Hudson County Community College Librarian Cynthia Coulter, as co-chair of the Research Committee of the New Jersey Library Association’s College & University Section, moderated at the annual Research Award & Forum session at the NJLA Convention on May 18th. About twenty people attended the program and the Q&A follow up led to lively discussions. A summary of the winning research follows.

Two librarians from Seton Hall University, Beth Bloom and Marta Deyrup were recognized for their publication, “The SHU Research Logs: Students Online Search Behaviors Trans-scipted,” which examines students’ online research behavior. Bloom and Deyrup recorded students while they were searching the library databases. They were able to see how undergraduates navigated various resources and hear their simultaneous comments about their search experience. Published in the September 2015 volume of The Journal of Academic Librarianship, this research was chosen for the 2016 Research Award.

Later in the program, David C. Murray, a librarian at The College of New Jersey spoke about his research, “E-Books In the Humanities: An Affective Faculty Survey,” dealing with Humanities faculty attitudes and usage concerning academic ebooks versus print books. Collecting survey feedback, Murray was able to correlate types of users by academic department and age to their format preferences.

To learn more about these studies and the Research Committee, please visit the College & University Section of the NJLA website:  If you are interested in becoming a member of the ACRL-NJ/NJLA-CUS Research Committee, please contact Cynthia Coulter at ccoulter<at>hccc.edu or phone her at 201-360-4722. The committee is a good way to keep abreast of New Jersey research innovations and topics. Members usually meet once a year to choose winning submissions from several proposals.