November/December 2009

GSLIS students Nicole Fonsh and Emmalia Harrington attended the Rally for Libraries at the State House on November 4 with Assistant Em Claire Dean Knowles. Emmalia came up with a chant for the crowd of over 250, "Save the Library! Save the World!" Following the rally at the State House, Nicole and Dr. Knowles joined Prof. Bush at the MA Book Awards sponsored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, housed at Simmons GSLIS. Students Amanda Bushnell and Brooke Berzantel staffed the event and supported the Center's director, Sharon Shaloo.

GSLIS Students Myrna Morales and Derek Mosley have received stipends up to $10,000 to support their studies from the ARL.

Professor and Dean Emeritus Jim Matarazzo '65LS has co-authored an article with Dr. Toby Pearlstein '77LS, "Scenario Planning as Preventive Medicine: The Case of the Unexpected Takeover," Searcher Magazine, November/December 2009, pp. 26-30. A portion of the article is based on an independent study with Dr. Matarazzo and was written by Jane McDaries '09LS. Dr. Matarazzo and Betsy Bellissimo '09LS have published a summary of their research (the result of an independent study) in the October/ November 2009 issue of Information Outlook, p. 10: "More Firms Outsourcing Their Searchers for Special Librarians."

Assistant Dean Terry Plum was a co-presenter of the paper "Point-of-Use Web Surveys for Networked Electronic Resources: Implementation and Sampling Plans" at the 8th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services (PM8), a satellite preconference of the World Library and Information Congress, sponsored by the IFLA Statistics and Evaluation Section (Florence, Italy). Also participating in the Conference was Adjunct Faculty member Raynna Bowlby who conducted a workshop entitled "Sustaining Continuous Improvement: Guiding Library Staff to Act on User Survey Results." Earlier in the year, Bowlby led a workshop on "LibQUAL+(R) and Other Practical Assessment Applications in Libraries" at QQML2009, the International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (Chania, Crete). The keynote presentation of QQML2009 was delivered by Professor Peter Hernon entitled "The Next Managerial Leadership: Continuation of a Research Agenda."

Congratulations to Dr. Ching-chih Chen, GSLIS Professor, for receiving two supplemental NSF Grants totaling $42000.00 in support of her World Heritage Memory Net activities in partnership with UNESCO World Heritage Center totally: (1) $12000 NSF/REU (Research of Excellence for Undergraduates) Grant. This will enable her to utilize the various language capabilities of numerous international students who are short of financial supports. (2) $29,997.00 as a continuing support to her "IDLP: International Collaboration to Advance User-oriented Technologies for Managing and Distributing Images in Digital Libraries." This will bring the total of this project to $584,006.00.