Ping Situ and Shuyong Jiang win 2008 ACRL Samuel Lazerow Fellowship

Megan Griffin
ACRL Program Coordinator
(312) 280-2514
mgriffin@ala.org

For Immediate Release,
February 5, 2008

Ping Situ and Shuyong Jiang win 2008 ACRL Samuel Lazerow Fellowship

CHICAGO - Ping Situ of the University of Arizona and Shuyong Jiang of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been selected to receive the 2008 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Samuel Lazerow Fellowship for Research in Technical Services or Acquisitions. Situ and Jiang were selected for the award for their research project on vendor-provided records and the experience of a research library in outsourcing cataloging service for its Chinese language materials, including its backlogs.

Sponsored by Thomson Scientific, the award fosters advances in collection development and technical services by providing fellowships to librarians for travel or writing in those fields.

“Technical processing in academic and research libraries is experiencing drastic change,” said Richard Bradberry, chair of the selection committee and dean of the university library and media services at Bowie State University. “The Committee felt that this proposal will have a significant and major impact on the way libraries use bibliographic data, provided by vendors, to keep current with acquisitions and cataloging; or, to reduce backlogs and provide better access to collections acquired.”

The library involved in this project has been outsourcing Chinese and Japanese books to a vendor and has been using Chinese book vendors for acquisitions. This experience will provide a starting point for the project in terms of issues and concerns that need to be addressed. This will also be complemented with a study conducted by one of the recipients in August 2006 on the brief records of the China International Book Trading Company (CIBTC), which calls for more focused research on Chinese book vendor records.

Situ received her M.A. in Library and Information Science from the University of Arizona in 2001, where she also earned a master's degree in Hispanic Linguistics in 2000. She received her M.A in Multiculture and Language Exchange with an emphasis in Hispanic countries, in 1987 from the Foreign Studies University in Beijing, China, where she also earned her bachelor's in Spanish Language and Literature in 1985.

Jiang earned her Ph. D. in Chinese from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, where she also received her M.A. in Library and Information Studies in 1996 and her M.A. in Chinese in 1994. She received her M.A. in Chinese from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China in 1984, where she also earned her B.A. in Chinese in 1982.

The award of $1,000 and a plaque will be presented during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif., at the ACRL President's Program at 1:30 p.m. on Monday, June 30.

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.