Carroll Preston Baber Research Grant recipient named

Contact: Mary Jo Lynch


312-280-4273


mlynch@ala.org

For Immediate Release


April 2002

Carroll Preston Baber Research Grant recipient named

Ethelene Whitmire, assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the winner of the 2002 American Library Association (ALA) Carroll Preston Baber Research Grant.

The $7,500 grant supports innovative research that could lead to an improvement in library services to any specific group of people. The grant was donated by Eric R. Baber of Newton, Kan., in honor of his father, Carroll Preston Baber, who was library director at Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University) for 27 years. Carroll Preston Baber died in January 1991, leaving ALA an endowment to support the award in perpetuity.

The 2002 grant will fund a project entitled "Faculty Research Productivity and Academic Library Resources and Services." The study will examine the relationship between those variables by using two data sets available from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, and the Academic Library Survey. The researcher will run a series of multiple regressions using SPSS software to test a theoretical model of the relationship between faculty productivity and library resources.

"This project has great potential to help the users of academic libraries - students and faculty - by providing results that library administrators can use in defending library budgets," said Charles Harmon, chair of the Baber Research Grant Jury. "Faculty research productivity is an accepted measure of institutional quality and evidence that library resources have an impact on that productivity strengthens the case for the library's budget requests."

Whitmire has a Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Michigan, and a MLS in Library Service from Rutgers University. She has been on the faculty of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2001.

Guidelines for the Baber Grant, including a list of previous winners, may be found
online.