The Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) and OCLC Research have awarded 2010 Library and Information Science Research Grants to Louise Spiteri of Dalhousie University and Laurel Tarulli of Halifax Public Libraries; Hsin-liang Chen and Barbara Albee of Indiana University; and Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jörgensen of Florida State University. The awards were presented during the ALISE 2010 Annual Conference Awards Reception in Boston, Massachusetts.
Louise Spiteri of the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University and Laurel Tarulli of Halifax Public Libraries will conduct research to examine and compare how library users access, use, and interact with two social discovery systems used in two Canadian public library systems. The objective of the study, ‘The Public Library Catalogue as a Social Space: Usability Studies of User Interaction with Social Discovery Systems,’ is to provide insight into the design or modification of social discovery tools to ensure they provide the best user experience.
Hsin-liang Chen and Barbara Albee, of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, will examine the implementation of an open source library automation system (Evergreen) in Indiana public libraries and its impact on library users in the project, ‘Impact of Open Source Library Automation System on Public Library Users.’ The expected significant outcomes of this project are to identify: benefits library users receive from the implementation of the open source library automation system; library users’ interests in using the OPAC to discover shared library collections; and whether the consortia library collections gain more usage by library users due to the implementation of the open source library automation system.
Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jörgensen, of the School of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University, will evaluate the utility of end-user generated tagging vocabularies (folksonomies) in maintaining and enhancing the quality of traditional knowledge organisation systems as sources of new terms, emerging concepts and relationships. The objectives of the study, ‘Assessing the Reuse Value of Socially Created Metadata for Image Indexing,’ are to evaluate the value of Flickr and Wikipedia metadata in generating useful terms and relationships for extending traditional controlled vocabularies.
OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grants support research that advances librarianship and information science, promotes independent research to help librarians integrate new technologies into areas of traditional competence, and contributes to a better understanding of the library environment. Full-time academic faculty (or the equivalent) in schools of library and information science worldwide are eligible to apply for grants of up to $15,000. Proposals are evaluated by a panel selected by OCLC and ALISE. Supported projects are expected to be conducted within one year from the date of the award and, as a condition of the grant, researchers must furnish a final project report at the end of the grant period.
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