LMD announces Paper Competition winners

Information Outlook, May, 2003

Paiki Muswazi from Swaziland is the winner SLA's Library Management Division for the International Paper Competition for Developing Country Librarians. Muswazi was a Global 2000 Fellow and attended the SLA's worldwide conference on special librarianship in Brighton, England, in October 2000. He is the Head of Special Collections at the University of Swaziland Libraries. As the winner he will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to SLA's 94th Annual Conference in New York this June and a two-year SLA membership. His paper, which will be delivered at the Conference, is "Library and Information Services (LIS) Strategic Planning in Developing Countries: A Case Study." Judges who had previously met or had worked virtually with any of the 49 authors who competed in the competition were recused from judging their papers.

There were two Honorable Mention papers that tied for second place. They were written by Umar Farooq and his father, Muhammad Yaqub Chaudhary; and K.A. Raju.

K.A. Raju, Director of the National Institute of Rural Development in Hyderabad, India. His paper was entitled "Traditional Values Still Relevant in Library Usage and Readership Enhancement: Challenges Before a Librarian."

Umar Farooq (Reference Specialist, U.S.I.A. Resource Center, Islamabad) and his father, Muhammad Yaqub Chaudhary, Librarian at the University of Aziz in Kashmir, Pakistan. Muhammad, a Global 2000 Fellow (he is the one who was hijacked on the way to the conference in Brighton, England, in October 2000), has been "twinned" by the Pacific Northwest Chapter, and received the Science arid Technology Division Travel award in 2002. Their paper was entitled "The Application of Leadership and Management Principles in Libraries.

Wei Wei, who' serves on the editorial board of Science and Technology Libraries, has arranged for a special issue of the journal to be published that will feature as many as 20 of the best papers in the competition. The topic was "leadership and management principles applied in a special library in a developing country." Other members of the committee were Daan Bloom, Sue O'Neill Johnson, Donna Scheeder, Sylvia Piggott, and Larry Walton.