Research on Libraries and Librarianship in 2000

Awards That Honor Excellent Research

All active awards are listed along with the amount of the award, the URL for the award (if available), and 2000 winners. If the award is annual but was not given in 2000, that fact is noted. General ALA awards are listed first, followed by units of ALA in alphabetical order, followed by other agencies in alphabetical order.

American Library Association

ALA/Library and Information Technology Association

Frederick G. Kilgour Award (with OCLC)


($2,000 plus expense-paid trip to ALA Annual Conference)


Winner: Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill


Rationale: Marchionini is a leader in the areas of digital libraries, human-computer interaction, information seeking in electronic environments, and information policy. His work, in the tradition of Frederick Kilgour, incorporates cutting-edge technology but never loses sight of the centrality of the user in any meaningful system.

ALA/Library History Round Table

Donald G. Davis Article Award


Award Page


Winner: Louise Robbins, University of Wisconsin, Madison


Publication: "Fighting McCarthyism Through Film: A Library Censorship Case Becomes a Storm Center,"
Journal of Library and Information Science Education 39 (Fall 1998): 291-311

Justin Winsor Prize ($500)


Prize Page


Not awarded in 2000

ALA/Library Research Round Table

Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research ($500)


Award Page


Winners: Karen M. Drabenstott, Schelle Simcox, and Eileen G. Fenton


Publication: "End-User Understanding of Subject Headings in Library Catalogs,"
Library Resources and Technical Services 43 (3). The authors report on the first large-scale empirical research on end-users understanding subject headings. Their findings led them to recommend major changes that have the potential to increase the usefulness of library catalogs.

Jesse H. Shera Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research ($500)


Award Page


Winner: Robert Carey, doctoral student, University of Western Ontario, School of Information and Media Studies


Paper: "Claiming the Inevitable Argument, User Fees and Professional Discourse in Librarianship." The author analyzes the public discourse employed by professional librarians to show how the user-fees issue has been depoliticized in order to resolve the tension between the profession's commitment to freedom of access and techno-bureaucratic control.

Three awards given by ALA units annually but not always for research were given for research in 2000. Two were given by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

The
K. G. Saur Award for the most outstanding article in
College & Reseach Libraries (
C&RL) went to Richard W. Meyer for "A Measure of the Impact of Tenure" in the March 1999 issue. The award committee described Meyer's article as "a well-written piece of quantitative research. Connecting tenure with institution quality is important not only for librarians, but for the entire academic community." The cash award of $500 is funded by K. G. Saur publishing company of Munich, Germany.

ACRL's Women's Studies Section started a new award in 2000 and gave it to a researcher. The first Award for
Significant Achievement in Women's Studies Librarianship was given to Lynn Westbrook (Texas Woman's University). The award jury chair commented that "The research presented by Westbrook in `Interdisciplinary Information Seeking in Women's Studies' is a truly fine example of the kind of scholarship this award was designed to recognize." The cash prize of $1,000 was funded by Routledge Press.

The
Blackwell's Scholarship Award presented by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) was given to Anne H. Perrault (University of South Florida). This annual award, a citation and $2,000 to the library school of the winner's choice, donated by Blackwell's, is given to the author of an outstanding monograph, published article, or original paper on acquisitions, collection development, or related areas of resource development. Perrault received it for "National Collecting Trends: Collection Analysis Methods and Findings," which appeared in
Library and Information Science Research, vol. 21, no. 1. The article presents a different methodology for collection analysis by identifying national collection patterns in academic libraries using data from the bibliographic utilities. Studying data from 1985-1996, the methodology indicates the impact of the serials crisis of the 1980s on library collections.

American Society for Information Science and Technology

ASIST Research Award


Winner: W. Bruce Croft


Rationale: Croft advanced work in clustering in significant ways, thereby improving its effectiveness. He developed the first system to integrate multiple search strategies, multiple document representations, user models, hypertext search, and intermediary strategies (I3R). His work on probabilistic retrieval and Bayesian inference networks has produced the INQUERY experimental system, which is used to build search engines by the Library of Congress, InfoSeek, and Sovereign Hill Software (now part of Dataware Technologies).

ASIST/UMI Doctoral Dissertation Award


Winner: Daniel Dorner


Project: "Determining Essential Services on the Canadian Information Highway: An Exploratory Study of the Public Policy Process"

Pratt-Severn Best Student Research Paper Award


Winner: Karen Weaver, OCLC


Project: "Cataloguing Internet Resources at MIT and UC San Diego Libraries"

Association for Library & Information Science Education

ALISE Methodology Paper Award


Winners: Boryung Ju, Robert Brooks, and Kathleen Burnett (Florida State University)


Project: "Measuring Navigational Preference in Hypertext Systems for Distributed Learning"

ALISE Research Paper


Winner: Allyson Carlyle (University of Washington)


Project: "Developing Organized Information Displays for Complex Works: A Study of User Clustering Behavior"

Eugene Garfield-ALISE Doctoral Dissertation Award


($500 for travel expenses plus 2000 conference registration and membership in ALISE for 1999-2000)


Winner 1: Cheryl Cowan Buchwald


Project: "Canada's Coalition for Public Information: A Case Study of a Public Interest Group in the Information Highway Policy Making Process"

Winner 2: Patterson Toby Graham


Project: "Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1918-1965" (School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama, 1998)

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