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CHICAGO - The Library History Round Table is pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 Phyllis Dain Library History Award. The award is named in honor of Phyllis Dain, a library historian widely known as a supportive adviser and mentor as well as a rigorous scholar and a thinker with great breadth of vision. Awarded every two years, the award is given for an outstanding dissertation that embodies original research on a significant topic relating to the history of libraries, librarianship or information science.

The 2011 recipient is Susan Reynolds for her dissertation entitled “The Establishment of the Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria, 1851–1884: Antecedents, Foundation, and Legacy.” Reynolds graduated from the Department of Library and Information Studies of Charles Sturt University of Australia in 2008 and is currently a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The award committee was impressed by the depth of her research, her lucid and engaging prose and her ability to place the history of the library within a larger historical context. The Committee praised Reynolds’s work for “setting a new standard for the history of a specific library.”

The Library History Round Table of the 91´«Ã½ exists to facilitate communication among scholars and students of library history, to support research in library history and to be active in issues, such as preservation, that concern library historians. The Round Table sponsors conferences, publishes a newsletter and presents prizes such as the Phyllis Dain Dissertation Award to promote excellence in library history research.