Rachael Miller ’09, who will be graduating in May with a double major in Hispanic Studies and Greek and Roman Studies, has won The Ames Library Artistic and Scholarly Research Strategies Award. The award was established to recognize outstanding information access strategies used by students in the development of their scholarly and artistic/creative projects while at Illinois Wesleyan.
Miller’s research, “Las bibliotecas públicas y la comunidad Latina (Public libraries and the Latino community)” was completed for her Spanish for Social Justice class with Professor of Hispanic Studies Carolyn Nadeau. Miller’s research analyzed the library resources needs of the growing Hispanic population in our community. In her winning essay, Miller chronicled her research journey that took her from library databases and research discussions with Ames librarians to interviews with librarians in both the Bloomington and Normal public libraries. Professor Nadeau’s letter of support for the application cites Miller’s work as “…an extraordinary example of the well-researched paper that Illinois Wesleyan students are capable of producing.” In addition to a $500 award, her essay is online in Digital Commons, the online archive that houses IWU student journals, vetted student artistic and scholarly research, and faculty scholarship. (As reported IWU’s Campus Weekly)