LaDawna Harrington
twitter: @ldharring
LaDawna graduated with her BA in Education, from the University of Northern Colorado certified in Speech Communications and Dramatic Arts. Her Master's in Library Science is from Rutgers University where she is currently a part-time lecturer teaching School Library Management both face-to-face and online.
LaDawna has been a librarian at Millburn High School (MHS) in Millburn, NJ since 2010, and prior to that taught 13 years in a Middle School in Woodbridge Township. Her experience in library land is extensive having started her career in the Interlibrary Loan Department of Ohio University (home of OCLC) and then moving to IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis) to manage the acquisitions for the Main Library and its 3 branches. Moving to the East Coast LaDawna worked as the corporate librarian for a biopharmaceutical company doing scientific literature research and corporate intelligence. It was at the Biopharm Co. and her involvement as the only corporate librarian to participate in a Business Science Alliance collaboration that was spear-headed by the National Science Foundation that she was drawn back to teaching.
LaDawna loves her job as a School Librarian and her involvement with the library and school community has brought her recognition in her field. In 2000, she was the first receipiant of the Villy Gandhi Leadership Training Scholarship, followed with the 2004 New Jersey Outstanding Media Specialist Award. Working for the library and educational communities in NJ LaDawna has served as the President (and other offices) for LibraryLinkNJ, on the Advisory Board for CISSL (Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries), on the DOE Technology Strategic Planning Committee and served on the New Jersey Information Technology Infrastructure School Advisory Group. For NJ Association of School Librarians (NJASL) she is a past president, served as conference chair twice, and has served on, or chaired, several committees. She represented NJASL in Chicago in 2006 for the AASL Vision Summit that set the vision for the organization and the rewriting of the Information Standards. She was the chair of the AASL parent outreach task force and served on the AASL P21 Crosswalk.
LaDawna is the author of the book Guided Research and several articles for a variety of journals or magazines. She is currently at work on a chapter for the latest installment of Dr. Leslie Maniotes's Guided Inquiry Design book. She was featured on NJ Class Room Close-up TV show, and is frequently asked to present at workshops, locally, nationally, and via webinars. She will be an instructor at the 2014 CISSL Summer Institute.
