Abbott Receives UW Libraries Outstanding Staff Award

Shadow Abbott, University of Wyoming Libraries library specialist, is the recipient of the UW Libraries Outstanding Staff Award for her contributions in 2025.

The Outstanding Staff Award, funded by the McMurry-Spieles Excellence Fund, honors a UW Libraries staff member who has demonstrated exceptional service to UW Libraries and made significant contributions to the university and/or the community. Recipients of this award are chosen by a committee of their peers.

Abbott has served as a library specialist in the UW Libraries Digital and Distinctive Collections Office since fall 2021. She first joined UW in 2016 as a student employee while completing her bachelor's degree. She digitizes a wide variety of materials, including documents, books, newspapers, photographs and maps, making them accessible online to researchers and the public. She has become a leading contributor to the UW Libraries' digital collections program, specializing in photogrammetry, a process that uses photography and specialized software to create highly detailed 3D models.

Abbott has produced more than 1,300 publicly accessible 3D models of fossils, archeological materials, historical artifacts and other unique collections. Her projects have included digitization work for the UW Geological Museum, UW's Museum of Vertebrates, the UW Archaeological Repository and UW Libraries' Special Collections, making rare and unique collections more accessible to audiences far beyond campus and around the globe. In addition to her digitization work, Abbott teaches workshops that introduce faculty, staff and students to 3D digitization techniques and their applications in research and education.

Colleagues who nominated Abbott cited her innovation, collaborative approach and ability to independently develop new methods that expand access to collections and support academic scholarship.

"We are incredibly lucky to have an employee with this skill at the University of Wyoming and who is willing to try to develop new ways of using photogrammetry, including a scale-to-model of a T. Rex," wrote Laura Vietti Wittke, Museum and Collections manager in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, in her nomination letter.

Abbott's work has transformed how researchers, students and the public interact with UW's collections. Her expertise, creativity and commitment to service have strengthened partnerships across campus and significantly expanded the reach of UW Libraries' digital collections.

Abbott is pursuing a Master of Library and Information Science degree while continuing to advance digital access to UW's collections through innovative digitization and 3D modeling initiatives.