2017 ACRL STS Oberly Award goes to Scholze and Witt

CHICAGO – Frank Scholze, library director at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Michael Witt, associate professor of library science at Purdue University, have been selected as the 2017 recipients of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Science and Technology Section (STS) Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences for “re3data.org,” a registry of research data repositories.

The award will be presented during the 2017 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

The re3data.org registry helps researchers, students, publishers, funding agencies, and librarians find the most appropriate repositories to deposit and discover research datasets. This international collaboration is led by Purdue University in the United States and by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, working together with DataCite, a global non-profit organization that provides persistent identifiers for research data.

“The STS Awards Committee is pleased to select re3data.org as the 2017 recipient of the Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences,” said award chair Sara Scheib, sciences reference and instruction librarian at the University of Iowa. “Working together with DataCite, re3data.org helps researchers and information professionals from all disciplines navigate the complex world of data sharing and discovery by indexing data repositories. All entries in re3data.org are reviewed twice by the project team for accuracy. The search, browse, and filtering options make this registry quite useful and the icons and other metadata indicating important repository characteristics (access restrictions, persistent identifiers, etc.) add considerable value. Thank you to the project leaders, Michael Witt and Frank Scholze, for sharing this work with the world.”

The Oberly Award was established in 1923 in memory of Eunice Rockwood Oberly, librarian of the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture from 1908 to 1921. She was the Bureau of Plant Industry's representative to the Congressional Joint Commission on Reclassification of Government Employees and was instrumental in gaining a fairer recognition of library activities. This biennial award is given in odd-numbered years for the best English-language bibliography in the field of agriculture or a related science.

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The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for librarians. Representing nearly 11,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals, ACRL (a division of the American Library Association) develops programs, products and services to help academic and research librarians learn, innovate and lead within the academic community. Founded in 1940, ACRL is committed to advancing learning and transforming scholarship. ACRL is on the web at acrl.org, Facebook at facebook.com/ala.acrl and Twitter at @ala_acrl.