Librarians Garner State Recognition for Research

TCNJ librarians swept up all of the honors granted this year by the Research Committee of the joint Association for College and Research Librarians (ACRL) and the New Jersey Library Association’s (NJLA) College & University Research Section.

Words by TCNJ's editorial staff

TCNJ librarians swept up all of the honors granted this year by the Research Committee of the joint Association for College and Research Librarians (ACRL) and the New Jersey Library Association’s (NJLA) College & University Research Section.

Each year, the committee recognizes excellence in the research efforts of New Jersey Librarians through two calls: the Research Award, honoring the best published research paper from the previous year, and the Research Forum, which promotes research efforts by providing a forum at the NJLA Annual for presentation of research work underway.

This year’s Research Award, sponsored by Seton Hall University, went to co-authors Jia Mi, electronic resources/serials librarian, and Cathy Weng, head of cataloging. Their winning article is “Revitalizing the Library OPAC: Interface, Searching, and Display Challenges,” published in Information Technology and Libraries, v. 27, no. 1 (March 2008). The Research Award winners will present during the Research Forum on April 29 at the NJLA Annual Conference in Long Branch.

This year’s Research Forum winners will also present the highlights of their in-progress research at the NJLA Annual Conference. The three winners this year are: 1) co-presenters Jia Mi, electronic resources/serials librarian, and Yongming Wang, systems librarian, for their project: “Search Capabilities and Federated Searches,” that provides a review of federated search engines; 2) Yuji Tosaka, cataloging/metadata librarian for his project: “Web-based citation management software and the impact of metadata quality on user-driven metadata reuse,” which reviews the accuracy of Web-based citation management tools; and 3) Terrence Epperson and Alan Zemel (Drexel) for their project: “Reports, requests, and recipient design: The management of patron queries in online reference chats.”