91´«Ã½

To: Library Research Round Table Members


From: Steve Wiberley, Chair


Re: Spring Report to Membership

Greetings Library Research Round Table members!

This report, LRRT's first posted on the Web rather than in the mail, is a new venture in communication with you. Because the cost of mailings has risen faster than round table revenues, the LRRT Steering Committee decided to post the chair's reports on the Web and notify members by e-mail when the report was available. The other parts of mailings, e.g., the list of research meetings at the Annual Conference, will also be posted on the web. We will make available in the literature distribution bins at the Annual Conference printed copies of the spring report and the list of research programs. Posting on the web is a major change, and we welcome your responses to it. Please e-mail comments to me (
wiberley@uic.edu).

Click below to learn about:

-
the new Ingenta Research Award


-
the site for Library Research Seminar IV (2007)


-
winners of the Shera awards


- forums at the upcoming Chicago conference:

*
Innovations in Service at the Seattle Public Library: Connecting Research and Practice


*
Information Seeking Research: Teens & Scientists


*
Four Star Research


*
Graduate Student Forum

-
our newly elected officers


-
inviting a friend to join LRRT

The Ingenta Research Award supports research on seeking, use and preservation of digital information. The award is for up to $6,000 to support research and up to $1,000 for travel to a national or international conference to present findings from the study. LRRT issued a call for proposals in February, and the jury deliberated in late April. The decision was very difficult because there were a number of strong proposals. I am pleased to say that Patricia K. Galloway, University of Texas School of Information, is the first winner. The award will support her project, "Institutionalizing a University Department-Level Institutional Repository." We will present the award to Dr. Galloway at our research forum on Saturday, June 25 at 1:30 pm. LRRT is grateful to Ingenta for its support of research and to Doug Wright of Ingenta for his hard work to help get the award off the ground.

The Library and Information Science Program of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario will host Library Research Seminar IV, October 10-12, 2007. The conference will be held at the Station Park hotel in London, Ontario with plenary sessions at the London Central Public Library. The conference theme is The Library in Its Socio-Cultural Context: Issues for Research and Practice. Dr. Gloria J. Leckie of UWO is chair of the seminar.

Linda Z. Cooper, and her Shera Awards Committee of Michael Havener and Ross J. Todd kept busy during the winter reviewing applications for the Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research and the Jesse H. Shera Award for the Support of Dissertation Research. The award for published research goes to Karen E. Fisher, University of Washington, Joan C. Durrance, University of Michigan, and Marian B. Hinton, University of Michigan, for "Information Grounds and the Use of Need-based Services by Immigrants in Queens, NY: A Context-based, Outcome Evaluation Approach" that appeared in the June 2004 issue of JASIST. The winner of the award for dissertation research is Donghee Sinn, University of Pittsburgh, for her study, "Records and the Understanding of Violent Events: Archival Documentation, Historical Perception, and the No Gun Ri Massacre in the Korean War." We will present these awards at the graduate student forum on Sunday, June 26 at 10:30 am.

As it has for several years, LRRT will present four research forums at the 91´«Ã½ Conference. Steering Committee member Lorri Mon has organized and will chair the first on Saturday, June 25 from 10:30 am until noon in McCormick Place (MCP) N-426a. Karen Fisher and Seattle Public Library's Jill Bourne will discuss "Innovations in Service at the Seattle Public Library: Connecting Research and Practice."

Jo Bell Whitlatch has brought together two forums featuring refereed papers. The first is on Saturday, June 25 from 1:30 to 3:30 pm in MCP S-503a, "Information Seeking Research: Teens & Scientists" where Sandra Hughes-Hassell and Denise Agosto of Drexel University will talk about urban teenagers and Pali Kuruppu, Iowa State University, about agricultural and biological scientists. LRRT's past chair, Lynn Westbrook will comment on these two presentations.

The second forum brought to us by Jo Bell is on Sunday, June 26 from 1:30 to 3:30 pm in MCP S-502B, "Four Star Research" in which Jessica Moyer, Richland Community College, will speak about "Learning from Leisure Reading" and Martha Kyrillidou, Association of Research Libraries, Colleen Cook, Texas A&M, and Bruce Thompson, Texas A&M, will address "Reliability and Validity of 2004 LibQUAL
+™ Scores for Different Language Translations." Connie Van Fleet of the University of Oklahoma and John Carlo Bertot of the LRRT Steering Committee will comment.

Jury Chair, Mark Winston, Rutgers University, has organized our graduate student forum of juried presentations for Sunday, June 26 from 10:30 am until noon in MCP S-502b. Mark has chosen Hannah Kwon, MLIS student, Rutgers University, to lead the session. The three speakers and their topics will be: Donghua Tao, Ph.D. student, the University of Missouri-Columbia, "Medical Students' Selection on Reference Services in Medical Libraries;" Jim Campbell, MLIS student, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, "Responses to the Enclosure of the Information Commons: 2000-2004;" and Karen Weaver, doctoral student, University of Pittsburgh, "Drawing within the Lines: Shades of Gender and Name Authority Variation in the Description of Early Printed Books."

I would like to thank all those whose work I have described above and others who make LRRT's accomplishments possible. Our Secretary-Treasurer, Alma Dawson, and Steering Committee member, Vicki Gregory, have represented us at meetings, served on juries, and guided us through many challenges. Myoung Wilson's efforts as chair of the Membership Committee have kept our numbers strong. And thanks to our Nominations Committee of Melissa Gross, Chair, Marie Radford, and Lorri Mon, we are pleased to welcome Joan Stein, Carnegie-Melon University, as Vice-Chair/ Chair-Elect and Jeffrey Pomerantz, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, as a new Steering Committee member. Finally, we are grateful to Denise Davis, Director of the 91´«Ã½ Office for Research and Statistics, our staff liaison at 91´«Ã½, and her assistant, Letitia Earvin. Their responses to the many demands of LRRT are models of efficiency, wisdom, and patience.

I look forward to seeing you in Chicago, and, to close, what else can a chair do, but urge you to persuade a friend to click on
http://www.ala.org/ala/lrrt/joinlrrt/joinlrrtinfo.htm and join us!