Beall selected for ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award

CHICAGO - The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services Outstanding Publication Award recipient for 2012 is Jeffrey Beall for his article “Academic Library Databases and the Problem of Word-Sense Ambiguity” published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 37, (January 2011), p. 64-69.

The Outstanding Publication Award is an annual award given to honor the author or authors of the year's outstanding monograph, article or original paper in the field of technical services, including acquisitions, cataloging, collection management, preservation, continuing resources and related areas in the library field. Mr. Beall will receive a citation and $250 sponsored by ALCTS.

Beall describes the article as emphasizing “the importance of high-quality metadata to efficient information retrieval.” The problem created by the inability of search engines to differentiate between multiple meanings of a word or phrase creates a considerable obstacle to the ability of searchers to retrieve relevant materials. Beall’s article “brings to light a long-standing problem in information retrieval that remains to be solved--one that librarians and users encounter on a daily basis. The article provides an overview of the problem and brings readers up to date on current practice and progress toward a solution.” Beall addresses issues relevant to a range of technical services operations, particularly in the current full-text environment, and presented high-quality scholarly research in an engaging and informative style.

Jeffrey Beall is metadata librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, in Denver, Colo. An academic librarian for more than 21 years, he has published extensively in the areas of metadata, full-text searching and information retrieval. In the last two years, his research interest has expanded into the field of scholarly open-access publishing.

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats.

ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.