LES Blog

Back in July we happily announced the publication of a new book from ACRL, Teaching Literary Research: Challenges in a Changing Environment, edited and featuring contributions by a number of LES members. Well, my library finally received a copy and I’m very impressed so far. So I’m giving myself the assignment of reading my way through the whole book, and I plan to write posts about each of the chapters as I do so. I’ll tag them “Teaching Literary Research” and include the cover image so they will be easy to locate.

The blog team is always looking for volunteers, so if you’d like to contribute by reading and writing about a chapter just let me know via the comments box. If you volunteer early you can have your pick of chapters!

I’m looking forward to diving into the book. Congratulations again to the LES members on this achievement!

Brand-new from ACRL publications is Teaching Literary Research: Challenges in a Changing Environment, edited by LES’s own Steven Harris (University of New Mexico) and Kathleen Johnson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). This book also features essays by LES members Laura Taddeo (University at Buffalo, see the previous post), Dan Coffey (Iowa State) and Meg Meiman (Delaware).

Teaching Literary Research is “a collection of essays that explores the relationship between information literacy and literary research. English professors and librarians provide perspectives on this relationship through presentations of best practices in teaching students from first year undergraduate through graduate levels.”

This promises to be a valuable resource for all of us who do library instruction. Congratulations to everyone involved in this great project!

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

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.

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

I had my first library instruction session of the semester last week, and it was a doozy! The 400-level English course was called “Victorian Bodies,” and the focus is the ways in which discoveries in science (and pseudo-science) influenced Victorian literature. The students’ assignment was to find some articles from Victorian periodicals on things like phrenology, mesmerism, evolution, etc. Let me tell you, undergraduates are NOT enthused when you tell them they may have to become familiar with that Victorian-era beast, the microfiche reader.

I did come across a handful of electronic resources that proved useful for this class’s assignments. The databases 19^th Century Masterfile (Paratext) and Periodicals Index Online (Chadwyck-Healey) are terrific resources for finding citations, and it’s relatively easy to copy and paste periodical titles over to WorldCat or your library’s catalog to find holdings. Periodicals Index Online also includes some links to JSTOR, so you may get lucky enough to find full-text that way.

A couple of excellent (free) web resources: the Internet Library of Early Journals has digital images for six periodicals, including the Annual Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Science in the Nineteenth Century Periodical has no full-text, but provides excellent indexing for sixteen 19^th-century titles.

And taking the quick-and-easy route (which undergraduate students would never do), there’s the Undergraduate Victorian Studies Online Teaching Anthology at the University of Minnesota Libraries, which has done everyone the favor of scanning some Victorian-era articles in three topic areas: “Condition of Women,” “Empire,” and (lucky for my students) “Science, Evolution and Eugenics.”

If you’re interested in the other resources (electronic, print and microform) I identified from my library, here’s the course web page.

How ‘bout you? Had any difficult instruction sessions lately that led you to interesting resources? You can leave a comment, or send your story to a Publications Committee member to be posted to the blog.