LES Blog

This post isn’t directly related to the business of being an English literature liaison, though perhaps it is a condition found more often among that breed than in other varieties of academic librarian.

I have a complaint, in the sense of the word defined in the Concise OED 11th Edition, revised, online:  “an illness or medical condition, especially a minor one.”  It is this:  even though I am a tenure-track member of the faculty of my university, I just don’t feel like One of Them. One of the departmental professors, I mean. And a good deal of this second-class citizen complex has to do with the very nature of my job.  We librarians are in the service profession, whether we work in a corporate, law, public, or any other kind of library. And in a university, one of the groups of people we serve are our faculty colleagues. They research, we research. They teach, we teach. They serve on university-wide committees, and so do we. But we’re also standing at the ready to help these colleagues with citation searches, fill their materials requests, anticipate their needs, go to bat to protect their ever-shrinking share of the acquisitions budget.  Does Assistant Professor of American Literature X do that for Assistant Professor of British Literature Y?  I don’t think so.

Another factor contributing to my professional insecurity is the fact that the folks who dole out money in my institution use credit-hour production as their primary means to assess value.  The library doesn’t produce credit hours.  Therefore, we have no measurable value.  I’ve heard it said that the library doesn’t have students, but no student graduates without the library.  Even if that sentiment exists at the purse-string level, how does that translate into money?  Right now the reference staff in my library is down by half, and with budget cuts, we have no expectation of being able to fill the vacancies in the next year or possibly two.  Faculty lines are in danger of disappearing forever.  When teaching departments can’t hire the faculty they need, courses don’t get taught.  Or, they get taught by adjuncts and graduate assistants, which is often unfair to students and instructors alike.  When the library has open faculty vacancies, the desk remains staffed, the BIs are still given, the collecting still gets done.  The publishing expectations don’t go away and neither do the service obligations.  We just cope.

I’m not complaining (in the sense of the word meaning to “express dissatisfaction or annoyance”).  I love my job.  I think I was meant to be an academic librarian – either that, or the decades I spent pursuing various university degrees made me unfit for any other life.  I feel appreciated and, from time to time, respected by the teaching faculty.  I like that my days are all different from one another.  It makes me feel warm and fuzzy when, as one of my Philosophy faculty members recently told my Dean, I “saved his butt.”  I adore the students, for the most part.  I even get a fair chunk of travel money to attend ALA, ACRL, and other conferences (partly because there are so few of us to claim the funds).

Why should English literature librarians be more susceptible to this malaise than other subject specialists?  According to Thea Lindquist and LES’s own Todd Gilman, academic librarians with PhDs in English Language and Literature rank second only to those with PhDs in History.  (“Academic/Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates:  Data and Trends 1965–2006.”  portal: Libraries and the Academy, 8:1 (2008), pp. 31–52.)  As Lindquist and Gilman also discovered, most of us, myself included, earned our MLS after earning our advanced subject degree.  When I started down that oh-so-long road to becoming Dr. Golomb, I intended to spend my days enlightening students and making a name for myself as an expert in contemporary British drama, not supporting others in those pursuits.

I’m glad my career shook out as it did.  Librarians are cool people, downright fun, and we keep our teeth out of each other’s backs.  I just wish I felt a little more entitled when I address my departmental faculty as “colleagues.”

The subject of librarians holding “office hours” in their academic departments seems to be a popular one of late. Over at ACRLog, Stephanie Willen Brown discusses her experience this past semester, and concludes: “The office hour was definitely a success - especially combining the actual work with the PR value of being in the building on a regular basis.” The folks at the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s “Wired Campus” column picked up on Stephanie’s post; both posts have received numerous comments from librarians around the Web who have tried this strategy for reaching out to faculty and grad students. And LES’s own Mary Claire Vandenburg writes in the latest issue of BiblioNotes [PDF, the article is on page 6] about simultaneously starting a new “librarian in residence” service while learning her way around a new discipline (Classics). Mary Claire found that her “complex email reference questions from students have gone up as a result of office hours, as have special requests from faculty for hard to find items.”

What has been your experience with office hours at your institution? Have you tried them and been successful? Tried them and been unsuccessful? Wanted to try them but couldn’t get support from your administration or department? This topic is on the agenda for the LES Reference Discussion Group at ALA Annual in Anaheim. This will be a great opportunity to share your experiences with your colleagues, or to ask questions about getting started with your own “Librarian in Residence” program. If you can’t attend, feel free to leave a comment or question here; we’ll use the blog to report back about any good ideas shared during the session!

LES Reference Discussion Group: Sunday, 6/29, 10:30a-12:00p, Grand Hyatt Regency, Orange County Salon III

What is your most recent publication?

The book is titled Literary Research and the Era of American Nationalism and Romanticism, part of the Scarecrow Press Literary Research Series. It was published in December of 2007.

How did you decide to write it?

For this series, there was a post to the LES list looking for people who were interested in working on the books. I responded for more information on the series. After looking at the first book in the series and corresponding with the editors, I decided to throw my name in for consideration.

What was the process that you went through?

For this book, I had to write a short proposal that summarized the anticipated content and organizational scheme of the book. I then had to submit a chapter outline that included representative examples of the types of resources that would be covered in each chapter. Once those submissions were approved, I received a contract, read it, signed it, and returned it to the publisher. Then, I started working on the book.

I had to do a lot of research before writing the book, and I was surprised at how much I learned during this process. It was fun to explore older resources that I sometimes tend to overlook in my own research and reference interactions. There are many useful and interesting bibliographies that were compiled decades ago. These types of resources allow researchers to uncover information about authors and works that may have faded in scholarly appeal over the years.

I followed the pattern established by Jenny Bowers and Peggy Keeran in their volume. They did an excellent job of speaking eloquently yet clearly to a wide variety of potential users. I tried to create a readable narrative that would connect the annotations in a logical and readable manner. Anyone who has ever created a pathfinder or research guide for a class can understand the challenge in writing annotations that don’t all sound the same. I forcibly expanded my vocabulary in order to more efficiently vary the discussion of resources.

Talk a bit about the publication.

The book and the series as a whole represent a much needed tool in literary research. The book is designed to be read as a cohesive whole, but it can also be read in parts. If someone only needs information of microform collections, for example, he or she can go to that one chapter for help.

My book deals with the literary output of the United States from nationhood to the threshold of the Civil War. Because literary scholarship increasingly expands its purview into cultural and historical studies, this book includes many resources that reach beyond traditional literary research tools—borrowing liberally from the standard tools belonging to other areas of scholarship.

What did you like most about the process/project?

I really felt that I was learning a great deal as I researched this book. As a result, I felt pretty confident in believing that the book would be a strong addition to the milieu of literary research.

What did you like least?

I never like to read my own work. Receiving the galleys was very exciting…having to read over 200 pages of my prose was a daunting task.

What suggestions would you have for LES members who would like to become involved in research and publication?

There is a great list of calls for papers on the University of Pennsylvania English Department’s web page at: http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/. I’ve ended up at many conferences after submitting papers to calls on this list. I’ve also written some encyclopedia articles for calls on this list. It was once am email service, but now you actually have to go to the page and look through the list. It’s also an archive, so you have to remember to check the dates for calls.

Why is something like this important to you?

I like research and writing, and I’m lucky to be at a university that supports those activities for its librarians. I like the sense that I am contributing to both literary research and to librarianship.

The Publications Committee is happy to announce a new feature on the LES Blog: Conversations with LES Authors.

By featuring these authors and their publications, we hope not only to bring attention to these informative works of scholarship, but also to help encourage others who may be interested in publishing to seek out opportunities and to learn from the experiences, successes, and mistakes of other section members.

Authors will start the conversation with a brief introduction to themselves and their work.  Afterward, members are encouraged to post comments and questions for the author by using the “comments” feature of the blog.  The authors will check back weekly and respond.

Our first author will be Angela Courtney. Angela is the Bibliographer for English Literatures, Film, Theatre, and Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington.  Before moving to Indiana, she was a senior reference librarian and the university archivist at Fairfield University.  Her career in libraries started at Auburn University in 1996 where she was the librarian for English literature.

Check back soon for our conversation with Angela.

OK, so I’ve been asked to be a panelist for a session on “Marketing Online Databases” at the MDK12 Digital Library Summit, to be held in mid-June. I will be representing the academic librarian’s viewpoint, and will be joined by a public librarian and a school library district administrator.  I agreed to be a panelist because the commitment is minimal (60 minutes total, so probably 15 minutes of talking plus time for questions) but I have to admit I haven’t thought much about how (if at all) we market our online databases to our customers.

At our university, marketing of the libraries and their resources is done at a more general level; e.g., giving out highlighters and Post-Its with the homepage on them at orientations, etc. I think most of our resource-specific “marketing” is done through our library instruction programs. We rely on the history subject specialist to inform the history students about Historical Abstracts, the English subject specialist to talk about MLA and ABELL, the art librarians to alert the art students to ArtSTOR and Art Abstracts. If a database doesn’t get used, I think most of my colleagues are happy to cancel it and look for something that is worth the cost, rather than spend time and energy marketing a database that no one wants to use.

One idea is to use cross-training of librarians to make sure that patrons will be connected with the most useful databases for their topics. This is especially important in institutions where you have a wide range of subject areas and a large number of electronic resources available. You could use a series of simple”brown bag” workshops (e.g., “Top 5 Databases in the Humanities,” “Digital Resources in the Life Sciences,” etc.) in which librarians train one another on the best databases to use for their subject areas.

What other ideas do you have? What are your experiences with marketing your databases to students and faculty? Do you spend much time thinking about how to get more of your patrons to use MLA, World Shakespeare Bibliography, or other electronic resources?

Last week, three of my colleagues and I presented a workshop as part of a conference held here at UMD called Digital Diasporas: Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies. We were invited by conference organizers in the English Department to present a three-hour workshop on “Navigating Digital Resources in African American/African Diaspora Studies,” which we divided up into three main sections: Research Strategies (general info on how to find books, articles and primary documents, databases and web searching tools); Professional Resources (universities, research centers and libraries, professional organizations, and teaching resources); and Digital Resources on Selected Topics. For this last section we chose four representative subject areas: Slavery, The Harlem Renaissance, Women Writers of the Diaspora, and Films and Filmmakers of the Diaspora. The webpage we created is located here: http://www.lib.umd.edu/MCK/Diaspora/index.html.

While resources for Slavery (and, for some extent, the Harlem Renaissance) were plentiful, I have to admit being rather frustrated in my search for high-quality web resources on Women Writers of the Diaspora. There’s the Schomburg’s African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, of course, and Voices from the Gaps, and a handful of resources like the Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress. But beyond that, pickings were mighty slim.

So what are your favorites? Do you have any recommendations for web sites that we missed in this subject area? (Or, for that matter, in any of the other subject areas–slavery, Harlem Renaissance, films & filmmakers?) Maybe you have a project at your institution that would fit with the theme of the workshop? Take a look at the workshop web site and leave your comments on the blog–we’ll happily add your site or project!

It has arrived from Amazon (on pre-order since February)! The fifth edition of James Harner’s Literary Research Guide. Woot! I should have shot an unboxing video! Sure, get one for your reference collection, but you gotta have one sitting on your desk too! Essentially brain food for librarians of literatures in English (LLE).

A sad commentary on the state of humanities scholarship in academia:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/04/2008040401c/careers.html

We often think of the adjunct faculty situation as an unfortunate by-product of university funding.  Thinking of it as intentional exploitation starts to raise the blood pressure.

Well, aside from the additoinal reading below, that’s the end of my attempt to radicalize you.

Reading:

Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works: higher education and the low-wage nation. New York: New York University Press.

Chomsky, N. (1997). The Cold War & the university: toward an intellectual history of the postwar years. New York: New Press.

Soley, L. C. (1995). Leasing the ivory tower: the corporate takeover of academia. Boston, MA: South End Press.

I just came back from a lunch-time session sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), a research unit housed right here in the main library at UMD, about their latest NEH-funded undertaking, the Shakespeare’s Quartos Project. (You can view the announcement for the talk, or read the University’s official news release.) It’s a pretty exciting pilot grant to “create a technical proof of concept ‘working model’ for the project by digitizing all 32 pre-1641 versions of Hamlet held by [six] participating libraries.” The eventual goal is to create a “freely-accessible, high resolution digital interactive archive of William Shakespeare’s pre-1641 quartos.” Scanning for the project has been under way for a while now, and you may already be familiar with the British Library’s Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto, which currently has the BL’s 93 copies of pre-1642 quartos, and which will eventually house the completed project.

The talk was part of MITH’s “Digital Dialogues” series, weekly talks on all sorts of interesting electronic issues and projects, usually attended by a mix of arts & humanities and computer science faculty and students. I attend when my schedule allows, but usually I’m the only librarian in the room. All of which got me to wondering… How much do you (as a humanities librarian) pay attention to and/or participate in developments in the realm of “Digital Humanities” (sometimes aka “Humanities Computing”)? If you do pay attention or participate, what are your reasons for doing so? What kinds of things interest you, and how do you keep up?

For now, my primary motivation is to learn about cool projects, like Shakespeare’s Quartos, (or the Dickinson Electronic Archives or the Walt Whitman Archive), that will help me to help my students and faculty. I think that down the road I’d be interested in participating in some sort of digital humanities project or scholarship, but I have yet to figure out how that would occur or what it would look like. As for keeping up, I feel a bit spoiled having a vibrant organization like MITH in-house, as I know there will always be interesting things going on right under my nose. But I’ve also recently become a fan of the blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, which is a great way to eavesdrop on some of the conversations going on in the field and learn about new resources. (Their three-part entry on Digital Humanities in 2007 offers an excellent overview of recent developments.)

I think the realm of Digital Humanities offers a natural venue for collaboration between librarians, researchers and computer scientists, and the best projects combine the technical proficiency, subject knowledge, and information organization skills and end-user focus of all three groups.

Last week I was flying to a state consortial meeting—a puddle-jumper kind of flight—no more than an hour or so. Perfect time to break out the new Kindle and do some reading. One of the books I bought for the Kindle was Ulysses. I got it for next to nothing. How is it I managed to get two degrees in English, studying primarily the authors of high modernism, without having read Ulysses? A puzzle indeed. But the Kindle to the rescue. Read the rest of this entry »