News/Announcements

Call for Applications: Institute for Research Design in Librarianship

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The William H. Hannon Library has received a three-year grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to offer a nine-day continuing education opportunity for academic and research librarians. Each year 21 librarians will receive instruction in research design and a full year of support to complete a research project at their home institutions. The summer Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) is supplemented with pre-institute learning activities and a personal learning network that provides ongoing mentoring. The institutes will be held on the campus of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. For more information about the project, including the project partners, the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), please see the project website: http://irdlonline.org.

The first institute will be held on June 16-26, 2014, with arrival on campus on Sunday, June 15, and departure on Friday, June 27.

We are now issuing a call for applications for the IRDL 2014. We are seeking novice librarian researchers who are employed by academic libraries or research libraries outside an academic setting in the United States to participate in the institute. We define novice researchers as those who may have conducted research but have not yet had an article published or a presentation accepted by a peer-reviewed publication or conference; librarians who have presented peer-reviewed poster sessions will be eligible. Librarians of all levels of professional experience are welcome to apply.

We seek librarians with a passion for research and a desire to improve their research skills. The project is designed to bring together all that the literature tells us about the necessary conditions for librarians to conduct valid and reliable research in an institutional setting. The cohort will be chosen from a selective submission process, with an emphasis on enthusiasm for research and diversity from a variety of perspectives, including ethnicity and type and size of library.

The Advisory Committee, comprised of librarians with research experience in a variety of settings, will use an open review process to select participants who will travel to Los Angeles, California, participate in all institute activities, and conduct a research project during the 2014-2015 academic year. The online application requests a proposed research project that will be revised at the institute and will be the basis for the study to be completed in the coming year.

Selection criteria:

• Significance of the research problem to the operational success of the applicant’s library or to the profession of librarianship;
• Clarity of the proposed methodology;
• Enthusiasm for research and desire to learn;
• Commitment to the year-long process of communicating with other participants and conducting the proposed study.

We will be accepting applications from December 1, 2013 to February 1, 2014.

Scholars accepted to the Institute will be notified by March 1, 2014.

Please contact Project Directors with any questions about the Institute or the application process:

Kristine Brancolini, Dean of the Library, Loyola Marymount University: brancoli@lmu.edu

Marie Kennedy, Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian, Loyola Marymount University: marie.kennedy@lmu.edu