Five Cornell seniors have received Fuerst Outstanding Library Student Employee Awards for "exceptional performance, leadership and library service to the campus." At $500, the Fuerst Award is one of the largest awards given to Cornell student workers.

The 1997 Fuerst Award winners and their majors, hometowns and libraries are: Eric Beveridge, history, DeSoto, Mo., Law Library; Kirsten Harhay, human development/family studies, Fairport, N.Y., Mann Library; Mohamed Nazri Omar, economics/government, from Malaysia, Management Library; Jeremy Pyper, Asian Studies, Montgomery, Ala., Olin Library; and Melinda Shaw, independent study, Agriculture/Life Sciences, Tully, N.Y., Olin.

The awards are named for their benefactor, Cornell alumnus and longtime contributor William F. Fuerst Jr. '39, and have been given annually for the past three years. Fuerst, 79, also has sponsored many other Cornell undergraduates through scholarships and support of athletics programs, prompting Cornell to name a physical therapy room in Schoellkopf Hall the William F. Fuerst Jr. Rehabilitation Room this past fall.

Recipients of the Fuerst Award are nominated by their library supervisors, who joined Fuerst and about 75 other friends of the winners for a reception in Cornell's A.D. White House on March 4.

Sarah Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, hailed the students' enthusiasm and contributions to the library. She told them, "I hope you will receive some practical and intellectual payoffs from your library work and that you will feel a sense of pride in having worked for one of the truly great university libraries. My personal hope is that you will go on to serve as ambassadors of the library, conveying their importance."

Cornell Library has 19 libraries with more than 6 million volumes and a budget of $34 million, Thomas said. Each year, 130,000 new items are added (filling 2 miles of shelving); 1 million items are checked out or renewed; and 5 million database searches are conducted.

"Those numbers give you a sense of what an energetic place Cornell Library is," she told the students, "and I would like to thank you for contributing to that energy."

Following Thomas' talk, Vally Kovary, director of external relations, presented the award winners and nominees with a copy of Land of Rivers: America in Word and Image, a new book from Cornell University Press. Ann Dyckman, director of library human resources, then read excerpts from the nomination forms that supervisors had completed on the winners' behalf.

Those excerpts, and the reception's conversations, were sprinkled with phrases like, "She's become a member of our family" and "Couldn't you stay with us for another four years?"