Education Librarian Ellysa Stern Cahoy was recently announced winner of the Best Article of the Year by portal: Libraries and the Academy, for “Personal Library Curation: An Ethnographic Study of Scholars’ Information Practices,” which she co-authored with research anthropologist Smiljana Antonijević. This recognition gives each author a cash prize of $250 and a plaque from the Johns Hopkins University Press.

The article focuses on the research outcomes from a 2012 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant of $143,000 that investigated how faculty create and manage personal information collections. It details results of ethnographic interviews with Penn State faculty across the sciences, humanities and social sciences on their scholarly research practices. The results showed that faculty most often faced difficulties when finding and accessing new information, and when organizing and archiving research articles and other significant data or artifacts.

Announcing the award, portal: Libraries and the Academy editor Marianne Ryan noted, “Volume 14 of portal is a very strong collection of content; the competition for this selection was stiff. In judging the articles, the committee applied portal’s stated criteria of sound research methodology; the extent to which an article places library issues within a broader academic context; the quality of the writing; originality; and timeliness. All of the articles nominated, of course, meet or exceed these basic criteria, since they were chosen for publication in portal in the first place.” Ryan said that Stern Cahoy’s article stood as it demonstrated excellence in all categories, and best met the criteria of significant contribution to the literature and advancement of knowledge. The award will be presented in person at the Annual ALA Conference in San Francisco, in June.