We reached out to the 2014 RPC award winners for an update about their research projects and how they used the award funds.  All three winners made great use of the funding.  Here is an update from Jane Wu.

The title for my ALAO research grant of 2014 was “A  Comparative Study of Information Literacy Education & Student Library Use Experiences in Three Chinese Academic Libraries”. $497 grant was offered on March 14, 2014 from ALAO to support the project. The plan was to use my two weeks’ exchange librarian opportunity at Shanghai Jiaotong University in June 2014 to explore the current information literacy education and student library use experiences in three academic libraries in China: Shanghai Jiaotong Unviersity, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and Southwest Jiaotong University.

During my two weeks as an exchange librarian at Shanghai Jiaotong University, I was able to interview some library faculty and library staff from Shanghai Jiaotong University and University of Shanghai for Science and Technology on their information literacy programs and trainings to their campus students. Because I was scheduled with many other academic exchange activities and presentations during that same two weeks period of time, I was not able to assess all data collected and conduct thorough literature reviews in Chinese. Due to the limited of time and funding,  I was also not able to collect data from Southwest Jiaotong University (which is 1223 miles away from Shanghai) as originally planned.

I am now granted the chance to do sabbatical in spring academic term 2016 which will allow me to continue and expand this past research project. Instead of just researching three academic universities, it will now be a collaborative comparative research project with three academic librarians from China. The new title is now “A Comparative Study of Information Literacy Education & Student Library Use Experiences in U.S. and Chinese Academic Libraries”. I am also very grateful that ALAO again granted me $2000 to support this research project. The project is expected to be completed in May 2016.
Heidi Gauder, University of Dayton, Chair, Research and Publications Committee