For immediate release | March 26, 2012

Wu, Senior and Feldmann win RUSA business reference research grant

CHICAGO — The Reference and User Services Association’s (RUSA) Business Reference and Services Section (BRASS) has selected research proposals from Kerry Wu and Heidi E.K. Senior and Louise Mort Feldmann as recipients of the BRASS Emerald Research Grant Award—two $5,000 grants sponsored by Emerald Publishing Group Ltd. that support research in the field of business reference.

These two grants in the amount of $5,000 each are awarded to individuals or collaborative teams seeking financial support to conduct research in business librarianship. Wu, business and economics librarian at Portland State University, and Senior, reference/instruction librarian at University of Portland, won the first of the two grants with their proposed study of the role librarians play in the academic program review process and teaching faculty’s perception of this role. Their study will specifically focus on business librarians’ involvement in the evaluation and approval of new academic programs (i.e. courses, tracks, graduate degrees or certificates) in business.

”Kerry and Heidi’s study will investigate an area of cooperation between libraries and business schools that has not been studied a great deal,” said Greg Fleming, award committee chair. “The results will be extremely valuable to librarians looking for new ways to establish partnerships with their faculty.”

Louise Mort Feldmann, business and economics librarian and associate professor at Colorado State University Libraries, will receive the second grant. She intends to research collaborations among academic libraries, public libraries and community organizations in jointly serving the business information needs of their local entrepreneurs. From these findings, she aims to identify best practices in local collaboration among various business information groups.

“Louise’s topic is of great interest to business librarians who serve the needs of entrepreneurs,” said Fleming. “The best practices identified by this study will be very informative to librarians and administrators in public and academic libraries.”

Wu earned her M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Senior holds an MLIS from the University of Washington. Senior and Wu have previously collaborated on the article “Three times a study: Business students and the library” which appeared in the “Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship” (2009). Senior was also the 1997 recipient of the RUSA BRASS Gale Cengage Learning Student Travel Award.

Feldmann earned her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Davis. She has served as business and economics librarian at Colorado State University Libraries since 2005. Her article, “Information Desk Referrals: Implementing an Office Statistics Database” College & Research Libraries, Vol. 70 (no. 2), pp. 133-140., was selected by the RUSA RSS Research & Statistics Committee for inclusion in the Reference Research Review for 2009, a bibliography focusing on research published within the last calendar year, annotating items of importance to the practice of reference.

Wu, Senior and Feldmann will be honored at the RUSA Awards Reception, scheduled for 5 - 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 24 as a part of RUSA’s events at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif. The exact location of this event will be announced in late spring. For more information, visit RUSA’s website or the Annual Conference website.

The Reference and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, represents librarians and library staff in the fields of reference, specialized reference, collection development, readers’ advisory and resource sharing. RUSA is the foremost organization of reference and information professionals who make the connections between people and the information sources, services, and collection materials they need. Learn more about the association at www.ala.org/rusa.

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