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The 2003 scholarship recipient of the W. David Rozkuszka scholarship is Naomi Frantes, who is currently enrolled in the online Master of Library Science program at Southern Connecticut State University from her home in Bismarck, North Dakota. She serves as manager of State Document Services at the North Dakota State Library. Among her wide and varied responsibilities, she supervises all aspects of the State Documents Service Department, coordinates the North Dakota State Document Depository Program that includes retrieving documents from state agencies and distributing them to the state depositories as well as the Library of Congress, contributes name authority records to NACO, and promotes state documents to the public and state agencies.

Naomi's interest in pursuing an MLS degree began when she was an undergraduate work study student in a college library, increased with her work in a variety of positions at the North Dakota State Library and culminated in her choice of the area of government documents when she was offered a cataloging position. Naomi says, "At that moment, I realized I had already found my niche working with government documents and chose to remain in my current position." "I am passionate about the world of knowledge and want to assist people in gaining access to information."

Naomi is particularly concerned with the range of issues surrounding permanent public access to both paper and electronic government documents. To this end, at the State Library she is involved in an exciting project to browse state agency web pages for publications and secure them for her collection in either paper or electronic format. She will be responsible for the implementation of future phases of the project such as the use of a spider to gather the electronic documents.

Colleagues speak of her professionalism, intelligence, dedication, organizational abilities, and creativity. Of particular note, as part of her somewhat non-traditional library science education, she worked with another distance student to create a cataloging system and updated database for a music collection located in California. Her professor was so impressed with the success of their project that she uses it as an exemplary service project each term for other students.

Naomi expects to complete her degree in May 2004 and has as a long-term career goal of the management of both federal and state government information and involvement in public service.