2025 WHSLA Award Winners!

Karen Hanus & Dora Davis

Submitted by Barb Ruggeri – Immediate Past President, WHSLA

On January 5th , I had lunch with Dora Davis and Karen Hanus to give them their well-deserved awards.

Dora Davis was the recipient of the 2025 Robert Koehler Award for Exemplary Service to the Wisconsin Health Science Library Association (WHSLA). Robert Koehler served as a distinguished member of the WHSLA board for nearly 38 of his 39-year membership. The award was created last year upon Robert’s retirement, and Dora is the first person to receive the award after him.

As our coordinator for Professional Development, Dora Davis has devoted countless hours to surveying membership about their interests, applying for support from NNLM Region 6 to fund MLA webinars, distributing funding codes to members to attend certified continuing education seminars at no cost, tracking the funding utilization and reporting this activity at our board meetings. She also administers our Professional Development stipend program each year.

Professional Development is the leading purpose and activity of WHSLA membership and it has sustained our state professional organization thanks to her consistent efforts since 2016. In addition to this role, Dora has served as an officer and a representative of our organization to other groups. She assisted in the planning of a large in-person conference in Milwaukee in 2019 as well as virtual conferences for our state association.

Karen Hanus received the WHSLA Librarian of the Year for 2025, in recognition of outstanding leadership, achievement and commitment to the library profession. It’s unusual for a WHSLA member to receive this award twice in their career, but since Karen Hanus’s first award in 1999, her continuous active involvement in WHSLA and her success as a health science library leader makes her a unique exception! 

In their nomination, WHSLA members acknowledged her decades of service to WHSLA which included archival preservation, digitization of records, executive leadership and most recently, innovations in WHSLA asset management in her first year as WHSLA treasurer. She was also cited for essential contributions to integrating the libraries for two healthcare system mergers since 2020, consistent efforts to increase awareness of library services across the Advocate Health enterprise, and her unflagging support for her library staff. As the submission aptly put it – “she does everything with compassion, wisdom and steady resolve.”

On behalf of the WHSLA membership, I sincerely thank Dora and Karen for their leadership and service to WHSLA.