Beta Phi Mu Announces 2016 Scholarship Winners

Beta Phi Mu, the International Library and Information Studies Honor Society, announced the 2016 scholarship and award winners at their annual business meeting and member reception. This event was held on Saturday, June 24th, in conjunction with the American Libraries Association Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL.

The Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships are $3,000 awards intended to support doctoral students who are working on their dissertations in library and information science and related fields. The 2016 winners are:

• Sarah Buchanan, University of Texas, “A Provenance Research Study of Archaeological Curation”
• Rachel Clarke, University of Washington, “It’s Not Rocket Library Science: Design Epistemology and American Librarianship”
• Wei Jeng, University of Pittsburgh, “Factors Influencing Qualitative Data-Sharing Practices in Social Sciences”
• Jinseok Kim, University of Illinois, “The Impact of Author Name Disambiguation on Knowledge Discovery from Big Scholarly Data”
• Robert Montoya, University of California, Los Angeles, “Articulating Composite Taxonomies: Epistemology and the Global Unification of Biodiversity Databases”
• Min Sook Park, Florida State University, “Exploring Social Semantic Relationships in Knowledge Representation in Health through Mining Unstructured Textual Data on Social Media”

Winners of the Sarah Rebecca Reed Scholarship for beginning library and information science students are Jennifer Dixon, studying at Pratt Institute, and Ayoola White, studying at Simmons College. The winner of the Blanche E. Woolls Scholarship for School Library Media Service, for a beginning library and information science student with an interest in school media librarianship, is Emily Fischer, studying at the University of Iowa. Each scholarship provides $2,250 of support to its recipients.

The $1,750 Harold Lancour Scholarship for Foreign Study was awarded to Natalie Baur, to help underwrite her work with a digital cultural heritage archive in Ecuador. The Archivo Cultural de Cañar is a digital archive intended to help preserve and provide access to the rich cultural heritage of the town of Cañar and the Cañari indigenous nation. Natalie holds an M.L.S. degree from the University of Maryland, with a concentration in Archives, Records, and Information Management.

The winner of the Frank B. Sessa Scholarship for the Continuing Professional Education of a Beta Phi Mu Member is Alyson Gamble, a member of Beta Zeta chapter at Louisiana State University. Currently working as a science librarian at the New College of Florida, she plans to obtain a Council of Science Editors (CSE) Publication Certificate. This certificate program requires CSE members to attend two conferences, three webinars, and two short courses before creating and presenting a research project in the form of a poster or published article. This scholarship provides $1,500 worth of support.

Beta Phi Mu was established in 1948 to recognize and encourage scholastic achievement among library and information studies students. It seeks to support the values of scholarship, leadership, and service within the library and information science profession. Beta Phi Mu is an affiliate organization of the American Library Association and is a certified member of the Association of College Honor Societies.

For more information, contact Alison Lewis, alewis@drexel.edu or 215-895-5959.