Are you thinking about applying for a LAUC research grant, but you aren’t sure what types of proposals are successful, or you’re wondering how recipients spend their grant funds? Take a look at these recent research projects from UC Berkeley that received funding.
Ann Glusker, Celia Emmelhainz, Natalia Estrada, and Bonita Dyess*
Project abstract:
We propose to address a gap in our knowledge of librarian and library staff morale by obtaining answers to the questions of how a librarian or staff person’s place in their library’s hierarchy, combined with their personal career background and aspirations, affects their morale in the workplace.
We intend to do this by following the methodology used by Kaetrena Davis Kendrick in her seminal work “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study” (2017). Adapting Kendrick’s methodology to instead focus on staff, we will use a purposive sample of academic library staff to conduct qualitative phone interviews nationally, and code the resulting transcripts using qualitative data analysis software, to extract themes and meaning which indicate factors that contribute to varying levels of staff morale. We anticipate that results from this pilot project will help us to improve staff morale at the UC Libraries, and can also be shared out in publications and presentations to assist organizational development at other academic libraries.
* At the time of application, co-author Natalia Estrada was not eligible to be listed as a grant applicant, as she was staff and not part of the librarian series. Bonita Dyess is a staff member.
Jeremy Ott, Mohamed Hamed, and Liladhar Pendse
Revealing the Use of Library Collections in International and Area Studies Scholarship through Citation Analysis
Project abstract:
We currently know very little about how scholars in International and Area Studies (IAS) departments use university library collections despite the potential of citation analysis to provide insight. Previous research employing citation analysis has focused on the top journals in general, non-IAS fields, and less frequently the publications of non-IAS academic departments, but with rare exceptions, the scholarship of IAS departments has not been investigated directly. The proposed study seeks to shed light on the use of library collections in the research of IAS scholars by analyzing the scholarly output of three UC Berkeley departments, the Department of German, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Department of Near Eastern Studies, from 2013 to 2017. We will consider not only the publications of current faculty members but also the work produced by emeritus faculty and lecturers during the same interval. One student assistant will be assigned to assess a sample of approximately 2000 citations from each department and will be supervised by the librarian-investigator who is responsible for the collections of that department. Categories of assessment include aspects of the source publication, bibliographic data specific to the citation, language, and local library data such as the format of holdings, locations, and call numbers. Through our analysis of this evidence, we hope to significantly increase our knowledge not only of how local collections are used, but more broadly the kinds of materials and the extent of interdisciplinarity that define each IAS department and characterize IAS research across fields.
Virginia Shih
CORMOSEA (Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia): Reflections, Challenges, and Opportunities
Expected Length of Project: July 1, 2020 – June 30, 2021
Email address: vshih@library.berkeley.edu
Project Abstract:
The Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA) was founded in 1969 by the late Professor Fred W. Riggs at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as a national committee under the auspices of the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS).
CORMOSEA is the professional organization for Southeast Asia librarians in the US to work together in curating scholarly content, and in cataloging, preserving, and delivering information to the Southeast Asia academic community at anytime from anywhere in the world. In June 2019, CORMOSEA received a 5-year grant of $1.2 million from the Henry Luce Foundation to create a digital, open-access Southeast Asia Library. The purpose of this research is to examine the corpus of AAS records (1947-1988) held in the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which includes a significant amount of CORMOSEA archive and relevant Southeast Asian studies files.
This research is expected to shed new light on the founding history of CORMOSEA, as well as the leadership decisions of pioneering faculty and librarians in spearheading viable national and international projects for Southeast Asia scholarship and curatorship in the US during the early years of
CORMOSEA’s history.
This research will be published as a paper tentatively titled CORMOSEA: Reflections, Challenges, and Opportunities as part of an effort to preserve CORMOSEA’s intellectual legacy. It will also serve as an invaluable, insightful, and impactful research reference source for training the next generation of US Southeast Asia librarians.