Eric C. Novotny selected as the recipient of the LHRT Innovation and Advocacy in Library History Award

The Library History Round Table of the American Library Association has named Eric C. Novotny as the recipient of the 2025 Innovation and Advocacy in Library History Award. This award acknowledges individuals or organizations that have made recent, substantive contributions to LHRT or to the wider library history community. This non-monetary award is given to individuals who have promoted library history in exceptional or new ways or who have reached audiences that have not been engaged previously.

Eric Novotny is the History Librarian at Pennsylvania State University. The award recognizes his work developing the Bibliography of Library History, an open access, searchable database containing over 7,000 entries for books, articles, and theses in library history and related fields published since 1990.

Novotny’s work builds on annual bibliographies compiled by Edward Goedeken and David Lincove. Those bibliographies were static lists, with only publication information, and required consulting several different volumes for comprehensive coverage. Over the last five years, Novotny has overseen the construction of a database that incorporates all the bibliographic entries in Goedeken's and Lincove’s lists and continues to grow as new research is published. He then developed a metadata schema to enhance the records with information about the subjects, geographic regions, library types, demographics, and chronological periods addressed in each entry.

Novotny oversaw a staff of library workers who assigned metadata to the bibliographic entries and enhanced records with abstracts, tables of contents, and summaries. The team also constructed the database to allow granular, faceted searching, and export of records to popular citation managers.

Researchers in library history who have used the Bibliography of Library History remark that it is an “enormous modernization of a decades-long enterprise to empower and inspire library history scholars,” and is “opening doors for new kinds of scholarship.” They anticipate that the bibliography will “spark countless discoveries in future research projects” and “wish that it had been available twenty-five years ago when I was researching and writing my dissertation.”

Novotny’s tireless dedication to envisioning, designing, and implementing the database has made a singular contribution to the field of library history, and all researchers in the field will benefit for years to come.