Black and Gabb honored with Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research

Alistair Black
Alistair Black, Professor Emeritus

Professor Alistair Black and doctoral candidate Henry Gabb have been honored by the American Library Association's Library Research Round Table (LRRT) with the 2017 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research. The annual award recognizes research that employs exemplary research design and methods in the planning or initial stage of use.

Black and Gabb's research repeated a 1916 survey of American corporate libraries with a selection of today's corporate librarians to assess operations and perceived value, following nearly a century of change. Their findings, presented in "The Value Proposition of the Corporate Library, Past and Present" and published in Information & Culture: A Journal of History (2016, vol. 51, no. 2), underscored the enduring value of the corporate library.

From the abstract: Corporate libraries of the kind we would recognize today began to appear around the turn of the twentieth century. They were a response to a rapidly changing corporate and commercial environment, acting as adjuncts to both the rise of systematic industrial research and the office management revolution that accompanied the implementation of scientific management. A survey of American corporate libraries in 1916 by the British manufacturer Rowntree and Company provides a snapshot of their operations and perceived value. The survey was repeated with a selection of today's corporate librarians. Their responses are strikingly similar to those of their early twentieth-century counterparts, despite intervening technological change. As it was a century ago, the value of the corporate library, even if it cannot be quantified, is accepted.

"The 1916 survey that Alistair uncovered in the Rowntree archives provided a 100-year-old snapshot of the American corporate library. Repeating the survey with modern corporate librarians suggests that little has changed in the mission or value proposition of the corporate library in spite of a century of technological progress," said Gabb, who worked on the research with Black as part of an independent study.

Gabb is doctoral candidate at the iSchool and a senior principal engineer at Intel Corporation. He studies chemical exposure from everyday consumer products, and the first phase of this work was published in "An Informatics Approach to Evaluating Combined Chemical Exposures from Consumer Products: A Case Study of Asthma-Associated Chemicals and Potential Endocrine Disruptors." He has published extensively in computational life science and high-performance computing. He holds a BS in biochemistry from Louisiana State University, an MS in medical informatics from the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, and a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.

Black is a prolific scholar whose research on the design of post-war British public libraries was recently awarded an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Honorable Mention prize for best faculty research. He is the author of A New History of the English Public Library (1996), The Public Library in Britain 1914-2000 (2000), and Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s (2017) and co-author of several other books. In 2014, he was named an iSchool Centennial Scholar for his outstanding accomplishments in the field of library and information science. He earned his master's degree in social and economic history from the University of London and his doctorate from London Metropolitan University.

Research Areas:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Scholarship provides validation, motivation for Martinez

BSIS+DS student Fabian Martinez chose his major because he wanted to learn how to help people understand and interpret data and information. While his immediate plans include finding a job in data analytics, business analytics, consulting, or product management, his ultimate goal is "to create meaningful relationships and help make a meaningful impact in the world" in whatever way he can.

Fabian Martinez graduation

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Guadalupe Castillo

Twelve iSchool master's students were named 2024–2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Guadalupe Castillo earned her BA in international studies and Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of California, San Diego.

Guadalupe Castillo

iSchool researchers to present at CHI 2025

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025), which will be held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Kemboi receives the Research and Advocacy Social Justice Award

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has received the 2025 Research and Advocacy Social Justice Award from the Office of Diversity & Social Justice Education in the Office of Student Affairs. She was presented with the award at the Social Justice Awards Ceremony, which was held on April 8 in the Illini Union. The annual event honors and celebrates the work and dedication of University of Illinois community members seeking to create a more inclusive and equitable campus.

Gladys Kemboi

Garnes receives Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement

Carolyn L. Garnes (MSLIS '72) has received the 2025 Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Library Association (ALA). The annual award, named in honor of award-winning children's book author Virginia Hamilton, is presented in odd years "to a practitioner for substantial contributions through active engagement with youth using award-winning African American literature for children and/or young adults, via implementation of reading and reading-related activities/programs."

Carolyn L. Garnes