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Call for Applicants for Paul Evan Peters Fellowship—Deadline June 24, 2014

paul-evan-peters
Paul Evan Peters,
image © CNI

The Paul Evan Peters Fellowship—sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE—was established to honor and perpetuate the memory of CNI’s founding executive director. The fellowship is awarded every two years to students pursuing graduate studies in librarianship, the information sciences, or a closely related field, who demonstrates intellectual and personal qualities consistent with those of Paul Evan Peters, including:

  • commitment to use of digital information and advanced technology to enhance scholarship, intellectual productivity, and public life;
  • interest in the civic responsibilities of information professionals and a commitment to democratic values;
  • positive and creative approach to overcoming personal, technological, and bureaucratic challenges; and
  • humor, vision, humanity, and imagination.

Two fellowships will be awarded in 2014:

  • One to a doctoral/PhD student in the amount of $5,000 per year, to be awarded two consecutive years
  • One to a master’s student in the amount of $2,500 per year, to be awarded two consecutive years

The Award’s Impact: Updates from Fellowship Recipients

Jessica A. Koepfler received the Peters fellowship in 2010 and she completed her degree in 2014. She now serves as director of design research and strategy at Intuitive Company, a user-centered research, design, and development firm. On winning the award, Jes wrote, “The fellowship provided a source of funding that allowed me to commit myself to a ‘fringe’ topic like the study of values within the context of homelessness. Without the funding, I would have been beholden to a topic that my advisor was funded in rather than getting to be creative and do something I was truly passionate about. The award is also quite prestigious and put a spotlight on me early on in my program, which had the snowball effect of people noticing me. This very likely impacted the number of great opportunities that came my way throughout my program and academic career. I am truly grateful for the fellowship and credit it with being very instrumental to me particularly in those early years of my PhD program.”

“The characteristics that have often been associated with Paul—positivity, creativity, humor, vision, humanity, and imagination—are, I hope, dimensions that I also bring to the work that I do as a scholar and as a teacher,” wrote Phillip M. Edwards, 2004 fellowship recipient and currently at the Center for Teaching Excellence at Virginia Commonwealth University. Edwards credits the award with helping to broaden his professional horizons as a student: “Because of this funding, I was able to travel to conferences which I would have otherwise been unable to attend, and the interactions I had among other researchers and practitioners at these gatherings have been more valuable than I could have ever imagined.” 

Christopher (Cal) Lee, who received the first Peters Fellowship, is currently associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches classes for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as continuing professional education workshops, in a variety of subjects, including archival administration, records management, digital curation, understanding information technology for managing digital collections, and the construction of digital repository rules.

Apply by June 24, 2014

Links to the applications and more information about the application process are available on the Paul Evan Peters Fellowship website.


The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is a coalition of some 220 institutions dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. The Coalition, which is sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE, is headquartered in Washington DC. More information about CNI is at http://www.cni.org/.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

A nonprofit association with more than 2,200 members, EDUCAUSE actively engages with colleges, universities, corporations, foundations, government, and other nonprofit organizations to further the mission of higher education through the use of information technology.  For more information, visit http://educause.edu/.

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