Dean Harry Bruce announced the 2011 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award - Arlene Kairoff Cohen-at its Dean's Club Dinner on May 19. This prestigious award, established in 1961, recognizes outstanding graduates of the Information School. Alumni are chosen for their distinguished service in community affairs, and/or specific meritorious service on behalf of the Information School and the UW.

Arlene Kairoff Cohen is described in one of her nomination letters as "a trailblazer to whom recognition is due." She received her MLib degree from the UW in 1973 and began her career at the UW's Pacific Northwest Bibliographic Center. After holding several other positions in the Seattle area, she moved to Micronesia in 1987 and ultimately became an Associate Professor and Head of the Circulation and Interlibrary Loan Department at the University of Guam Library. In 1990, she co-founded the Pacific Islands of Libraries and Archives (PIALA) and after retiring in 2007, she helped establish a network of nine hospital medical libraries in the Pacific islands where none previously existed. The libraries were facilitated by two grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

"Libraries were an integral part of my life since the time I was little," says Cohen, "I grew up in Los Angeles and started walking to the library when I was seven years old. I'll never forget how much I enjoyed the reading clubs in the summer."

After attending high school is Los Angeles., she studied sociology at California State University where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. While attending college, she obtained a position at the University of California at San Francisco's Medical Library, where she worked for Marion Mueller-one of Cohen's mentors. "She was an inspiration. Her enthusiasm was infectious."

Cohen also worked as a technical editor and writer for Boeing, and had various library instruction and consulting positions in King County, Highline Community College, and the University of Washington before she was drawn to the Micronesian island of Saipan, and later Guam, seeking library consulting and teaching positions. When she arrived in Guam, she wanted to pursue medical outreach because as she explains it, "Health is so basic. If you don't have your health, everything else is secondary. It's so important to have a healthy life." Improvements in access to health information became a driving force in Cohen's career.

After the launch of the internet, she trained doctors, nurses, allied health workers and students on how to use the internet as a resource and worked with schools and hospitals to to establish access to medical information. "I trained people how to get access and use the tools available to them," said Cohen, "I am passionate about information and resource-sharing."

Among her many accomplishments is her vigorous promotion and practice of library development and cost-free resource-sharing. She was co-founder of FreeShare, which made cost-prohibitive medical literature available to medical libraries across North America, the territories of the United States, and the US-affiliated Pacific Islands, thereby raising the level of service. Today over 50% of the medical libraries in the United States affiliated with the National Library of Medicine are FreeShare members, receiving over 75% of their materials cost-free.

When asked about how the iSchool prepared her for her career as an information professional Cohen commented, "I had wonderful teachers who taught me how to approach information organization and access issues. I learned that every subject area has its own way to be organized. The Library School gave me a way to see how different subjects-law, medicine, education, sociology, etc. - have their own organizational system with their unique indexes. I learned to appreciate each system and to study the organization of each subject first, so that I know how to find what I need. If you understand how something is organized, you know how to find the information. Library School provided the awareness of the frameworks used to organize knowledge or information, and the sources and tools to find that information. There is a unique organization to the way a field is established-an approach to knowledge," said Cohen.

She credited former faculty members Benjamin Page, Edmond Mignon and Marcia Bates for their wisdom and guidance. She described Mignon as "a visionary in terms of what he saw as the application of technology to information access-a guiding light." In 1972, he was able to foresee that one could search for an article, press a button, and print it out."

Although her establishment of the medical library system in the Pacific Island is her proudest achievement to date, she is now searching for her next place where she can make a significant difference. "There is such a need for access to cost- free resources in developing areas and resource sharing throughout the world, and I want to meet that need where I can." she explained.

Arlene has been recognized by two legislative resolutions in Guam, was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Islands Association of Libraries and Archives, as well as the recipient of the Virginia Boucher-OCLC Distinguished Librarian Award from the American Library Association.