Brian E. Coutts Named Winner of RUSA’s Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award

Brian E. Coutts, Professor and Head of the Department of Library Public Services at Western Kentucky University, was selected as the 2017 winner of the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award, RUSA’s highest honor, for his distinguished contributions to reference services and the library profession. Sponsored by Credo Reference, the award consists of $5,000 and a citation, which will be presented to Coutts at the RUSA Achievement Awards Ceremony at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

For a career spanning over thirty years, Coutts has established a prominent legacy of reviewing and authoring reference books, essays, and articles, including the annually selected, widely-read and highly valued, “Best Reference” in Library Journal.

Coutts’s research interests include reference publishing for print and web resources, history reference sources, travel on the web, the history of Spanish Louisiana, the history of Belize, and much more. A complete list of published and forthcoming works can be found at http://people.wku.edu/brian.coutts/.

The Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award selection committee unanimously selected Coutts “for his enthusiastic advocacy for reference, his passion for librarianship, and his superb writing and reviewing of reference sources.”

The Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award selection committee includes: Cheryl M. LaGuardia (Chair), M. Kathleen Kern, Rosemary Long Meszaros, Teresa Portilla Omidsalar, and Joseph A. Thompson Jr.

The RUSA Achievement Awards Ceremony and Reception will be held from 5-6:30 p.m. Sunday, June 25 at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. All conference attendees are invited to the event. Additional event details will be available on the conference website in April.