Library History Round Table announces Bernadette Lear as the Donald G. Davis Article Award recipient

For Immediate Release
Tue, 06/05/2012

Contact:

Norman Rose

Program Officer

Office for Research and Statistics (ORS)

800-545-2433 ext. 4283

nrose@ala.org

CHICAGO —Bernadette Lear, Behavioral Sciences and Education Librarian at Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg, is the 2012 winner of the Donald G. Davis Article Award presented by the American Library Association (ALA) Library History Round Table (LHRT).  This award is given every second year to recognize the best article written in English in the field of United States and Canadian library history, including the history of libraries, librarianship and book culture in the previous two calendar years.

Lear’s winning article, "Yankee librarian in the Diamond City: Hannah Packard James, the Osterhout Free Library of Wilkes-Barre, and the public library movement in Pennsylvania," was published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 78, 124-162.

The committee cited "Bernadette's exceptional use of a variety of primary sources, her attention to Hannah James's personality and personal life as part of the context of her work as a librarian, and the attention to a conservative librarian during the Progressive Era," said Holly Willett, chair of the Library History Round Table Davis Award Committee.  "We believe the article opens the way for a closer examination of that era as a contested space,” added Willett.

The Davis Article Award Committee for 2012 consisted of Dominique Daniel, Assistant Professor and Information Literacy and Reference Library at Oakland University in Rochester, MI; Ellen Pozzi, Lecturer and doctoral student, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; and Holly Willett, Associate Professor and Director of the Schaub Instructional Materials Center, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ.

The award honors Donald G. Davis, emeritus professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas and editor of Libraries & the Cultural Record and its forerunner. A major contributor to the field, Dr. Davis has authored numerous historical articles, advised many notable Ph.D. dissertations, compiled important bibliographies, and edited both the "Encyclopedia of Library History" (with Wayne Wiegand) and the "Dictionary of American Library Biography Second Supplement."

More information on the Library History Round Table is available online.