CALL Grants and Chapter Awards Committee 2020-2021 Annual Report

Committee members: Jessie LeMar (chair), Jesse Bowman,  Shari Duff, Lyonette Louis-Jacques, and Jamie Stewart.

This year’s Grants and Chapter Awards Committee was charged with selecting grant recipients based on established criteria for CALL members to attend professional meetings and selecting recipients for the chapter awards based on nominations from CALL colleagues.

 Grant Activities

The Committee met in August 2020 by conference call to discuss the committee plans and the committee charge. Due to the pandemic and cancellation of many conferences, it was decided that we would encourage members to apply for grants to cover professional development outside of the traditional conference offerings. This included grants for coursework, certificates, or opportunities to learn new skills. At the first CALL Business Meeting in September we spoke to membership to encourage applications for a wide range of events.

The committee received multiple applications for grants during the 2020-2021 year. We met via conference call in February and March to decide on the applications, and in one instance voted via an email due to schedule conflicts.

In addition to the grants awarded from application, the Committee decided to utilize $2500 of our annual budget to award 25 grants for AALL Annual Conference registrations at our May Business Meeting. The grants were raffled off on the conference call, and any meeting registrant was eligible to be entered into the raffle. With the conference being virtual, and the registration fee being reduced, we thought this was a fantastic opportunity to support the professional development in a year that has been hard on the personal and work budgets of many of our members.

The Committee awarded the following grants to our members:

  • Matt Timko – AALL Intro to Library Budgets Course
  • Sabine Schuller  -SLA Competitive Intelligence Certificate
  • Stacia Stein – AALL Management Institute
  • Emily Byrne – AALL Innovation Bootcamp
  • Brittany Adams- Rare Books School- Law Books: History & Connoisseurship
  • 25 AALL Annual Conference Registration grants

 Chapter Awards Activities

In April, the Committee sought nominations for the chapter awards via a post to the CALL listserv. The Committee received nominations for each of the chapter awards and then reviewed all of the nominations. The following recipients were selected based on the criteria listed on the CALL Web site:

  • Lifetime Achievement in Law Librarianship Award: Gretchen Van Dam
  • Agnes and Harvey Reid Award for Outstanding Contribution to Law Librarianship: Jean Wenger and a posthumous award to John Klaus
  • Award for Outstanding In-House Publication: Matt Timko

Chapter awards were presented to the recipients by Jessie LeMar at the virtual May CALL Business Meeting