SILS faculty and students receive 2007 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research

Two professors and two doctoral students of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have been awarded the 2007 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research by the Library Research Round Table of the American Library Association (ALA).

Drs. Paul Solomon, senior associate dean and associate professor and Gary Marchionini, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor; and Ph.D. students Cheryl Davis and Terrell Russell co-wrote the winning paper titled, “Information and Library Science MPACT: A Preliminary Analysis.”

"The paper proposes a set of metrics for assessing university faculty mentoring impact as manifested in doctoral dissertation advising and committee membership," said Marchionini.  "A sample of 2000 dissertations in information and library science over a 40 year period was used to demonstrate the potential of the metrics. These metrics can be a teaching/mentoring adjunct to research publication and citation counts as measures of faculty impact.”

The Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research was established by the ALA Library Research Round Table “to provide recognition and monetary support for dissertation research employing exemplary research design and methods.” Two awards are presented annually, although some years the award has not had a winner.

According to the ALA Web site, papers submitted for the award were evaluated in a double-blind, peer review process based on:

1. The appropriateness of the design and method(s) for the research problem.
2. Adequacy of the description of the methodological procedures.
3. The definitions of important terms where needed.
4. The adequacy of the data collection instrument(s) or technique(s).
5. Appropriateness of the proposed data analysis for the research problem and methods.
6. Innovation of the research design.

Research topics for the Shera Award are required to relate to library and information studies, and the papers accepted must be in the initial stage of use.

The decisions of the Committee are announced by the LRRT Steering Committee Chair prior to the  Annual Conference scheduled for June 21 - 27. The award includes a $500 monetary gift.