The fall issue of BiblioNotes is now available! In this riveting issue:
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
This is Albert Goldbarth’s year. The only two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, this year the Poetry Foundation bestowed upon him the Mark Twain Poetry Award; his latest collection, The Kitchen Sink (Graywolf, 2007), was named a Kansas Notable Book; and the Goldbarth Papers, after over two years of processing, were made available to researchers.
The Albert Goldbarth Papers consist of 28 linear feet of manuscripts, cover art samples, publicity material, notebooks, research packets, ephemeral material, and correspondence and writings by others. The finding aid can be accessed at http://specialcollections.wichita.edu/collections/ms/2007-02/2007-2-a.html.
Goldbarth has been teaching writing at Wichita State for over 20 years. I’m not going to try to describe his style, but I do love this opening sentence from James Sallis’s review of Goldbarth’s 2003 novel, Pieces of Payne: “Reading Albert Goldbarth is like watching the valedictory address at a university created by a merger between Clown College and MIT.” (Review of Contemporary Fiction (2003) 23:3, 132.)
Interested researchers should contact Special Collections and University Archives, Wichita State University, 316.978.3590 or specialcollections@wichita.edu.
The Fall 2008 edition of BiblioNotes is now available online, and hard copies are in the mail. In this issue:
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.”
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. (more…)
Greetings All–
Exciting news from ALA Midwinter! The Publications Committee’s own Linda Stein presented the reports of the blog and wiki task forces to the LES Executive Committee, and we passed with flying colors! We have approval to further develop these two tools for communication among LES members. Be on the lookout for more information from Publications on how you can contribute to the blog and share your insights with your colleagues.
Read the LES Blog Task Force Report
Greetings fellow LES’ers, and welcome to the brand-new LES Blog! We hope that this blog will provide a forum for timely information sharing among LES members. Unlike email messages, which are easily deleted or misplaced, items on the LES blog will be archived for future reference and easily accessible to all.
To this end, here are some of the things we have in mind for future blog entries:
Through the “Comments” feature, we also hope that the blog can provide a space for lively interaction between LES members. Feel free to use the Comments section to suggest topics for future postings, or ideas on how you’d like to see the blog developed. What would make it most useful to you? What kind of content and discussion would make you most likely to visit regularly? We hope to hear from you!