Paula T. Kaufman has been recognized as the 2012 Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Academic/Research Librarian of the Year, the ACRL announced on January 24. The title comes with a $5000 award, which she will receive during the ACRL/Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) President’s Program at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA, on June 25. Kaufman is currently the Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries, university librarian, and professor of library administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Kaufman became the first Simpson Dean of Libraries in 2009, as LJ reported, after ten years as university librarian there. Before that, she served as dean of libraries at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from 1988 to 1999. Among other titles, she is a previous board member and president of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and has been a member of the HathiTrust Executive Committee since 2008, the year the digital repository was launched. She has also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration since 1995. “She has been a distinct leader at several organizations and has been influential in every venue in which she has worked,” said John M. Budd, chair of the award committee and a professor at the University of Missouri School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, in the announcement. “Nominees and supporters uniformly extol her abilities to build consensus, to develop multi-institutional groups and to work with diverse and sometimes opposing bodies.”