Charlotte Nunes & Mary A. Armstrong selected winners of the 2025 Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant
“We are deeply honored to be named the recipients of the 2025 Gail Schlachter Memorial Research Grant. While it is widely believed that engagement with inclusive library resources has a positive effect on students’ sense of belonging, we hope our data-driven approach to examining this assumption will push forward knowledge in this important area. We’re particularly proud to connect the award-winning Lafayette Queer Archives Project to this endeavor. We recognize that the Schlachter Memorial grant will also help us learn more about how collaborative, cross-institutional, library-centered endeavors can positively transform student climate and advance our most core mission and values. We look forward to sharing our findings with other institutions, as well. Many thanks to RUSA for this exciting opportunity.” – Charlotte Nunes & Mary A. Armstrong
“Charlotte Nunes & Mary Armstrong are the recipients of the Gail Schlacter Memorial Research Grant for their proposal focused on the Lafayette College Queer Archives Project. They plan to develop a data-driven approach to measuring how a library resource impacts student perceptions of belonging at an institution as well as advance the scholarship around how student engagement with inclusive library resources can impact both learning and a sense of institutional belonging.” – Award Committee Statement
Charlotte Nunes & Mary Armstrong’s project, The Shape of Belonging: Tracing the Impact of the Lafayette College Queer Archives Project on Student Participants will focus on the Lafayette College Queer Archives Project (qap.lafayette.edu). The QAP is a collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative designed to illuminate Lafayette’s Queer history, advance teaching, learning, and research in the area of LGBTQ+ studies, and promote positive institutional transformation. It is a joint initiative of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, an interdisciplinary major program at Lafayette, and Lafayette College Libraries.
By learning about the impacts of the QAP on student perceptions of belonging at Lafayette College, the completed project will provide a framework for assessment that can be widely adopted across academic libraries. In addition to better equipping libraries to advocate for resources based on demonstrated impact, data-gathering and assessment of library impacts on student belonging can help us advance libraries’ and librarians’ most core mission and values and will answer questions such as, “How can we use assessment data to determine how students who may feel differentially entitled when they arrive on campus feel more equitably entitled when they graduate?” and “are we fostering a culture where all students feel entitled to access library collections, resources, and opportunities?” And, “how can we use this information to focus our efforts on those resources, collections, services, and types of spaces that have the biggest impact on the outcomes to which we aspire in terms of inclusion and belonging?”
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.
The RUSA Achievement Awards and Grants Selection Committee was Chaired by Celia Ross.