91´«Ã½

This year's recipient of the NewsBank/Readex/GODORT/91´«Ã½ Catharine J. Reynolds Award is Gregory W. Lawrence, the Government Information Librarian at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library. Greg's primary specialty is government information related to agriculture. He is the coordinator of the United States Economics and Statistics System (USDA-ESS) web site housed at Cornell. This database provides searching capabilities to 300 reports and datasets from the economics agencies of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Researchers, politicians and farmers throughout the U. S. and abroad heavily use this site. Greg is in the process of creating and conducting a customer satisfaction survey based on the SERVQUAL instrument for this web site. This survey was created as a part of Greg's graduate studies for the Doctoral degree in Information Science at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY) and will be sent to 1500 date users associated with the USDA-ESS.

Greg will use the Reynolds Award stipend for travel to two national USDA data users meetings where he will conduct customer satisfaction focus group sessions. The qualitative information gathered through the focus groups will guide his interpretation of the quantitative survey data. This is important research in our field where little is known about customer satisfaction and use of databases. It is our pleasure to provide Greg with the means to complete this project and we look forward to its final results. Greg is another example of a documents librarian with intellectual curiosity and the ability to study and improve his profession with solid research. This is the kind work that gives us hope for the future of government information access and the development of new talent to carry it out.