In attendance:
Beth Bloom, Angela Camack, Sara Harrington (Co-Chair), Triveni Kuchi (Co-Chair), Anthony Lee, Penny Page, Scott Smith, Anita Talar, Mark Thompson.

• The meeting began after a tasty relaxed lunch (courtesy of the Dean of Seton Hall Libraries) and with some traces of sunshine peaking out, despite the potential snowstorm warnings for the afternoon and weekend. Agenda and minutes of the October meeting were approved.

• A brief discussion of the agenda items and plan for the meeting was presented by Sara. The NJLA CUS ACRL NJ Research Program, Award Luncheon, Forum timings and other details/arrangements for the conference in April was discussed. This was a meeting held primarily to discuss and decide the Research Award winner and the Research Forum participants for the NJLA Conference to be held on April 26, 2006.

• The Research Award was moved up to no. 1 on the agenda for discussion. Seton Hall will be providing the honorarium for the Research Award winner for this year as well. The process for ranking the award nominations against each criterion was decided after some discussion. Using these criteria to judge the nominations resulted in a 2005 Research Award winner, Kayo Denda for her article “Beyond Subject Headings: A Structured Information Retrieval Tool for Interdisciplinary Fields,” Library Resources & Technical Services 49, no. 4 (October 2005: 266-275.

• It was decided that the judgment or ranking process be brought up for discussion again as an agenda item for the next meeting. Further, the text of the announcement for the Research Award was also recommended to be placed for discussion and revision for the next meeting. More specifically, adding, “originally published” in the ____ year was recommended to be included in the announcement text.

• A similar process of ranking was used for making decisions about the Research Forum participants and 4 participants: Judy Jeng, “An Evaluation Model for Assessing Usability of Academic Digital Libraries,” Patricia Libutti, Jerris Cassel, and Mira Foster, « Qualitative Analysis of Student Search Behavior with the Searchpath Tutorial : Research In Progress” Lilia Pavlovsky, “Virtually Professional: Emerging Online Learning Communities in LIS” Mary Ann Trail, David Lechner and Carolyn Gutierrez, “When New is Not Always Better: Reassessing the Traditional Workbook.” and one alternate was chosen.

• The announcement and notifications will be sent out by Sara soon.

• Topics for the next meeting on May 12, 2006 will include discussion on a draft of the research committee Website.

Respectfully submitted by
Triveni Kuchi