LES Blog

Attention all LES members, new and old.  Please plan to join us for the New Members Discussion Group on July 12th from 3:30 to 5:30 in the Palmer House State Ballroom for engaging discussion and genial conversation about our shared work as literature bibliographers.  Are you new to the profession? Bring your questions and queries. Are you a seasoned veteran? Come share your wisdom, tried and true strategies, or, maybe even learn something new. At the New Members Discussion Group we talk about what you want to talk about. Coping with change at your library? Managing a controversial collection? Just been asked to become the new Digital Humanities Librarian?  Together we can share what we know to address these challenges.  Come share your questions and experience.

If you have suggestions for topics you would like us to be sure and discuss, please drop a note to either Frank or Arianne, and we will weave them into the conversation.

And if you can’t make it to Annual, please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments of this post.See you there!

Co-chairs,  Frank Gravier (gravier@ucsc.edu) & Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (hartsea@muohio.edu)

Okay this might be a bit of shameless self-promotion, but I’ll be co-leading (along with Eric Resnis, Information Literacy Librarian at Miami University) an ACRL Instruction Section Current Issues Discussion Group at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.  Here’s a brief description:

The purpose of this discussion session is to begin a dialogue about discovery-based learning techniques and how they might be utilized in information literacy instruction.  Attendees will explore the tenets of discovery-based learning, their relationship with active learning techniques, and the pro/cons of using these methods. The conveners will use their experiences with a university-wide learning community to springboard conversations on incorporating new pedagogical concepts in the classroom.

Date, Time Location: 7/12/2009 Sunday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Hotel: Sheraton Chicago; Room: Sheraton BR I

I realize that this is at the same time as the LES Collections Discussion Group, so many of you won’t be able to come.  I’d love to hear your thoughts though on this topic since I know many of us have instruction as part of our job duties.  In fact here are two of the questions we’re going to ask:

1.      How do you incorporate active learning into a 50-minute one-shot deal?  How do we deal with the constraints of the method and still teach effectively?

2.      Does your university/college have any campus-wide initiatives to engage students in learning?  Has the library been involved with these initiatives?

Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.  Also, if you’d like the handouts from the session, please send me an e-mail at hartsea@muohio.edu.  I’ll send out handouts to those interested right after the conference.

See you all in Chicago!

Arianne Hartsell-Gundy

LES Member and 2008-2009 LES Chair Karen Munro was chosen for the “Member of the Week” section of the ACRL Web site last week:

http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/2009/05/18/member-of-the-week-karen-munro/

Interestingly, they don’t mention her current responsibilities with LES, but the write-up includes a nice picture and short Q&A with Karen. Where will Karen go from here? No one knows for sure, but read those TV listings closely when the networks announce their fall schedules…

Our literature librarian colleague from Yale, Todd Gilman, has written an excellent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the value of library instruction. Check it out: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/05/2009051401c.htm.

Mr. Gilman makes the point that, “While college students may be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And there’s a huge difference between the two.”

Well said. If I could find a non-obnoxious way to do it, I’d send this to all of the faculty at my institution.

I just had an article published in the Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarinship (E-JASL) on a faculty author series that has been in operation at my library since 2005. Started by the humanities librarians to provide a forum for research by Arts & Humanities faculty members, the series, Speaking of Books… Conversations with Campus Authors, has grown to include speakers from many different departments. Most importantly, it’s provided an opportunity to promote the library as a place of learning, not just a warehouse for books and computers.

I don’t want to rehash the details since you can read them in the article, but I was interested to know if others have done similar events/series at their libraries. If so, what was your experience? Did you have difficulty finding faculty participants or attracting audiences? Did you need to convince your administration to sponsor such events? If so, how did you do it? What has been the response from your faculty and from the campus?

Thought LES members would be interested in this recent piece from the New York Times, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth” (Feb. 24, 2009). This is hardly anything new, though perhaps the level of anxiety that humanities folks are feeling is a bit higher than usual these days.

This is a tale to contradict the notion that students will not use a resource that isn’t available “on the computer.”

My institution can’t afford EEBO, but a year or so ago, when another university in the state was able to acquire it, they put their microfilm set of Early English Books up for grabs. It took 15 seconds after the e-mail offer came through for me to stake my claim. It then took me months to convince my administration to let me have this 3,434-reel resource for the cost of a one-day U-Haul rental. I surveyed my liaison faculty — twice. I found free cabinets. I negotiated for space to put those cabinets. I put in a formal proposal explaining the value of the collection, even though I would have thought it self-evident. I had to check every detail about access, labeling, and cataloging with the donating institution, and I even had to submit the number, dimensions, and weight of the book boxes in which the film would be transported. Hoop after hoop after flaming hoop.

I’m happy to report that the set is being used. Some users have no particular research need for EEB but are fascinated by the content. Others are finding it crucial to their work, such as the philosophy professor whose publisher required him to cite from a particular edition of a work of Locke’s, or the MA student who is doing a thesis around a Centlivre play that has never been republished. But to raise interest even more, I decided to make EEB February’s “Resource of the Month.”

This was the first time in my roughly 30 months at Wichita State that the RotM was not an electronic resource. Attendance was surprisingly good and included undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. Since there is no microfilm reader in the library’s classroom, I had participants gather in a reading room near the film cabinets. There I told them all about Messrs. Pollard and Redgrave and Mr. Wing and gave a brief history of the UMI filming project. I showed them the indexes to provide a sense of the scope of the collection and the diverse nature of the libraries that house the originals, even though not everything indexed was filmed.

Since the documents are all in our OPAC, I happily did not have to show my audience how to use the indexes. But I did draw their attention to the broad scope of available content by passing around pages I’d printed on the subjects of religion, politics, travel, literature, cryogenics (!), and medicine. (That last one was a prescription to cure coughing in children that involved washing worms in wine before drying and crushing them into an ingestible powder.) Then we did a few catalog searches, selected a document, located the proper reel, and threaded up the ol’ microfilm reader.

And everyone agreed that the process was not so hard, and certainly worth the trouble. And that the serendipitous discovery of great stuff on the way to the destination document was pretty cool.

For anyone interested, here’s a link to the handout I prepared for the class and beyond: http://library.wichita.edu/reference/images/PDF/EarlyEnglishBooks.pdf

A post-by-proxy for our colleague Vince G. at Concordia.

Concordia University in Montreal, Canada has blocked access to Facebook on campus,but it is available on the wireless network. Ostensibly, this was done to limit traffic on the university network, but now that Facebook has become a professional and academic communication tool, as well as an essential tool for students, I believe this prohibition is unwarranted. I am wondering if this practice is widespread (or not). Do you know of any other universities that have blocked campus access to Facebook?

I asked Barbara Chen, the editor of the MLA International Bibliography,  to comment on OCLC’s plan to include the Bibliography’s records in WorldCat Local.  Here is her reply:

When OCLC first approached us with an idea to include the Bibliography in WorldCat Local, I realized that this would be a good opportunity for the MLA to experiment. Both organizations were trying to think in new, creative ways to encourage findability for a range of users. We understand that we may be able to reach more students and scholars by integrating our database into a simple search platform than we would as a standalone file. We are expecting OCLC will remind users where they are finding the most relevant material on language and literature by including our name in their search results screen. Once users recognize the wealth of information the Bibliography holds on their topics of interest, they will want to come back and search us again. It doesn’t matter if the search is performed through WorldCat or in the Bibliography. Users will have an option to either type in a few keywords in a multi-file search or to set their sights on a specific database, browsing indexes and thesauri or even our Directory of Periodicals.

WorldCat Local will be a conduit to information but it will not be the final resting place for data files. Libraries will still need to subscribe through their vendor of choice to be able to access records.

 I understand that WorldCat Local is a work in progress with expected date of introduction for this part of the operation in July 2009. Even though I am not directly involved in its implementation, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the system. My goal is to improve the Bibliography to the best of my ability, and I can only do that in communication with others.

Sincerely,
Barbara Chen
Director of Bibliographic Information Services
and Editor, MLA International Bibliography
26 Broadway
New York, NY 10004-1789
tel. (646) 576-5076
fax (646) 835-4021
email bchen@mla.org

Thanks to LES member Jaena Hollingsworth, we now have our very own Facebook group. Join today at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=63799751170. The group offers another forum to meet and interact with your fellow LES members, so stop over and start a discussion topic, upload photos of past LES events, or just write something witty on the wall.