Librarian Recipients of PSC-CUNY 40 Awards, 2009
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Saad Abulhab, Baruch College |
| Marvie Brooks, John Jay College Panel: Library Title: Protection Management / Private Security Annotated Bibliographical Guide |
| Ching-Jung Chen, City College Panel: Art History Title: Gendered and classed: Picturing the Consumption of Tea in Georgian England This project analyzes how the consumption of tea, an exotic and fashionable drink in Georgian England, carried conflicting gender and class significations in portraits, genre pictures, and popular prints. The effect of tea on the economy, health, and morals was hotly debated in the eighteenth century. It was credited with improving the digestive system as well as blamed for causing diverse illnesses. Male tea drinkers were characterized as temperate as well as effeminate. A woman who enjoyed tea could be a lady, a coquette, or a gossip. At the same time tea was viewed as the quintessential domestic drink, it was condemned as an extravagance, the cause of idleness, with attendant evils such as gossip. All those different connotations of tea found pictorial expression during the eighteenth century. Through the examination of contemporary textual and pictorial documents, my study explores the social implications of tea consumption in relation to distinctions of class and gender. By offering new insights into social and artistic life in Georgian England, this research will be useful to those interested in the study of visual culture, social history, class structure, and gender issues. |
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Kathleen Collins, John Jay College |
| Lisa Ellis, Baruch College Panel: Library Title: Is it Good Enough? Evaluation of Results in Federated Searching As a system capable of searching across many database platforms, federated search systems seem to offer users the Google-like simplicity of relevant and satisfying results at the click of a button. This study involves undergraduate students in an information retrieval class at Baruch College (LIB 3020) who will evaluate the results in a federated search system known as Bearcat in terms of the concepts of relevance and satisficing. Students will report on their information search process in terms of search strategies employed, relevancy attained and how they decide when they have enough relevant information. |
| James Kaser, College of Staten Island Panel: Library Title: An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction Set in New Orleans This project will identify works of fiction set in New Orleans, Louisiana with the purpose of preparing a book-length annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is useful for scholars wanting to draw on fictional works as source material. Social historians interested in cultural, economic, and political attitudes toward New Orleans as the focus of national attention through many periods of its history would find such works particularly useful. Literary scholars may wish to explore specific areas such as genre, issues of authorship, style, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and the New Orleans popular literary tradition. During this project, bibliographic citations will be entered into a database and annotations written in preparation for a complete annotated bibliography. This research anticipates an article discussing how the books reflect shifting cultural attitudes prevalent during specific historical periods. Cover designs and illustrations are crucial to understanding the books as cultural artifacts, so relevant material will be photographed. Research for this project will be undertaken in four special collections: Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection; Louisiana and Special Collections Department, University of New Orleans—Lakefront; Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library; Special Collections, Tulane University. |
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Andrew Leykam, College of Staten Island |
| Brian Lym, Hunter College Panel: Library Title: Survey of the Administration and Institutional Use of the Project SAILS Information Literacy Assessment This study will assess the administration and use of the results of the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (SAILS) test at 83 cohort institutions. The SAILS test is a cognitive test with multiple-choice questions and is widely used to assess the information literacy skills of undergraduate students. The test is administered by a cohort of individual academic institutions in the Spring and the Fall. Results from all institutions are merged by Project SAILS into a benchmark file and information literacy “benchmarks” for specific student majors and class standing levels are thereafter determined for the cohort group. This study will focus on the institutions which administered the test through the Spring 2007 semester; Hunter College was a part of this cohort. An online survey will be distributed to these 83 cohort institutions. Questions in the survey address the methods (i.e. probability, nonprobability sampling, etc.) used by institutions to select test takers as well as use of the findings from the SAILS assessment subjects. |
| Sara Marcus, Queensborough Community College Panel: Library Title: The History and Applicability of Sears Subject Headings Librarians are considered the keepers of knowledge. However, the very method in which this knowledge is kept can cause confusion, not only for the patron seeking the knowledge held, but also for the librarian unfamiliar with the methods used in cataloging and classifying books. Changing terms, or terms that do not change and thus portray what today could be considered bias or prejudice, can cause confusion or embarrassment in searching the vast knowledge base available. While there has been much attention paid to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), limited attention has been paid to the development and application of the Sears Subject Headings. To some extent, this research is a byproduct of an assignment used in a graduate level course in Technical Services (Cataloging and Classification) at Queens College. This assignment asks students to trace a randomly assigned Library of Congress Subject Heading topic (gays/homosexuals, Holocaust denial, Blacks, slaves/ slavery, and sex) through four printed editions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings lists and to discuss the impact that history and society have had on these changes. This research project is an extension of the assignment given to students, as it examines Sears headings and focuses on more than one heading over the existence of the subject heading list, rather than a selection of four editions. |
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Maura Smale, NYC College of Technology and Mariana Regalado, Brooklyn College
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| Polly Thistlethwaite, Graduate Center Panel: Library Title: Mining the Asylum: Pursing Records in the Jacksonville State Hospital Archive Library and archival literature focuses on service to the professional staff and patients of psychiatric institutions. Several histories of mental health service and institutions have been published, as have biographies of those treated in those systems. Yet little published guidance is readily available on the thorny topic of access to archival records of American mental hospitals. There are few ready explanations about the terms of biographical, literary, public, or academic use for these records from a researcher's point of view. I plan to seek access to my great-grandmother's mental health archive in the Jacksonville State Hospital where she lived most of her adult life. I will discuss relevant law about mental health records, use, and strategies for access. This exploration is intended to be useful to others conducting archival research on mental health institutions and biography of lives intersecting with the mental health system. |
| Susan Thomas, Borough of Manhattan Community College Panel: Library Title: The Importance of Print Art Zines in Academic and Art Libraries This grant funds the purchase of art and design zines, ephemera overlooked to date in most art and academic libraries. Art zines are a subcategory of zines or fanzines. Art zines are usually self-published: Do-it-Yourself (DIY) booklets featuring illustration, typography, photography, and design. The subject matter may be conceptual or intellectual; personal or diarist; or vernacular ("found" text or illustrations). Art zinesters range from self-taught creators to successful contemporary artists. Art zines document artists' practices and networks and are valuable primary sources. Many articles about zines can be found in library and education literature, but nothing about art zines has been published in art librarianship and art literature. The grant will assist in the completion of a paper and will lead to an eventual gift to a yet-to-be-determined library. |
| Michael Waldman, Baruch College Panel: Library Title: Gender and the Library Catalog Academic libraries have long used the Library of Congress classification system to organize their collections. This works relatively well for established subjects. But what happens when a subject undergoes a radical transformation? In recent years the concept of gender has gone through a revolution, going from stable binary to flexible and fluid. How can the catalog reflect this new reality? This project seeks to explore the words and concepts transgender people use to refer to themselves in order to understand how our current classification system could in fact reflect our users' realities. |
| Judy Xiao, College of Staten Island Panel: Library Title: A Comparative Study of Information Literacy Education at MIT, USA, and Tsinghua University, China With the boom in information technology and the explosive growth of digital content available on the Web, the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate, locate, evaluate, and use the needed information effectively and ethically become increasingly important. Academic libraries and institutions need to develop effective programs to promote information literacy and foster lifelong learning among members of their community. This project is a comparative study of two of the world's premier universities - MIT and Tsinghua University. The result of the study will provide academic libraries and the institutions they serve with a roadmap for effective information literacy instruction in the digital age. My previous PSC-CUNY grant allowed me to travel to Tsinghua University and study Tsinghua's information literacy education program. This grant will fund my visit MIT to study MIT's initiatives and latest development in information literacy education so that I can complete a comparative study. |
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Lauren Yannotta, Hunter College |
