Middletown, CT – March 15, 2017: Gina Kessler Lee, information literacy librarian at Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, CA, has been chosen as winner of the Where Can Choice Reviews Take You? contest. The premier source for reviews of academic books, digital media, and Internet resources in higher education, Choice Reviews is a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association. The database published its 200,000th review earlier this month.

Launched in December 2016, the Where Can Choice Reviews Take You? contest solicited ideas on how the Choice Reviews database might be used in instruction and research, particularly in hands-on ways that librarians might present it as a useful tool to faculty and students undertaking research. In early March, a panel of judges at Choice met and reviewed the submissions, considering the merits of each based on the benefit to students and/or faculty research, overall importance of the proposed initiative, and practicality. One winning submission was chosen.

Gina Kessler Lee’s winning submission, “Select, Annotate, and Critique: An English Honors Thesis Project Using Choice Reviews,” presented an assignment that would enable students to use Choice Reviews to identify the most authoritative books on their chosen topic; create a LibGuide summarizing, comparing, and contrasting the books and articles they found; and—based on their findings—to critique the library’s collection of books on their topic and submit a recommendation to the librarian of titles to purchase.

“We were impressed with how Gina’s idea involved the student, librarian, and faculty advisor, and using Choice Reviews as an interactive tool, which is very much in line with how we encourage the database to be used,” said Mark Cummings, editor and publisher of Choice. “Using CR to find the best sources on a given topic, learning how to organize those sources into a LibGuide in the style of a Choice Bibliographic Essay, and ultimately making collection development recommendations to the librarian are valuable growth opportunities for students – and great ways to utilize Choice Reviews.”

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