LIANZA

Posted by: Mike Metcalfe | Posted on: 08 Nov 10

The Paul Szentirmay Special Librarianship Scholarship judging panel are excited to announce that we have decided to award the Scholarship to two applicants this year.

Victoria Passau
Victoria is a Client Services Librarian at the University of Auckland's Fine Arts Library. Her application was for funding her MLIS research paper, the aim of which is to utilise a socio-historical methodology to assess the effect academic and organisational influences have had on the development of the Fine Arts Library at the University of Auckland.

The judging panel felt Victoria was worthy of this award as her paper could motivate others working in special libraries to assess the historical development of their own special library and place it into a broader social and historical context. Her application also demonstrated a strong background and relationship with her client user community to give her a good insight into her research topic, as well as strong support from her library as to the value of her research. 

With her paper having MLIS peer reviewing we also felt she would be given good guidance in its development. We hope by making this award to Victoria that we are encouraging other MLIS students to focus their research papers on special library topics also. 

Siong Ng
Siong Ng is the Library Manager at the Carey Baptist College in Auckland. Her application was for funding her research into the information seeking behaviour of distance students in theological libraries.

The judging panel felt Siong was worthy of this award as her research would have a wider benefit for other special libraries who assist in distance education. The research would particularly highlight technology issues around resourcing these libraries to meet the challenges of servicing the information needs of distance students and would therefore provide special libraries with useful data to help them advocate for extra funding to meet these client needs. Siong also demonstrated to us in her application her previous experience in being able to get her research funded and published, showing us an ability to work independently, competently and professionally on her research.

We look forward to seeing Siong's research published and hope it will encourage others working in special libraries to do similar research on aspects of their services that provide off site information service delivery to their clients.

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