Newsroom

Alyssa M. Valenti, RVCC Electronic Resources & Web Services Librarian, has been awarded the 2025 Distinguished Service Award by the NJ Academic Librarians Association.

Valenti has been an academic librarian since 2005 and has been the Electronic Resources Librarian at RVCC since 2011. Throughout her career, she has developed expertise in multiple facets of librarianship, electronic resources management, administration of EZProxy and OpenAthens, information literacy and inclusive teaching practices, web services design and development, user experience and usability testing, and library administration and budget management. Valenti has provided extensive leadership to NJAL, including serving as President-Elect, President, and Past President from 2019 through 2023, taking on additional time as Past-President when a colleague was unable to fulfill their term.

During her time as President, Valenti was instrumental in ushering through the name change of the annual Virtual Academic Library Environment of NJ/Association of College & Research Libraries – NJ/NJ Library Association College & University Section (VALE/ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS) conference to “NJ Academic Libraries Conference (NJALC),” giving it better name recognition around the state, especially for early-career librarians, and bringing the conference name in line with its purpose and with other ACRL Chapter conferences across the country. She also led the organization through the challenges of the pandemic, including providing an opportunity for academic librarians whose NJLA Conference presentations were cancelled to still showcase their work.

Valenti’s commitment to the broader library community is evident in her longtime service to VALE and its VALE Academic Library Information Discovery (VALID) project and to ACRL through the Conference Contributed Papers Committee and several other ACRL committees.

Valenti’s research has been published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship and Library Hi-Tech News, and she co-authored a chapter in the ACRL publication, Virtually embedded: The librarian in an online environment.  The DIY Usability Testing Kit for Libraries that she created during a faculty sabbatical is freely available online for any library to use and includes templates, scripts, task lists, and more based on usability testing best practices. A summary of her project and best practices was published by Weave: Journal of Library User Experience.

###

May 22, 2025

Media contact: Donna Stolzer, 908-526-1200, ext. 8383