On October 22, 2009, the Wisconsin Library Association Awards Banquet recognizes the Red Cliff Library Project by awarding a 2009 Special Service Award to the three SLIS students who conducted the project.  The project with Red Cliff helped to support and encourage the creation of TLAM at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. 

The following excerpt is from  http://www.wla.lib.wi.us/awards/awards.htm

Special Service Award

Chelsea Couillard, Christina Johnson and Catherine Phan share the Special Service Award for their Community Needs Assessment for the Red Cliff Tribal Library, conducted when all three were students at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. In the summer of 2007, the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Bayfield County began to discuss closing the tribal library. The library was out of compliance with statutory requirements for system membership, usage was declining and little money was available from the tribal budget for the library.

The students were awarded a Kaufmann Entrepreneurship Community Internship grant for the summer and fall 2008-09 in order to conduct the needs assessment, under faculty supervision and staff cooperation, and in partnership with the Red Cliff Tribe. The students made monthly visits to the Red Cliff Reservation between June and November 2008, for community discussion and self-education. They collaborated with Joe Bresette, Red Cliff Tribal Operations Director; Jim Trojanowski, Northern Waters Library Service Director; Tim Kane, UW Extension Educator; and Janice Rice, UW-Madison librarian and then president of the American Indian Library Association.

Trojanowski, who nominated the group for the WLA Special Service award, reports that the Red Cliff Tribe is working hard to reopen the library. He states that though meeting statutory requirements for system membership is likely to remain a challenge for the library, “the fact that any library service will be available is a remarkable achievement that is unlikely to have occurred without the work of Christina, Catherine and Chelsea.”

The final report, Mazina’igan Wakai’igan: Red Cliff Tribal Library was released in December 2008. Currently, Coulliard is employed in Children’s Services at Baraboo Public Library; Johnson is the librarian in the American Indian Studies Library at UW-Madison; Phan is at MERIT, the School of Education Library at UW-Madison.

From left to right: Christina Johnson, Catherine Phan, and Chelsea Couillard–and the UW motor pool vehicle they drove one of many trips to Red Cliff.  Photo courtesy of UW-Madison SLIS.