Dr. Matthew Griffis, Assistant Professor at SLIS, was awarded a 2015 OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant. Griffis’ project, entitled “The Place of the Librarian in the Deskless Library: Do Roaming Reference Models Create a More User-Centered Library?”, will investigate the spatial relationships between library users and roaming (also known as “roving”) reference librarians in public and academic libraries. An extension of his PhD dissertation, Griffis’ new study explores whether roaming reference service models create a more “user-centered” library than traditional, stationary reference models.

Griffis will be visiting libraries this spring and summer to collect data and will be presenting his findings at the ALISE Annual Conference in Boston, MA in January, 2016. Griffis joined the faculty at SLIS as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August of 2013. His research interests include the library as place, library buildings as social architecture, public libraries as community spaces, the history of public libraries and librarianship, and Carnegie libraries. His teaching interests include library foundations, archives and archival science, library history, research methods, and information technology in libraries.