Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS) announces the availability of grants of up to $1,000 (funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney Grant) to assist authors with preparing literature reviews. The purpose of the grants is to provide funds that will be used for clerical and research support, thereby allowing the author/s to concentrate on analyzing the resources and writing the literature review. In this new grant program, recipients will be able to work with the LRTS editor to determine appropriate uses. Possible tasks might be collecting citations, sorting and organizing citations by themes and categories, locating and gathering resources to be reviewed, verifying citations, funding purchases of articles not owned by the home institution of the author, and so forth. Funding also could provide a mentoring opportunity in funding assistance by a library school or information science student.
Highly cited, literature reviews provide an essential professional service to practitioners, scholars and students by identifying the key themes and most important publications appearing in successive two year periods. Books and articles by accredited scholars and researchers, i.e., primarily peer-reviewed publications provide the basis for a literature review. A good literature review is evaluative, selective and critical, and goes beyond summarizing and quoting from the selected sources. Literature reviews explain why the sources cited are important and valuable, may compare them to prior works, and create a structure that organizes the two year body of content to make it comprehensible and to identify themes, not only for those who have followed the developments it describes, but to future researchers. All sources referenced appear in the endnotes; a separate bibliography is not published. Although commissioned, LRTS literature reviews go through the same double-blind peer review process as unsolicited manuscripts.
LRTS seeks authors for the following topical areas and time frames:
- Preservation literature 2009-2010
- Cataloging and classification 2009-2010
- Collection development and management 2009-2010
Authors currently preparing LRTS-commissioned literature reviews also are welcome to apply for a grant if they provide a rationale explaining how the funds will be used.
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The grant proposal must include:
- Requester name, title, and contact information
- The literature to be reviewed (see list above)
- The requester’s credentials to write the literature review
- Amount requested
- Budget plan and rationale for how the funds will be expended
Proposals are by March 26, 2010.
Applications and inquiries should be submitted to Peggy Johnson, LRTS Editor, lrtseditor@ala.org.