TechNique: January 2006

Applying for research grants and scholarships: Just do it!

Sharon Uthmann, ALIA Dunn & Wilson 2005 recipient

As some of you may be aware, I am this years' recipient of the ALIA Dunn & Wilson Scholarship. To quote from ALIA page:

The Dunn & Wilson Scholarship is a biennial award up to $5000 (presented at the biennial library technician's conference) and provides the recipient with an opportunity to investigate a particular project relating to the practice of library technicians, which will increase the recipient's professional occupational experience.

The Dunn & Wilson Scholarship is just one of the many research awards ALIA provides for its members. Others include:

• Study Grant Award
• Ray Choate Scholarship
• YBP Lindsay & Howes Research Award for Collection Services

Some of you may be wondering what I'm planning on researching and why I applied for the award. My project aims to investigate and identify secondment programs offeres to library technician's nation wide and in all library sectors. When complete, it is hoped that my reseawill act as a resource for library technicians to refer to when seeking out secondment opportunities during their careers.

The idea for this research project stemmed out of the paper I presented at the recent ALIA Library and Information Technicians Conference neXt - titled Multi-skill me: Secondment opportunities and issues at QUT Library. While researching for my paper/presentation it came to mind that it would be good to find out what sort of secondment programs are offered in other organisations. I decided to focus on library technicians as from personal experience, there comes a time when the career ladder stalls and there is no further chance to climb higher with the same qualification under your belt. Library tecnicians are more likely to reach this point in their career and there is little room for professional development. However, secondments ensure that library technicians continue to develop and learn more skills. Then I saw Tania Barry's e-mail to the ALIA LibTec list advertising the ALIA Dunn & Wilson Scholarship and it all just fell into place!

This is not to say that applying for research grants/scholarships is easy as it does take a lot of thought and work. For the Dunn & Wilson Scholarship I had to fill in the following form.

From this form the hardest part to fill in for me was the budget side of things. Just how much do you charge yourself to do research? I approached previous Dunn & Wilson scholarship holders to ask how they approached their application and got heaps of great ideas. The next challenging part of the application was finding contacts to approach about secondment programs in other organisations. This is where the ALIA e-lists came in handy as I put a call out for anyone that had been on a secondment or worked in an organisation that offered secondments. From the replies a list of possible contacts was established.

Now it's your turn. Do you have an idea or passion you'd like to research or bring forward in the LIS profession? Then seek out and apply for a research grant. In ALIA's new statement on ALIA's role in education of library and information professions it stated that LIS graduates must be equipped with an understanding of the importance of research activity within the profession to encourage the expansion and diversification of its knowledge base. Jennefer Nicholson backed this up in her recent Directline article (inCite September 2005), by saying 'directors are keen to foster a culture in our sector of applying for research awards and the benefits of taking up awards will be promoted at every opportunity. A workshop on applying for research awards is to be scoped to supplement the tools currently available on ALIAnet.

Now that the easy part has been done and I was successful, the hard part - i.e. the research - begins. Stay tuned for details of how the research is going by visiting my Dunn & Wilson Scholarship blog.