Dr. Yvonne Chandler, associate professor and director of the Law Librarianship and Legal Informatics program is a recipient of the 2020 Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award by the American Association of Law Libraries. The award is the Association’s highest honor.

Established in 1984, the Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award recognizes a career of outstanding, extended and sustained service to law librarianship and to AALL. The Award is presented to an individual who has completed or is nearing completion of an active professional career.

Since joining the IS department in 1993, Dr. Chandler has dedicated her time to teaching and service in the LIS profession.

“Dr. Chandler is one of our most dedicated professors,” Jiangping Chen, professor and chair of the Department of Information Science told AALL. “As an enthusiastic LIS educator and scholar, she has guided and recruited numerous students to the library and law library profession, especially minority and first-generation college students.”

Chandler has been an active member of AALL for over 40 years, attending the association’s annual conference each year, and hosting networking events for IS alumni and students. She is also a founding member of the Black Caucus of AALL. Her service to law librarianship also includes serving as Vice President and President of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) from 2004-2005 and 2005-2007, respectively.

In addition to her role as director of the Law Librarianship and Legal Informatics program, Dr. Chandler served as director for several out-of-state cohorts for the Master’s program. As cohort director she successfully recruited many students of color to pursue their library and information science degree, and served as advisor throughout their journey.

IS alumna, Dawn Smith (MLS ’05) showed support in nominating Dr. Chandler for the award. She recounts the positive influence that Dr. Chandler has had on her as a mentor and a friend, and says "Meeting Yvonne was a transformative moment in my life." As a student, uncertain of how she would merge her love for the law and libraries into a successful career, Dr. Chandler helped her chart her path towards becoming a law librarian. She credits Yvonne for helping her to build a professional network, eventually leading to her current job as Head of Acquisitions at the Yale Law School.

“Servant leadership is why she won this award,” says Dawn. “She invested time (our most precious commodity) in each person that she impacted in our profession, and she has left behind a legacy of caring, empowerment, and encouragement that we can continue to share with those who come into librarianship after us.”

Passionate about LIS education, Chandler has received several federal grants totaling over $4M dollars to support education for the pursuit of master's degrees in library & information science. Her most recent grant in 2016 from the Institute of Museum and Library Service provided full tuition scholarship opportunities for 12 Pacific Islanders living and working in the USAPI, known as the LEAP-II Cohort Program.

This is Chandler’s second major award from AALL. In 2019, she was honored to receive the Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award for the publication "Celebrating Diversity: A Legacy of Minority Leadership in the American Association of Law Libraries " that she co-authored with her colleagues. She was also the recipient of the DEMCO/ALA Black Caucus Award for Excellence in Librarianship from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.