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Past Winners

Past winners of the Bob Williams Awards

Bob Williams Research Grant (up to 2000 USD for the best research proposal received):

  • 2020: Alyson Gamble, Simmons University, for their proposal “Mental Health Information in LIS: A 100 Year Retrospective of Access and Attitudes”
  • 2019: Not awarded
  • 2018: Lynne Bowker, University of Ottawa, for her proposal “Revealing One of Information Science and Technology’s ‘Hidden Figures’: How Helmut Felber brought information science principles to bear on the development of early term banks”
  • 2017: Matthew Mayernik, National Center for Atmospheric Research, for his proposal “Organizing Scientists, Organizing Data: Infrastructures and Institutions for Long-Term Scientific Data Initiatives”
  • 2016: Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan & Thomas Dousa, Aix-Marseille University and University of Chicago, for their proposal “Information Science: Origins, Theories & Paradigms: A Comparative Approach”
  • 2015 (maximum award raised to $2,000): Ronald Day, Indiana University Bloomington, for his book project “Documentarity, the Literary and the Right to Truth”
  • 2014: Not awarded
  • 2013: Kalpana Shankar & Kristin Eschenfelder, University College Dublin and University of Wisconsin-Madison, for their proposal “Social Science Data Archives: A Historical View of Sustainability, Access and Use”
  • 2012: Not awarded
  • 2011: Trudi Bellardo Hahn & Diane Barlow, University of Maryland, for their proposal “Research on the NSF, information science, and Helen Brownson”
  • 2010: Andrew Russell, Stevens Institute of Technology, for his proposal “An open world: ideological origins of network standards”
  • 2009 (inaugural award, maximum of $1,000): Charles Meadow, University of Toronto, for his proposal to study the digital divide historically.

Bob Williams Research Paper Award (500 USD for the best unpublished paper on information history received):

  • 2020: Rodrigo Ochigame, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for “Informatics of the Oppressed”
  • 2019: Not awarded
  • 2018: Brian Dobreski and Barbara Kwaśnik, for “Changing Depictions of Persons in Library Practice: Spirits, Pseudonyms, and Human Books”;
    and Alex Poole, Drexel University, for ”Harold T. Pinkett and the Lonely Crusade of African American Archivists in the Twentieth Century”
  • 2017: Alex Poole, Drexel University, for “Could my dark hands break through the dark shadow?” The North Carolina Negro Library Association’s War on Information Poverty in the Long Civil Rights Movement, 1935-1955″
  • 2016: Gábor Szommer, Hungarian independent researcher, for “Parallel Expansions: The Role of Information during the Formative Years of the English East India Company”
  • 2015: Not awarded
  • 2014: Not awarded
  • 2013: Xiaohua Zhu, University of Tennessee, for “Who Had Access to Juris?: A Failed Case of Open Access”
  • 2012: Not awarded
  • 2011: Not awarded
  • 2010: Sarah Buchanan, UCLA, for “‘Name’s the Same?’: The Los Angeles Chapter of ASIST upon its Semicentennial”
  • 2009 (inaugural award): Rachel Plotnick, doctoral student in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University, for “Computers, Systems Theory and the Making of a Wired Hospital: A History of Technicon Medical Information System, 1964-1987.”