Announcement: Best Paper of the Year Award for Volume 15

Abstract

The selection committee is happy to announce the best paper of the year for Volume 15 of the Journal of Map and Geography Libraries. The committee, comprised of three current members of the editorial board, unanimously selected a winner based on methodological soundness and overall quality of the research, originality, significance to the field of map and geographic librarianship, and quality of writing. Most of the articles referred to geo-literacy and were addressed to librarians and library users. Geoliteracy is an issue that constantly concerns librarians while shaping their provided services. The committee concluded that all of the considered papers from Volume 151 were of high quality and contained adaptable and actionable information for map and geographic library professionals. However, there was one paper that stood out as the best paper of the year. We would like to congratulate Philip White and Susan Powell (White and Powell 2019) for their article, “Code-Literacy for GIS Librarians: A Discussion of Languages, Use Cases, and Competencies”. In the winning article, White & Powell argue that code literacy is quickly becoming an essential competency for GIS librarians, much to the chagrin of this committee chair, who had been putting off learning R or Python until reading their article. The authors argue that while libraries have been offering data services for decades, the growth of data science programs and the open science movement, and the increase in the scale of data sets has created new challenges for librarians both in supporting researchers using spatial data, and in using data for their own work. They assert that code literacy is the natural progression in the ever-evolving core competencies for GIS librarians. Both R and Python are free and open source and have been used for spatial analysis for some time. The authors lay out the strengths and primary users of each language, concluding that either option would be a good choice for librarians to have in their skillset. https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2021.1937765