2022 RUSA Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant

Dr. Hyerim Cho, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri’s School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, selected as winner of Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant

The Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant is awarded annually to financially support an individual or collaborative group conducting research into reference or user services whose research projects aim to better understand or answer key questions related to connecting people to resources, information services, and collections.

Dr. Hyerim Cho

RUSA’s Achievement Awards Committee has selected Dr. Hyerim Cho as the recipient of this year’s Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant in recognition of the quality of her research proposal and the positive impact the findings will have on libraries and library patrons. Dr. Cho has published and presented extensively on information needs as well as recommendation and discovery services for anime, illustrations, video games and other visual multimedia.

Her proposed project aims to extend her previous research on video games. Over the next year, she will conduct a focus group and semi-structured interviews in order to better understand video game players’ affective information needs and the ways in which their game-playing behaviors regulate their moods in their everyday lives. The findings of her study will help information professionals understand video game users’ affective/emotional needs and contribute to enhancing the rigor and inclusivity of current video game recommendation and reference services.

Dr. Cho earned her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. She teaches two courses for the University of Missouri’s Information school: Foundations of Library and Information Science, and Information Needs and Behavior. She has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings and has delivered over 15 conference presentations. Her publications and presentations have addressed numerous topics related to access, description, discovery, and recommendations for visual multimedia. She is a member of the American Library Association, the Association for Library and Information Science, and the Association for Information Science and Technology. She is a reviewer for four journals: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Information Science, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization.

For additional information, please see her personal website https://hyerimcho.com/

The 2021 Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant committee was Chaired by Chris LeBeau.

More information regarding the RUSA Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant is available here.

Interview with Dr. Hyerin Cho