Cheng Zhen, Director of the Information Centre at the National Library of China, has been selected as this year's winner of the FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Librarians.

Mr. Cheng heads the unit of the National Library that provides legal reference to the Chinese Government, National People's Congress, State Council and its agencies, as well as the general public. He is currently working on a project with the Washington University School of Law to compare Chinese and U.S. government publications and information dissemination. An active participant in legal information conferences in China, he is involved in the development of a Chinese Association of Law Libraries.

At AALL, Mr. Cheng will give a presentation to the FCIL-SIS on how the Chinese government information is currently published and disseminated, and the implication of recent regulation on freedom of government information in China.

This grant was made possible through the generosity of Ellen Schaffer, other FCIL librarians, and friends of the law librarian community, and has brought a librarian from outside the United States to the AALL Annual Meeting since 2001.

The selection committee (Barbara Bean, Thomas Kimbrough and Mary Sexton) considered an unusually strong pool of 16 applicants, from 11 countries.