Scholarship Winners
Dr. Barbara Bonous-Smit Scholarship
For an academic librarian who has been in practice for at least 5 years following receipt of a Master’s degree in library/information science.
- Alesandra Otero Ramos, SUNY Geneseo
Early-Career Scholarship
For an academic librarian who has been practicing for less than 5 years following receipt of a Master’s degree in library/information science.
- Allison Ransom, Hunter College
Student Scholarships
For students currently enrolled in graduate degree programs in library/information science who are considering a career in academic librarianship.
- Francesca D’Arista, Queens College
I was honored to be a Student Scholarship Award recipient for ACRL/NY 2024. This was my first time attending a library science conference as a first-semester master’s student, and I was greatly impressed by the events, speakers, and presenters. The conference opening statement acknowledged Fordham University’s occupation of Lenni-Lenape and Wappinger land, which I felt was an important first step towards integrating anticolonial work into the every operations of academic libraries. This is a praxis that dictates the way I personally navigate library science as a student and as a library employee. Malikah Hall-Retteen’s poster on decolonizing the legal bookshelf, and Tierney Gleason’s lightning talk on conducting diversity audits through curating reference exhibits were especially engaging and informative, demonstrating how their work as librarians is inherently political, and dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion. Zachary Vickery and Morgan Bond gave an enlightening talk on library sustainability, detailing how they achieved the impressive feat of reducing the amount of trash cans in SUNY Oswego’s library from over 300 to below 70. This effort to reduce the amount of time and labor custodians spend replacing nearly empty trash cans, and to reduce the excessive amount of plastic bags that are wasted in this process, has inspired me to suggest a similar audit within my library of work. And I am particularly looking forward to applying for Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz’s next installment of Fridays in May: Queer BIPOC Peer Networking Program. I hope you continue finding community within this evolving field through the generosity of committees like ACRL/NY and the librarians I was fortunate enough to connect with that day.
- Adina Karp, Pratt Institute
I attended the 2024 ACRL/NY Symposium Values in Context: Praxis in the Everyday. As a student in my first semester of my MLIS degree at Pratt Institute, this was one of my first professional library experiences, and I am so grateful that this was my introduction to the field and my potential future colleagues. It was during the fourth session of the day, “Library and Union Values: Alignments, Frictions, and Resolutions”, that speaker Alan Witt asked two questions that really framed my learning takeaways from the day. He asked: “How do we define public good?” and “Who do we offer or owe our services to?”. I felt these questions were in constant discussion and reframing throughout the entire symposium — from speaker sessions, to lighting round panels, posters, and even the informal conversations around the table. And it was the methodology of question asking, and conversation bridging that I saw these values echoed back. Ultimately, as Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz explained in her framing in the final panel of the day, “conversation can be a kind of technology” — no one had true or definitive or all encompassing answers to the questions of the day, but the conversations were in themselves the value produced. I left the symposium with the tools to frame those questions for myself, and new potential ways to envision my future in the library field.
- Marina Mikhail, University of Toronto