LES Blog

This fall, our English Department split into two departments: English literature and Writing & Composition Studies. In addition to being the home for the required introductory English courses, the WSC Department has its own faculty (cannibalized from the former English Department), and it  will have majors and and an MA program. It also hosts the university writing center.  My problem is that there are lots of sources for resources in literature, but I’m having trouble finding sources for resources in writing, composition and rhetoric. Does anyone know of any useful blogs or listservs, in this area, similar perhaps to LES for literature?

I very much appreciate any input you have.

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).

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…)

I’ve been thumbing my way through a couple different volumes in the Oxford “Very Short Introduction” series. (I only thumb these days, no actual reading!) They are quite attractive and useful works. We’ve bought quite a few volumes in the series. In fact, our head of reference has been keen for us to get the entire series. I’m not sure they warrant that much devotion, but it does strike me that they are a pretty good resource for librarians to learn more about literary genres and critical practices that they may not be familiar with. Brief, [fairly] authoritative, entertaining. Increase your reference skills and your collection development acumen at the same time. I am also a fan of Routledge’s “New Critical Idiom” series. I am less familiar with “Edinburgh Critical Guides,” but they look pretty good too.

Oxford Very Short Introductions

Routledge New Critical Idiom

Edinburgh Critical Guides

By hook or by crook, I convinced the other humanities selectors at Hopkins that purchasing access to ProQuest’s C19 Index was an imperative. And it was. The academic strength of Hopkins’ English faculty lies in the period from the 1750 to 1920, although that is shifting with a few new hires, and I am fielding an increasing array of questions from graduate students interested in online resources from the long nineteenth century.

C19 Index certainly does that job and does it well. ProQuest calls C19 “the bibliographic spine of 19th century research, providing integrated access to the most important finding aids for books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers and archives.” Users of C19 Index can simultaneously query the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, and The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, and others. Certainly, my patrons are appreciating improved access to these resources, in one, easy to navigate location. And they no longer have to use that notoriously clunky Nineteenth Century Masterfile.

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