Donald G. Davis Article Award

The Donald G. DavisArticle Award is presented by the Library History Round Table of the AmericanLibrary Association every second year to recognize the best article written in English in the field of United States and Canadian library history including the history of libraries, librarianship, and book culture. The facts.
Deadline: January 13, 2012.

Exciting? Welll....no one ever entered the field of librarianship for the excitement. Last year's winning article stars the Hartford Public Library's very own Caroline Hewins circa 1882.

2010's winner was Surveying the Field: The Research Model of Women in Librarianship, 1882-1898

by Kate McDowell, Graduate school of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her article was published in The Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3, (2009): 279-300. 

Abstract: "Women who promoted library services to children in the United States in the late nineteenth century introduced the systematic use of survey research on library practice to the field of professional librarianship. They created a series of qualitative survey‐based reports, the Reading of the Young reports, which were presented at ALA conferences from 1882 to 1898. These reports both assessed the current state of and promoted the development of services to youth. The research model they developed was adopted by other women and men in librarianship for research on other aspects of the emerging field of public library service. The discourse of librarianship had been previously based on individual expertise, and their research model changed the field in two ways: first, by gathering empirical evidence about library practice, and second, by introducing a collaborative model of discourse. These findings about the influence of women during the early years of librarianship call for reexamination of historical explanations for feminization of the field."