2007 Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries

Information/Library Needs Assessment for Medical Research and Health Care Delivery Initiatives in Botswana
University of Pennsylvania Libraries

An Elsevier Foundation grant will fund a comprehensive assessment of library and information services to support medical education and improve HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment in Botswana, a country with the second highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. The program draws on the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to contribute expertise to an established partnership between the University and the Government of Botswana, part of the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS partnership led by the Gates Foundation and the Government of Botswana. Because Botswana is regarded as a testing ground for policy and practice in this area, this grant has the potential to be ground-breaking in identifying ways libraries can contribute to improved outcomes for HIV/AIDS patients in the developing world.

Strengthening Usage Skills in Access to Online Resources in the Niger Delta Universities of Nigeria
University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria

An Elsevier Foundation grant will establish the capacity in the Niger delta region of Nigeria to deliver ongoing training on access to online resources, and will serve all four of the major universities in the densely populated Niger Delta region. There is currently very low use of online library resources at the universities due largely to the lack of training and awareness of the availability of online resources among librarians, faculty, and graduate students. Under the proposal, the universities would establish and equip a permanent Elsevier E-Library Training Room, and fund the launch of a series of training programs targeted at librarians responsible for the health sciences, agriculture, pharmacy and science; academic staff; graduate students, and the wider university community. It has the potential to serve as a very concrete and replicable model for other countries and regions. The Training Room and course program would be maintained in subsequent years by the University of Port Harcourt, which has benefited from past support from the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, which includes the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations.

Creation of a Latin American Virtual Library on Health and Disaster
Regional Disaster Information Center for Latin America & the Caribbean (CRID), Pan American Health Organization, National Library of Medicine

An Elsevier Foundation grant will improve the use and deployment of scientific, technical and medical information for disaster relief and reduction. The project will reinforce the efforts and initiatives taken by CRID in Central America and in the Andean countries to develop a “Latin American Virtual Library on Health and Disasters” to compile and share information on disasters, thus strengthening national and local capacity to manage and use health and disaster information. The grant will create a network of six centers in Central America and the Andean countries, which have among the highest incidence of disasters of any region of the world with major consequences for human life and economic development. The Elsevier Foundation grant will build the capacity of librarians to anticipate information needs during a disaster, deploy technologies for finding and disseminating disaster information, and participate more effectively in disaster-preparation and policy. It will also align standards and information management methodologies to allow for more extensive and efficient information sharing on disasters. The project has the potential to further demonstrate that the effective use and distribution of scientific technical and medical information, especially health information, in anticipation of and during disasters, has significant potential to save lives.

FARM-Africa Training and Advisory Unit Co-ordination and Digitisation Project
FARM-Africa (Food and Agriculture Research Management)

The Elsevier Foundation grant will extend the use of scientific, technical and medical information in East and South Africa in ways that will have a concrete impact on agricultural development. The grant will fund the grant will fund an audit of a large array of agricultural science and technology resources developed or acquired by FARM-Africa, a well-regarded organization with a 20 year track record in the region in support of community forest management, smallholder farmers, and pastoralist development.. The long-term goal of the project is to compile and digitize extensive but geographically dispersed resources into a much more accessible web-based portal for use by farmers, NGOs, governments and the private sector across the region. The FARM-Africa website is already well visited for such a site in this region, so adding this new content has the potential to greatly increase access to important content across the region.

Capacity-building for Vietnamese Science and Technology University Librarians in Reference and Information Services
Vietnam Development Information Center

A grant from the Elsevier Foundation will fund a highly focused and locally managed program to develop reference services at science and technology universities. References services are poor at these institutions and the library profession in Vietnam is viewed as an administrative function, rather than as value-adding and proactive. The project aims to use traditional training techniques and accepted materials to train librarians thoroughly in reference services and serve as seed professionals to spread knowledge to other librarians in their home institutions. The program provides essential training to address a basic need, which has the potential to have an important impact on science and technology in Vietnam.

E-library training initiative
Medical Library Association – “Librarians without Borders”

The grant will extend for one year an existing program of workshops and curriculum development on the use of online resources, including Hinari, Agora and Oare, aimed at researchers, clinicians, government officials, and librarians in developing countries in Asia and Africa. It will also provide for the further development and deployment of an email training course that provides a less expensive channel for delivering training and that is scaleable to participants in other countries where distance and resource constraints prevent users and trainers from attending workshops. The grant will facilitate the development of a ‘users survey’ that will assist in establishing future training priorities. The Medical Library Association/ Librarians without BordersSM program conducted eight 4-day workshops on the use of HINARI in Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria and Tanzania, resulting in significant increases in usage.

2007 New Scholars

Professional Development Grant for Parents of Infants and Toddlers
University of California - Irvine

The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to develop an innovative program to address the unique challenges faced by scholars with family responsibilities in travelling to professional conferences and research meetings in national venues that are necessary to advance their careers and contribute to scientific discovery and innovation. The new program will provide dependent care assistance to faculty in science, technology, engineering and math who are at least 50% responsible for childcare and will be administered through an established competition with formal guidelines and backed up by a survey to evaluate its impact as part of the University’s overall program for promoting work-family balance. The formal framework and evaluation report that will result from this program will enable them to establish other sources of funds to sustain the program after the Elsevier grant.

Transitional Support Program
University of Rhode Island

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to create and disseminate a series of programs to help new scholars in science, technology, engineering and math to meet their academic and parental obligations while on the job. The centerpiece of the initiative is the development of a lactation model program, which will establish a prototype onsite lactation room and advisory resources for lactating faculty mothers. It is envisaged that this prototype facility will be sustained permanently following the grant period with university funds and will be replicated elsewhere at the university and in the region based on a formal assessment of its effectiveness. The program builds directly on initiatives developed under a grant from the National Science Foundation to increase the percentage of women faculty hired, identify barriers to recruitment and retention in these fields, establish parental leave programs, and create greater understanding in the academic departments of the need for family-friendly practices. This lactation program is an innovation in the academic arena in the scientific and technical disciplines and has good potential for creating a model program that will be adopted by other institutions.

SettleNet
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to address barriers to relocation that affect the recruitment and retention of new women scholars. The program will address a wide set of new scholars – notably women with working spouses and partners, whose own careers often present a significant obstacle to relocation – by establishing resources to help new faculty settle in a new location, relocation counseling, a regional career network for faculty spouses, and career coaching for both the scholar and the spouse. The program is particularly innovative in taking a regional approach that extends not only to other universities, but also to all PhD-hiring institutions. It would become self-sustainable through membership fees and will create incentives for institutions to participate in the network by offering credits to institutions that actively participate, e.g. by interviewing and hiring a spouse. RPI is playing a nationally recognized role in the advancement of women faculty in technology and the Settlenet initiative therefore has high potential to serve as a model program.

Increasing representation of female researchers in the computability community
Computability in Europe Conference Series/University of Amsterdam

An Elsevier Foundation grant will support the Computability in Europe Conference Series to increase the participation of women scholars in a field where they are currently underrepresented. CiE (Computability in Europe) is a European network of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability. Its conference series CiE-CS plays an important role in giving female researchers the opportunity to present results and serve as plenary speakers and role models. CiE-CS will use the grant to establish a mentoring program at the conference to establish formal and informal contacts among senior scientists and graduates students. It will further fund the provision of childcare at the conference to encourage and allow women scholars to attend, a significant innovation for a Europe-based conference.

From Graduate Student to Assistant Professor: Helping Post-doctoral scientists and engineers meet the demands of career and family life
Princeton University

The grant will create programs with a particular focus on the post-doctoral period, a critical time in which a disproportionate number of women scholars in science and engineering make the decision not to apply for assistant professor positions in research universities. The program will address work-family balance issues that are distinct from those faced by graduate students and faculty, since post-doctoral training occurs in a fairly brief time period and almost never takes place either at the university where the researcher has earned her degree or at the university where she will ultimate become a faculty member. For post-doctoral researchers with families, the challenges of this dislocation include separation from spouses or domestic partners, who also often tend to be pursuing academic careers at the same time, and difficulty in finding childcare while travelling to conferences. To address theses challenges, the Elsevier Foundation grant will support extension of funding for a dependent care travel program for post-doctoral fellows and support for travel for fellows whose spouses are graduate students or post-doctoral fellows in science and engineering at another institution.

ASCB Child Care Award Program
American Society for Cell Biology

An Elsevier Foundation grant will allow the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) to provide stipends to cover childcare expenses for selected traveling scholars who attend the ASCB Annual Meeting. While women scholars make up nearly half of post-doctoral researchers in biology, there is a sharp fall off of women in the ranks of assistant professors, associate professors and full professors. Society conferences offer attendees opportunities to highlight their research, hear from leaders in the field, and network with peers. Consistent with studies and feedback from academic institutions, the Society has identified family care issues as one obstacle to the participation of new women scholars in the ASCB annual meeting. This participation is an important venue for career development in the field.

Encouraging Diversity and Work/Life Balance in Engineering Faculty
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, College of Engineering

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the UICU College of Engineering will develop and test new approaches to enhance to its existing programs to address the under-representation of women faculty in technical fields. The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to establish a monthly forum for faculty and post-doctoral students and their families to provide social reinforcement, advice and peer-counseling. It will also establish small groups of scientists and engineers, not including families, which will consist of both new and senior faculty to discuss work and work-life issues. The program also includes diversity workshops for faculty, department heads and search committee members, to enhance awareness among the engineering faculty of how gender issues can unfairly limit the opportunities available to women. The new programs will support an established university-wide program, which has received past grants from the National Science Foundation, to increase the advancement of women faculty in technical fields, through recruitment and retention programs, spousal hire programs, and awareness-building.

2006 Innovative Library Access

Guangxi University of Technology Library, China
Developing a virtual reference service
This grant will create a real-time virtual library reference service at Guangxi University of Technology, a comprehensive university focusing on engineering in Liuzhou City, China. By empowering librarians to take an active role in providing services for students, this program will not only promote public access to knowledge, but it will also serve as a model to other institutions in the region. The benefits will reach over 17,000 students, who will now be able to interact with librarians and find reference solutions any time, any place.

Hanoi Agricultural University, Vietnam
Enhancing librarian knowledge and information literacy
This project is focused on preserving and disseminating content in agriculture, fishery and forestry by enhancing professional knowledge and information literacy for librarians in agriculture, fishery and forestry universities in Vietnam. It will also establish a network of information literacy librarians who will contribute to the goal of producing high-level agricultural thinkers.

Hanoi Medical University, Vietnam
Promoting research in traditional medicine
Traditional medicine has a very special place in the fabric of Vietnamese culture. This grant aims to preserve and sustain traditional thought in medicine by building a database for disseminating traditional medicine research results at Hanoi Medical University for use in combination with modern medicine in disease prevention and treatment.

National Information Technology Park, Mongolia
Digitizing the first research library in Mongolia
This grant will result in the digitization of the first research & development library in Mongolia with the aim to digitize all doctors' theses and R&D. This project will mark the first digitization of medical information in Mongolia, making material available for wider use and dissemination and providing access to this information for scientists, students and the general public.

Suranaree University of Technology, Thailand
Fostering local science and technology research
This grant will allow Suranaree University of Technology to begin constructing self-learning, computer-based modules to preserve and teach local and traditional knowledge focusing on science and technology for secondary schools in Nakhon Ratchasima, where Suranaree University is located.

Zhejiang University of Technology Library, China
Improving library service via e-resource reorientation
Zhejiang University of Technology will use a survey technique to identify researchers' usage patterns, which will enable the libraries of Zhejiang to better meet the needs of their users. By filling in the gaps in use of A&I databases, the grant aims to increase the efficiency and value of A&I research in China.

2006 Scholars Program

Boston University
This grant supports the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Initiative at Boston University. As part of an active program of mentoring and leadership development for women scholars, WISE will sponsor an outstanding female graduate student.

California Institute of Technology
The grant will support the work of Dr. Lisa Taneyhill, who is exploring the target and function of genes involved in neural crest induction and migration in the laboratory of Dr. Bronner-Fraser. The grant will support her continued scholarship and her role as a mentor for other women scholars at California Institute of Technology.

University of California, Berkeley
The UC Berkeley “Big Ideas @ Berkeley” program supports young scholars in implementing community programs. As a part of this program, this grant will enable Dr. Madelaine Plauché, a post-doctoral field researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, to deploy the Open Sesame Project Toolkit in four village centers in Tamil Nadu, India. The Open Sesame Project sponsors access to online information for all literacy levels in developing regions of India by creating open-source and easy to use spoken dialog systems for training and education purposes.

University of California, Berkeley
As part of the “Big Ideas @ Berkeley” program, the Science Technology and Engineering Policy Group (STEP) seeks to create better technology policy through collaborations between scientists, technologists and policy-makers. This grant will enable Kate Hammond, a joint Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley and UCSF, to develop training programs that provide scientists with the skills to communicate effectively and understand the decision-making process of political institutions.

Dependent Care Program, Princeton University
Princeton University aims to establish a dependent care program to address the worrisome trend of female Ph.D. candidates unable to pursue their careers as science and engineering professors while raising a family. This grant will allow Princeton to begin funding a program to help graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with the necessary childcare associated with travel to academic conferences.

Annual Award, Society of Toxicology
As part of an initiative to promote leadership in the field, this grant will establish and fund an annual award over three years. The Society of Toxicology is a global leader in advancing science to enhance human, animal, and environmental health.

Day Nursery, Keio University, Japan
In an effort to support women scholars with family responsibilities, this grant will help contribute to the establishment of a day care program at Keio University, the oldest private university in Japan.