Breezy Silver
Staff Recognition

The disruptions created by the pandemic and the subsequent closure of the Gast Business Library in March 2020 affected Breezy’s work in two significant ways. First, there was a quick and immediate shift to online learning across campus which resulted in a substantial increase in demand for online access to the business library’s collections. Breezy met this challenge head on and significantly increased the business library’s purchases/licenses of e-books, including e-text books and increased seats to the e-books we already licensed. She also purchased more seats to some heavily used databases and purchased historical company datasets to support faculty research. The pandemic also created some other unique demands that we hadn’t encountered before, and Breezy met these challenges with novel solutions. This included mediated access to two business resources that were previously only available on a walk-in basis, Bloomberg and AutoNews. Bloomberg has a proprietary terminal with specialized searching syntax and was a heavily used resource prior to our closure. Breezy worked directly with Bloomberg and the business college to gain remote access to the Bloomberg data so that she could run queries for PhD students and faculty as needed. This had never been done before here at MSU. Some of the queries she conducted for students required a lot of communication since many of the students weren’t that familiar with the resource. Ultimately, this large increase in demand for e-everything placed Breezy’s work in the limelight and it is to her credit that faculty, staff, and students were able to seamlessly access the material they needed over the past year. Her efforts resulted in a collection that supported an evolving curriculum in an online environment and supported the library’s strategic efforts with respect to student development and support. There were also multiple occasions throughout the year where Breezy went the extra mile to help frantic faculty and struggling PhD students access the data they needed. She should be highly commended for her commitment to building and maintaining accessible collections and for her contributions supporting transformative research activities in business and economics, a strategic priority for the library.

The second way that the COVID pandemic affected Breezy’s work related to her other major responsibility – that of managing the daily operations of the Gast Business Library, including the front desk. As part of this responsibility and under normal circumstances, Breezy directly supervises two full-time professional staff members and indirectly supervises 18-20 student employees. Student employees mainly work at the front desk in the business library, and since we were not open, we had to advise students that we couldn’t continue to employ them. This was difficult and stressful for everyone. Breezy worked with C. Ryan to communicate with student employees during this time and was able to place some student employees in different positions at the Main Library. In addition to navigating a difficult situation with our student employees, Breezy was also very supportive of both of her direct reports throughout the year and sensitive to the unique challenges each one faced during the pandemic. Consistent with the library’s strategic priorities in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion and organizational vitality, she was empathetic and thoughtful in her approach to supervision and found solutions that allowed both staff members to work remotely on projects that benefitted the library. Finally, Breezy demonstrated a high degree of flexibility in the face of changing priorities and a shifting landscape of university policies and procedures during the pandemic. In fact, when it looked like we might reopen in the fall of 2020, she came in on her vacation days to help plan and modify operations so that we could reopen safely. While we did not reopen at that time, her planning was not in vain as it will inform our plans to reopen this August.