The annual Library Scholar Award recognizes students who have demonstrated growth in and increased understanding of information literacy through independent study or research. For the first time this year, the application prompts were based on the new threshold concepts of information literacy developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Students were nominated by faculty; winners were chosen through an application process.
The 2015 Library Scholar Award winners are:
Rebecca Diamond ’15 – Nominated by Professor Cathy Ouellette for her work researching the Jewish community of New Amsterdam
From Rebecca’s application: “The writing done in my research area is not simply determined from an examination of primary documents, but created within a community of scholarship already being done in a broader or slightly different discipline. Rather than recombining facts into an end product, each work that I read is a reaction or commentary on previous works that brings new insights into the story that is constructed over years of research and scholarly work. The broader implication of this principal, which I discovered through my research, is that knowledge depends on the context of the discipline it is situated within. When I engage with a source in a research project, I am responding to and conversing with the author of that source in an attempt to further the argument—and therefore our knowledge—about that piece of the historical puzzle.”
Rocio Vidal Ronchas ’15 – Nominated by Professor Ben Carter for her work on diet and health status during the Late Medieval Period in Western Europe
From Rocio’s application: “One of the first truths I discovered while working on my Independent Study was that information is never black and white, therefore searching requires strategic exploration. Extensive research demands for sources to be critically analyzed and creatively synthesized. A great amount of the time I spent interacting with the published literature was devoted to handling conflicting sources, judging their strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the reasons for their discrepancies. In order to objectively present the published work, I critically examined different author’s claims in order to understand their reasoning and fully grasp their ideas. Furthermore, research required me to be flexible and creative in the way I made connections between my sources since I linked bioarchaeological data with historical writings. While bioarchaeology makes generalizations about the overall population basing itself on small sample sizes from different locations, historical sources tend to focus on the higher social classes since they were the only ones to record their history. This taught me to understand the bias associated with my sources and how to properly deal with it.”
Congratulations to our 2015 Library Scholars!
A display highlighting this year’s award winners will be located near the reading lounge on Level A of Trexler Library.
