Baker City library workers earn statewide honor for regional service

Beth Ross and Jon Georg helped keep Eastern Oregon’s library network moving through an Evergreen upgrade, bot attacks and funding uncertainty, and Oregon has now named the two Baker City-area workers its Library Employees of the Year.

The Oregon Library Association gives the award to a library employee who shows excellent service, leadership, initiative and a willingness to share skills across an organization. Ross, Sage Library System’s Systems Manager, and Georg, its Systems Specialist, are the 2026 recipients. OLA’s award history shows Bahram Refaei received the honor in 2025 and Robin Dawson in 2024.

Their work reaches far beyond Baker City. Sage says it is a consortium of 77 member libraries in 15 counties of eastern and central Oregon, with the combined catalog hosted by Eastern Oregon University’s Pierce Library and managed by the Sage Library System council. Some member libraries circulate through the integrated library system, while others participate as interlibrary-loan partners only. The Baker County Library District said Ross and Georg were the only two staff members running Sage, a detail that makes the statewide recognition especially significant for a system that connects rural libraries to books, records and deliveries they could not easily maintain on their own.

The honor also landed after a difficult year for the network. At a Jan. 21, 2025 council meeting, Sage leaders said the Evergreen upgrade had been an ordeal, that reports had broken during the process and that the system moved from Evergreen 3.13.5 to 3.13.7 to fix bugs and rebuild shared report templates. By July 15, 2025, council notes said Georg had been blocking AI bots with Python scripts and that daily log files had dropped from more than 30 GB to under 10 GB. Those same 2025 records show the council wrestling with how to make the courier system more self-sustaining as funding changed.

For Baker County, that work is not abstract. It affects whether a patron in Haines, Halfway or Richland can find a book through the shared catalog, whether a school library can tap into regional holdings and whether a small branch can keep serving its community without building a costly standalone system. Sage also warned in April 2025 about a spoofing domain, sage.eou.org, and said it had been registered from a high-risk IP address, another reminder that rural library service now depends as much on technical defense as on shelves and story time.

Sage’s history page says its libraries migrated to Evergreen in December 2010 with funding from LSTA, Wildhorse and The Collins Foundation. Fifteen years later, Ross and Georg were still keeping that regional backbone intact, and Baker County’s access to library service depended on it.