Blackwell's Scholarship Award honors John Willinsky
Contact: Charles Wilt
Executive Director, ALCTS
312-280-5030
cwilt@ala.org
For Immediate Release
March 14, 2006
Blackwell’s Scholarship Award honors John Willinsky
CHICAGO—The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is pleased to announce that John Willinsky has won the Blackwell’s Scholarship Award.
Willinsky won for his monograph, “The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship,” published in 2006 by the MIT Press in Cambridge, Mass. The Blackwell’s Scholarship Award honors the author of the year’s outstanding monograph or article in the field of acquisitions, collection development, and related areas of resource development in libraries.
Willinsky’s “The Access Principle” makes a clear and compelling case for open access as a public good. Willinsky argues that the production of scholarly work comes with the responsibility of circulating scholarship, and this responsibility includes investigating new models of publishing. “The Access Principle” shines new light on the age-old questions of access to knowledge and the responsibilities of scholars as citizens of a larger world.
Willinsky is Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia and director of the Public Knowledge Project, a research initiative that works with scholarly societies and professional organizations to develop online systems to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research. Willinsky has published widely in the areas of literacy, educational technology, and socio-cultural aspects of language and literature. He is the author of “Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED” published in 1994 by Princeton University Press.
Blackwell’s donates a $2,000 scholarship to the U.S. or Canadian library school of the winning author’s choice. Willinsky has designated the scholarship be given to a student in the First Nations concentration at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The award will be presented on Sunday, June 25, 2006, at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony and Membership Meeting during the 2006 American Library Association (ALA) meeting in New Orleans.
The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services. Areas of concentration of ALCTS members include acquisition, cataloging, collection development, preservation, and archiving of all library materials in all formats as well as serial collection management.
ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.
