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Angela manages a team of 15 people whose job is to promote and innovate library services, through 4 libraries, to the children in Thunder Bay. Her major efforts are working with the children themselves, where she works hard with the children to make sure that appropriate literature is available to the little ones at the very earliest stages of their development. As she states "Kids at an early age develop their spheres of interest and my team and I take the time to develop this interest and hopefully shape their future". Being so far away from the influence of Toronto and its extremely large library system has forced Angela and her staff to innovate in ways that have made her noticeable to other librarians throughout the province and has led to this very prestigious award. In her quest to influence the young minds at an early age, she last year created a project that distributed an education package on the importance of reading at an early stage. Over 1500 copies of this packages were given out to parents of all the new born babies in the Thunder Bay area. Angela was also instrumental in finding outside financing (mainly from Kinsman and Friends of the Library) for this very innovative project that served the entire Thunder Bay community. In addition, her other major innovation for the year 2000 was to come up with a solution to filter the Internet for children; which is called KIDNET. In this way, the children using the Internet at the Thunder Bay Library system are guaranteed to view only "safe" and "educational" WEB sites.
All Slovaks should be very proud of Angela's achievements. Angela, keep up the good work!!!! Congratulations on your once in a lifetime award.
We are depending on Angela Mikita to bring her innovative skills to the "Slovaks in Canada" project. Angela, working along with Peter Suffak, are leading the Thunder Bay community on wholehearted participation. Thunder Bay Slovak organizations will be meeting on Tuesday, February 20th at the Slovak Legion. Mr. Suffak is also inviting several representatives of the older families so that they can hear the news directly and get busy looking in their family albums for pictures (photographs, souvenir pamphlets, old newpapers).
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