Annual Report (2002)
Gerd Muehsam Award Committee, ARLIS/NA


Submitted: January 2003

Submitted by: Paula Gabbard
e-mail: gabbard@columbia.edu
phone/FAX: (212) 854-6745 / (212) 854-8904
 

2002 GMA Committee members: Laura Schwarz (Board Liaison), Jacqueline Allen, Paula Gabbard (chair), Tom McNulty, Jeff Ross, Suzanna Simor, Liv Valmestad.

Membership remained unchanged throughout the year.

2003 GMA Committee members: Laura Schwarz (Board Liaison), Jacqueline Allen, Margaret Boylan, Paula Gabbard (chair), Tom McNulty, Jeff Ross, Suzanna Simor, Liv Valmestad.

Activities of the year:

Met at the 2002 Conference.  We set up a calendar for the coming year, after congratulating ourselves for our success of the previous year (13 qualified papers and projects and a winning paper: Factors Affecting Controlled Vocabulary Usage in Art Museum Information Systems by Alison Gilchrest).

 

Calendar:

April 11, 2002: Each committee member sent PG 1-2 faculty names from six institutions as appropriate people to contact for soliciting good papers/projects to the GMA.  This list of institutions is derived from the ALA web-site of institutions offering North American Library Masters Degree Programs (89 total) (http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oa/lisdir.html#us). 

Methodology:

In 2001 we began to find appropriate faculty from these institutions , finding such names from 53 institutions.  This year (2002) we tackled the remaining 36 institutions to identify appropriate faculty—thus the assignment of six institutions to each of us.

Wanted:                 Full name, rank, what they teach (or their specialization)
                               Mailing address
                                Phone/ FAX
                                email address

Suggested procedure sent to committee for getting more individual faculty names:

1) Pull up the school’s web site, look for name of the administrative assistant and for list of faculty.  If it is clear from the web site who teaches courses where a paper or project appropriate to the GMA, use these names.  If not, then:

2) With the web site on your screen, call the administrative assistant and ask him/her for names of appropriate faculty (You will need to explain what the requirements are for the GMA.  I’ve included this below.)  If the faculty suggested are not on the web directory, ask for directory information listed above.

3) When you’ve made your way through the six institutions, forward to me all the data you collected and I incorporated these people into the existing directory

4) If you happen to know any other faculty at any institution who would be good to add, please give me their names.

April 12, 2002: PG created new GMA announcement to go on ARLIS/NA web site.

April 30, 2002: Each committee member had by now emailed PG new faculty names.  PG then emailed the GMA announcement and a cover letter to all listed faculty, to administrative assistants, and to deans of all ALA library schools.

September 20, 2002: PG again emails GMA announcement to all functional email addresses used in April. Gabbard also prints out new announcement to mail to faculty and schools in list.

November 15, 2002: Submission postmark deadline.

December 11, 2002: Gabbard sends the submitted 8 papers, one web-project, and ballots to committee.

January 10, 2003: Deadline for committee to return ballots to Gabbard.

January 28, 2003: Winner and other applicants are notified, as well as committee members, headquarters, treasurer, etc.

March 20-26, 2003: Baltimore ARLIS/NA Conference

In analyzing the submissions, they all came from schools we contacted, but only two faculty we had specifically contacted were named as professors for which the papers were written/projects were designed.  Those faculty listed on the papers/projects are specialists in fields other than visual resources or art librarianship, for example, library management, information retrieval, children’s literature, multinational librarianship, learning disabilities and librarianship, so I only selectively added their names to our ever growing list.  The winner (below) was selected soon after the committee ballot deadline:

Donny Smith The Surrogate vs. the Thing.  Written while a student at Drexel University College of Information Science & Technology. (Spring 2002)

Issues for the Executive Board:

1.   Is headquarters updating the list we sent to them of library schools and selected faculty, or should we send our updates to them each year? I keep a copy in MS-Word, and I have mail-merge documents for this list.

2.   I would much rather not be burdened with the work of emailing these faculty and institutions in the spring and the fall, plus sending out paper copies of the announcement, but I believe this is the only way we will continue to receive papers for this award.  Any assistance that could be provided by headquarters would be greatly appreciated.

3.  I still have the archives of the GMA for the last 12 years, and never heard from the board last year where they should be sent.


Gerd Muehsam Award Ballot   2002   (Condensed)

Final Grade:________

Final Score:________

Paper Number:______

Title of Paper/Project:_____________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

Evaluate this paper or project according to the criteria listed below. Score each category with the lowest number as the weakest score and the highest number as the strongest score.  Please add specific and detailed comments for those submissions that are the strongest , as they may be incorporated into the awards presentation.  Assign a letter grade (A to F with pluses and minuses) to each paper.  If no paper or project merits a grade higher than B+ from anyone, then we will communicate by email to decide whether we wish to grant any award.  If there is too wide a disparity between our scores, I will want to communicate with you as well.

1.  Relevance to art librarianship or visual resources curatorship:

0  1  2  3   4   5   6   7   8    9   10

2. Research and scholarship:

0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10

3. Originality:

0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8

4. Clarity and organization (including style, readability, design, grammar, punctuation, and spelling):

0   1   2   3   4   5   6

5. Terminology and vocabulary:

0  1   2   3   4 

Comments:

Total score (please note this on top of front page as well):____________

Reviewer's name:_____________________________________________

Date:____________________