield Dave has added new services to the library catalogue, making recommendations to students as they explore the library collection.

Taking the analysis of library usage information further Dave, with his colleagues, has found a strong positive correlation between library usage and the final grades achieved by students. This type of information and analysis will be invaluable to the library community as it seeks to prove the value of library services in the coming years.

(lots of relevant blog posts on usage data and how it has been used at Huddersfield on Dave’s blog)

Dave is a strong supporter of the recent ‘Mashed Library‘ events, which seek to explore the use of technology in libraries. Dave has organised two of the six events over the last two years, and has provided his considerable expertise in support of the others.

Dave leads by example in both his technical work and his contribution to the community, and thoroughly deserves recognition as Information Professional of the Year.