UAL Service Excellence Award 2018 - Kim Frail

Submitted by: Debbie Feisst

We are pleased to nominate Kim Frail, Public Services Librarian at the HT Coutts Library, for the UAL Service Excellence Award. As you will see, her system wide work is significant and she most certainly excels in all criteria for this award.

Kim’s recent term as Chair of the UAL Teaching and Learning Committee is an exemplar of her commitment to service excellence and leadership. Over the years that she has chaired this group, and as the Subject Librarian for CTL, Kim has developed a series of unique and well-attended workshops with CTL-seconded professor Dr. Carla Peck for librarians to strengthen and deepen our teaching abilities. 

Kim’s leadership in and attention to supporting librarians to be strong instructors has resulted in the most rigorous attention to teaching development at the UAL in at least a decade and with tangible impact on teaching for all who have attended these high quality workshops. 

This aligns perfectly with the UAL Strategic Priority related the Teaching Library and shows a scope of accomplishment and relationship building within UAL and other campus units. Kim has taken a lead in this strategy being rationalized, developed and articulated for the UAL as a whole. It is thanks to many of her efforts and strong vision that UAL is moving forward as a Teaching Library. She is able to also communicate this perspective to others and does so enthusiastically and on an ongoing basis.

Kim consistently shows initiative and innovation and the most recent and impactful example of this is her tireless effort to champion the inclusion of the Library Resources Block in eClass. Kim pioneered use of the eClass Library Block starting in 2012, winning a TIGER grant to work with an instructional designer to design the block. Kim collaborated with faculty and colleagues to assess uptake and use by students, providing statistics and laying the groundwork to back PSC’s initial advocacy with CTL to get the block hard-coded into eClass. 

Kim has maintained relationships with CTL and ITS in order to introduce updates to the block when the opportunity presented itself, and has advocated with effective persistence for the block to become present by default in all courses for 2018-2019 and beyond! Thanks to Kim’s efforts, and solutions-focussed perspective, library services are present for all students in the digital learning environment. You cannot get much more impactful than that!

Kim is a skilled communicator and a respected and valuable staff member at Coutts and beyond, demonstrating strong facilitative abilities and who has the very significant and important capacities for collaboration and project management. Kim’s strong competencies in these areas and her overall qualities she brings to the work environment have ensured her great success  

Her commitment to service is evident in the relationships she has developed in her Subject area, Elementary Education, where Department Chair Maryanne Doherty describes Kim as “a very positive asset to our Department in that she makes outstanding contributions” and that Kim’s “professionalism and ability to provide outstanding advice” is essential.