Abby Armour
Library Director
Mukwonago Community Library
Mukwonago, Wisconsin
Mukwonago Community Library has called many places home in its more than 140-year history, including two jail cells in the Village Hall and an old roller rink. In its current and largest location in downtown Mukwonago, the library is thriving under the leadership of its director Abby Armour.
The library has undertaken an effort to repatriate items from its Grutzmacher Collection, which contains about 12,400 Native American items gifted to the library in 1965 by artifact collector Arthur Grutzmacher. For years, Armour worked to catalog the collection and guide the library through compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In 2024, the library repatriated Belongings removed from a burial site near Sacramento decades prior to the Wilton Rancheria Tribe of California, becoming the first public library in Wisconsin, and only third in the U.S., to repatriate Belongings under NAGPRA.
Armour is also expanding access to library materials and services. With support from the library’s Friends group, she has grown the library’s Thingery, which offers patrons a vast collection of items to check out including stargazing packs, woodburning kits, and a steel tongue drum. She has also used grant funding to add smart lockers outside the library to allow for 24/7 hold pickups—one of the first libraries in the state to do so. And in partnership with other area libraries, Armour facilitated the library’s participation in the Library Memory Project to provide programs to those affected by memory loss, Alzheimer's disease, and other forms of dementia.
“I can safely say that in my more than 40 years of library service, I have rarely encountered anyone as enthusiastic, as forward thinking, as risk-taking, competent, and yet professional as Abby Armour,” one of her nominators wrote. “She is a phenomenal person and librarian and is definitely a ‘Librarian to Love!’”
Armour was selected from nearly 1,300 nominations from library users nationwide for the 2025 award. As part of her award, she will receive a $5,000 cash prize as well as complimentary registration and a travel stipend to attend ALA's LibLearnX event in Phoenix.
The I Love My Librarian Award is sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with additional support from the New York Public Library, and is administered by the American Library Association. Since 2008, library users have shared more than 24,000 nominations detailing how librarians have gone above and beyond to promote literacy, expand access to technology, and support diversity and inclusion in their communities.