Nominations sought for ABC-CLIO Online History Award
Contact: Liz Markel
Marketing Specialist, ASCLA
312-280-4398
NEWS
For Immediate Release
October 28, 2008
CHICAGO--The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) seeks nominations for the 2009 ABC-CLIO Online History Award, an honor that expresses RUSA’s commitment to the role librarians play in linking up patrons with information.
This biennial award was established in 2005 to encourage, recognize and commend professional achievement in historical reference and research librarianship. The winner receives $3,000 and a citation, donated by ABC-CLIO, a publisher of historical reference materials.
RUSA welcomes nominations of individuals or groups who have contributed one of the following to the historical reference field: a freely available online historical collection(s); an online tool(s) tailored for the purpose of finding historical materials; or an online teaching aid(s) stimulating creative historical scholarship. The first award recipient was the Oregon Historical Society for its
Oregon History Project (2005), an online resource for learning about Oregon history that brings primary source documents and digitized artifacts together with web-based thematic and regional narratives, biographies, a k-12 learning center and “focused digital packets” highlighting African American, Asian Pacific, Gubernatorial, Native Reservation, Women’s History and Wartime Portland.
More recently, Faith Jones, head of Literature and Language Collection, Mid-Manhattan Library, the New York Public Library, received the 2007 award for
The Yizkor Books Project . The resource offers access to a collection of more than 600 digitized, privately printed Holocaust memorial books owned by the library, providing contemporary families of Holocaust victims, genealogists and historians of the prewar decades with a rich source of information about Jewish families and communities in eastern Europe prior to World War II.
Those interested in submitting a nomination for the 2009 award can download the award nomination form from the awards section of the RUSA website or request the form from Liz Markel, RUSA Marketing Specialist, via e-mail at lmarkel@ala.org, or from Shelley Arlen, chairperson for the award committee, at Shelarl@uflib.ufl.edu. All nominations must be received by Dec. 15.
The Reference and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association (
http://www.ala.org/), 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.
