St. Peter librarian named Library Media Specialist of the Year

Sep. 30—What began as a love for books turned into, quite literally, an award-winning career.

After working as a library media specialist in the St. Peter Public Schools District for seven years, Karen Snay was named the Library Media Specialist of the Year at an Information and Technology Educators of Minnesota conference over the summer. The school district announced the award this week.

"It was a huge honor and a huge surprise," she said. "I feel it's totally undeserved. There are many, many media specialists who are in libraries and teachers all over who do tons of stuff that deserve it."

Snay's peers and colleagues couldn't disagree with her doubts more.

Ann Hokanson, executive director of Traverse Des Sioux Library Cooperative System — southern Minnesota's region of public libraries that provide outreach and connections with K-12 school libraries — confidently nominated Snay for the award and would do it all over again if she could.

"Her creativity and enthusiasm for providing library service to kids really showed during the pandemic," she said. "She was able to achieve great things in spite of the difficult circumstances."

Among the great things Hokanson alluded to was Snay's achievement in combining the middle school's library access to the St. Peter Public Library and regional library system so students have access to more books and resources.

"I learned that there was a school in New Ulm that was piloting having public library cards given out through their middle school," Snay said. "I said, 'I'd love to do that because our library is just down the street and it'd be great.' So we were able to work out a plan that allows us to share information with the public library and get public library cards printed for our kids."

When the school library is out of a book that a student wants, Snay and others alike are able to look it up on the public library's system and check it out using the students' public library card.

The book is then delivered by mail or picked up by Snay's middle school library assistant who happens to work part time at the public library.

"St. Peter TDS is a consortium of public libraries across the south-central part of Minnesota so students have access not only to what we have in our libraries, but if a book is in New Ulm, Arlington or Mankato, they transport it to St. Peter and to our school," Snay said.

Hokanson also applauded Snay's willingness to pilot a new library management system, changing the school's former system called Destiny — a specific LMS for K-12 — to one called Evergreen.

"I'm the only (school) librarian in St. Peter and I run the four school libraries, so it's kind of like a mini consortium here," Snay said. "They (the regional library system) wanted to test drive one of the systems that they were looking at without implementing it in all of their libraries all at once to get the bugs out of the way."

With the help of her team and TDS Technology Director Seth Erickson, the school's LMS was changed and Snay's "mini consortium" became the guinea pig.

"Seth took all of our books in each of our schools in the Destiny system and got them all transferred into this Evergreen system," Snay said. "We all learned how to use the Evergreen system so that we could figure out how to do it and report back to them what glitches we were having, how it worked and what didn't."

The task wasn't easy, as the Evergreen system is massive in comparison to the school's former one. Diligent effort and hard work went into the past year in order to report accurate findings about the system.

Snay said it was a huge undertaking but she's happy to have done it.

"I just feel really fortunate to be working in a library and doing something I'm in love with," she said. "Books and literacy are my passions."