#26 -- Fall 1995
Biblio-Notes (ISSN 1076-8947) is published twice a year by the English and American Literature Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. Paper subscriptions are free to members of the section.
Editor: Scott Stebelman, Gelman Library, George Washington University, 2130 H Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20052; telephone 202-994-6049; SCOTTLIB@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU
Copyright © 1995 by the American Library Association.
News from the Chair
This has been an exciting and busy year for EALS in our first full year as a section within ACRL. The transition from section to discussion group has involved many bureaucratic details; as we warned ourselves from the beginning, things are a lot more complicated than in the old days of EALDG. But now most of these initial details are behind us, and we have been turning our attention more and more to the real business of EALS. Our new bylaws state that this business is "to represent members of ACRL who specialize or are otherwise professionally involved in the selection, acquisition, organization, and use of information resources related to literatures in English, to enhance those members' professional development, and to promote the improvement of library resources in support of study and research activities in this field." When we translate those words from "Bylawese" to plain English, it appears that we have set ourselves some ambitious tasks.
What has really impressed me is the number of people who have devoted time and energy to making this possible. It says a lot for our membership that we were able to find a full complement of members for all of our new committees, each of which has been working hard to help our fledgling section meet the needs of its members.
Our section bylaws were approved by the ACRL Board in Chicago, and will appear on the spring 1996 ALA ballot. I urge everyone to vote in that election. (Dare I urge you to vote "yes" on the bylaws?)
Our Chicago program, "The Humanist and the Librarian: Creating a Collaborative Partnership," was very well attended and received praise from many quarters. ACRL leadership was particularly impressed that we had a head start on this year's presidential theme, "Every librarian a leader"! In keeping with the New York venue, next year's EALS program will concentrate on the theater. We have two co-sponsors for this program: the ACRL Arts Section and the Theatre Library Association. Unlike many co-sponsorships which are in name only, all three groups are contributing actively to the program, and ARTS and TLA have representatives on our Program Planning Committee, under the able leadership of Susan Peters. TLA's Richard Buck has been instrumental in rounding up exciting speakers and in arranging for the use of facilities at Lincoln Center. Our program, entitled "Beyond the Stage Door," will focus on how creative people in the theater make use of library resources. Speakers will include playwright Edward Albee, actress Marian Seldes, and a stage designer and a costume designer to be announced. Be sure to set aside Monday night in New York for this dramatic event! Even though they did not exist "officially" until after this year's conference, our four new committees plunged gleefully into their work in Chicago. The Publications Committee is exploring a number of projects, including a sequel to EALDG's 1987 collection, English and American Literature: Strategies for Collection Development. The Membership Committee is looking at ways to increase our number of members, at 251 already quite impressive for such a young section. In particular, they will be focusing on diversity within our membership. These two committees will also be collaborating to produce a membership brochure. And a spin-off group from the Publications Committee is exploring the possibility of an EALS site on the World Wide Web.
The Planning Committee is starting to draft a strategic plan in order to set some priorities among the many activities and goals our members have proposed for our section, and will also help to write some of the required reports for ALA and ACRL. Lately, the Executive Committee has been discussing the possibility of some sort of corporate sponsorship, and what uses the section might make of such funds if they were forthcoming.
Amidst the flurry of new activities and sometimes overwhelming bureaucratic details, we want to be sure that we maintain those activities for which our members have most valued EALS and its predecessor, the English and American Literature Discussion Group. Biblio-Notes continues to flourish under Scott Stebelman's editorship. And of course, true to our origins as a discussion group, we will continue to make room for open-forum discussions at our midwinter and annual meetings. This winter in San Antonio we will try a new twist on our group discussions. Richard Fyffe will lead the first in a series of informal discussions that might be entitled "Everything Librarians Ever Wanted to Know About Current Critical Schools But Were Afraid to Ask." Richard will start us off with a forum on the philosophy of Richard Rorty and its connection with current critical theory.
A hundred thanks to all of you who have helped get our group rolling--and a special note of thanks to our past-chair Michaelyn Burnette, who so ably saw us through our first year as a section. I hope to see many of you in San Antonio.
Timothy Shipe
University of Iowa
Minutes from the General Meeting
The EALS program at ALA 1995 was entitled: "The Humanist and the Librarian: Creating a Collaborative Partnership," chaired by Michaelyn Burnette (Univ. of California, Berkeley, and EALS Chair). The three panelists were Stephen Wiberley, associate professor and bibliographer, University of Illinois-Chicago; J. Paul Hunter, Chester D. Tripp Professor in Humanities, University of Chicago; and Marcia Pankake, professor and bibliographer, University of Minnesota.
Stephen Wiberley began the session with his talk, entitled "Types of Humanities Scholarship: Opportunities for Collaboration between Librarians and Humanists," which was based upon his research on the typology of humanities research. He described five different types of humanities research, and the different types of library use common to humanists in these different categories, and therefore the opportunities presented by the different kinds of humanities research for collaboration.
1) Bibliography. Since bibliographers must look at as many copies of a book as possible in order to describe it accurately, libraries and librarians are very important to their work. Bibliographers need print versions, not electronic ones (unless they are bibliographers of electronic editions, which has another set of complicated issues).
2) Editing. Editors need to look at many copies, editions, witnesses as possible, and, as with bibliographers, library collections and librarians are central to their work. Digitized or electronic copies are acceptable, and may be the end product. The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines provide a structure for collaboration between libraries and humanists, through the TEI header that is required for each document.
3) Historical scholarship. Historians look at biography, historical context, genre, and use original editions and manuscripts a great deal. They spend a good deal of time in Rare Book collections.
4) Formal criticism. Formal literary critics generally use modern or standard editions for their work, with not much need for libraries. They could use electronic editions.
5) Theory. Theorists challenge and orient ways of thinking. Generally, they cite other theorists or philosophical texts and are idiosyncratic, with no need to be thorough in finding sources.
Stephen posited that while there is not much room for collaboration in the last two categories, the first three present many opportunities for collaboration between humanities scholars and librarians.
J. Paul Hunter began his talk, entitled "New Directions in Faculty Research and the Role of the Librarian," with a look at current trends in literary studies. There will be fewer faculty and librarians in the future. Literature faculty are in the libraries more often now than in the past, and so are students. Modes and fashion change quickly in literary studies, with current emphases in historicism, cultural studies, and studies of new cultural areas.
Purely theoretical works are being published less frequently, with new historicism but one part of this. The rise of American Studies and Feminism has rediscovered and resuscitated older, neglected texts. Scholars with historicist interests will continue combing the collections for new materials.
Humanists are interested in introducing a wider range of texts and wider range of cultures into scholarship and instruction, viewing all texts as cultural documents. This broadened range has left many scholars ill-equipped for the interdisciplinary work that is necessary, and they will require collaboration with librarians who have a broader perspective outside of single disciplines.
Combined with the shrinking faculty size, English departments are covering a wider range of literatures than previously. Where formerly an English department at a large university would have five or six medievalists, it now has three or four. They must turn to colleagues outside of the department, including librarians, for expertise.
Marcia Pankake, in her talk entitled "Librarians and Teachers as Colleagues," looked at ways in which she collaborates with humanists in her position as English and American literature subject specialist. Humanists work largely alone, relying on library collections without consulting librarians. They use other sources for information, such as footnotes, information from their colleagues, and formal bibliographies. Librarians must therefore anticipate the needs of scholars, and as a result, use different patterns of information gathering than humanists.
Marcia uses several channels, some indirect, to provide information to humanities scholars. She is active in training graduate students in research methods (an activity no longer done within the department). She is involved in the interviews of candidates for faculty positions, which she sees as an opportunity to inculcate the value of the library in prospective faculty members. She works with the technology expert in the department, providing instruction in new resources. She participates in accreditation requests for information.
One looming crisis in humanities is in editing and bibliography. Graduate students are not being instructed in even the basic techniques or principles in these fields. Its importance is increasing, but developments in the past 40 years have de-emphasized it.
In closing, Marcia noted that a major form of collaboration will occur as librarians shape collections. As there is little or no consensus in priorities or directions in literary studies, librarians will play an important role in developing priorities by developing collections.
Perry Willett, Secretary
Indiana University
Recent Studies of Interest to English and American Literature Librarians
by Scott
Stebelman
Citations are limited to the period 1994-95. 1994 citations listed in the Fall 1994 issue of Biblio-Notes are omitted.
Atkinson, Ross. "Humanities Scholarship and the Research Library." Library Resources & Technical Services 39 (1995): 79-84.
Baker, Sharon L. "Quality and Demand: The Basis for Fiction Collection Assessment." Collection Building 13 (1994): 65-68.
Baker, William and Byron Anderson. "The MLA Database on CD-ROM: Perception and Reality." Library Review 43 (1994): 30-36.
Barclay, Donald A. and Darcie Reimann Barclay. "The Role of Freshman Writing in Academic Bibliographic Instruction." Journal of Academic Librarianship 20 (1994): 213-17.
Bates, Marcia J. "The Design of Databases and Other Information Resources for Humanities Scholars: The Getty Online Searching Project Report No. 4," Online & CD-ROM Review 18 no. 6 (December 1, 1994): 331-334.
Bates, Marcia J. et al. "Research Practices of Humanities Scholars in An Online Environment: The Getty Online Searching Project Report No. 3," Library & Information Science Research 17 (Winter 1995): 5-40.
Beghtol, Clare. "Domain Analysis, Literary Warrant, and Consensus: The Case of Fiction Studies." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46 (1995): 30-44. [examines subject indexing in the MLAIB)
Belanger, Terry. "The Materiality of The Book: Another Turn of The Screw." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 187-195.
Benaud, Claire-Lise and Sever Bordieanu. "Electronic Resources in the Humanities," RSR: Reference Services Review 23 no. 2 (1995): 41-50.
Benseler, David P. "MLA Directory of Periodi- cals: A Guide to Journals and Series in Languages and Literatures Periodicals Published in the United States of America." Modern Language Journal 78 (1994): 240-241. [book review]
Biemiller, Lawrence. "Preserving Literary Treasures That Have Undergone Centuries of Neglect and Mistreatment." The Chronicle of Higher Education 40 (July 27 '94): A39.
Bolter, Jay David. "Authors and Readers in An Age of Electronic Texts. Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 7-19.
Budd, John M. "User-Centered Thinking: Lessons from Reader-Centered Theory," RQ 34 (1995): 487-96.
Burnette, Michaelyn et al. "The Humanist and the Library: Promoting New Scholarship Through Collaborative Interaction Between Humanists and Librarians." The Reference Librarian 47 (1994): 181-191.
Cage, Mary Crystal. "Survey Finds That Most English Departments Include Classical Texts in Lower-Division Courses." The Chronicle of Higher Education 41 (Oct. 12 1994): A18.
Case, Barbara and Ying Xu. "Access to Special Collections in the Humanities: Who's Guarding the Gates and Why?" The Reference Librarian 47 (1994): 129-146.
CETH Workshop on Documenting Electronic Texts: May 16-18, 1994, Radisson Hotel, Somerset NJ. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, 1994.
Christensen, Peter G. "Using English Department Library Liaisons in A Term Paper Clinic: Reviving the Scholar/Librarian Model." Research Strategies 12 (1994): 196-208.
"Computers and Communication in The Humanities: A Survey of Use/Mullings." Program 28 (1994): 222.
Connaway, Lynn Silipigni. "An Examination of the Inclusion of A Sample of Selected Women Authors in Books for College Libraries," College & Research Libraries 56 (1995): 71-84.
Davis, Burns. "Designing a Fiction Assessment Tool: The Customer Service Approach." Colletion Building 13 (1994): 69-82.
Day, Mark Tyler. "Humanizing Information Technology: Cultural Evolution and The Institutionalization of Electronic Text Processing." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 67-92.
Ellis, Elizabeth L. "The Uses of Unpublished Materials by Literary Scholars: A Citation Study." M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library School, 1994.
Gaynor, Edward. "Cataloging Electronic Texts: The University of Virginia Library Experience." Library Resources & Technical Services 38 (1994): 403-13.
Giordano, Richard. "The Documentation of Electronic Texts Using Text Encoding Initiative Headers: An Introduction." Library Resources & Technical Services 38 (1994): 389-401.
Gordan, Lucy L. "Life in the Berg Collection: A New York Story." Wilson Library Bulletin 68 (April 1994): 26-31.
Greenberg, Douglas. "Technology and Its Discontents: Some Problems and Possibilities for The Humanist in The Virtual Library." In Changes in Scholarly Communication Patterns: Australia and The Electronic Library. Ed. John Mulvaney and Colin Steele. Canberra: Highland Press, 1994. [chapter pages unknown].
Guenther, Rebecca S. "The Challenges of Electronic Texts in The Library: Bibliographic Control and Access." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 149-172.
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Ed. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard. Oxford: The Text Encoding Initiative, 1994.
Harloe, Bart and John Budd. "Collection Development and Scholarly Communication in the Era of Electronic Access." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 20 (May 1994): 83-7.
Hockey, Susan. "Electronic Texts in The Humanities: A Coming of Age." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 21-34.
Hockey, Susan. "Evaluating Electronic Texts in The Humanities." Library Trends 42 (1994): 676-693.
Hoogcarspel, Annelies. "Guidelines for Cataloging Monographic Electronic Texts at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities." CETH Technical Report, no. 1. New Brunswick, NJ: CETH, 1994.
Hum, Sue Yin. "Mapping Disciplinary Territory Through Professional Journals: Composition and Rhetoric Scholarship in the 1970's." Diss. Texas Christian University, 1994.
Humanities and Arts on The Information Highways: A Profile: September 1994. Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Art History Information Program, 1994.
Jensen, Mary Brandt. "Cohabiting with Copy-ight on The Nets." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 93-103.
Jones, Robert Alun. "Durkheim's Imperative: The Role of Humanities Faculty in The Information Technologies Revolution." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 173-185.
Keith, Cassandra M. "A Brief History of the Literature of English Canada," RQ 34 (1995): 447-452.
Kelly, James L. "Literary Landmarks in the United States: An Analysis, Map, and Bibliography." Bulletin of the Special Libraries Association. Geography and Map Division 178 (December 1994): 30-36.
King, Jack B. "History Research Into the 21st Century." The Reference Librarian 47 (1994): 89-108.
Klemperer, Katherina. "Electronic Texts." Information Technology & Libraries 13 (1994): 6-49.
Kovacs, Diane K. "Internet Resources and Humanities Reference Service." In Emerging Communities: Integrating Networked Information into Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 253-63.
"LC Presents Virtual Whitman Display: Author Notebooks Go Online," Wilson Library Bulletin 69 (May 1995): 19.
LeJeune, Lorrie. "The Role of The Scholarly Publisher in An Electronic Environment." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 105-112.
Lowry, Anita K. "Electronic Texts and Multimedia in The Academic Library : A View from The Front Line." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 57-66.
Marchand, James H. "The Scholar and His Library in The Computer Age." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 137-148.
Miller, R. Baxter. "Black Literary Journals: Issues of Trust." Black Issues in Higher Education 12 (May 18, 1995): 38-40.
Murdoch, D. "The Riches of Empire: Postcolonialism in Literature and Criticism," Choice 32 (1995): 1059-71. (selected literature review targeted to librarians).
Neuman, Michael and Paul Mangiafico. "Providing and Accessing Information via the Internet: The Georgetown Catalogue of Projects in Electronic Text." The Reference Librarian no.41-42 (1994): 319-32.
Ore, Christian-Emil. "Making An Information System for the Humanities," Computers and the Humanities 28 (1995): 277-282.
Perry, L S. "Electronic Media: Gale's Literary Index CD-ROM." Choice 31 (1994): 1709.
Plum, Terry and Topsy N. Smalley. "Research As Repatriation." The Reference Librarian 47 (1994): 147-165. [views "the humanist patron as an author of a text, and literature searches as processes of repatriation"]
Price-Wilkin, John. "The Feasibility of Wide-Area Textual Analysis Systems in Libraries: A Practical Analysis." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 113-135.
Quinn, Brian. "Some Implications of the Canon Debate for Collection Development." Collection Building 14 (1994): 1-10.
Rabinovitz, Rubin. "Poetry Software : Poem Finder 94." PC Magazine 13 (Sep 27, 1994): 424.
Research in Humanities Computing 2: Selected Papers from the ALLC/ACH Conference, Sieen, June 1990. Ed Susan Hockey and Nancy Ide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Reynolds, Judy. "A Brave New World: User Studies in the Humanities Enter the Electronic Age," The Reference Librarian 49/50 (1995): 61-81.
Rose, Jonathan. "The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing." Scholarly Publishing 25 (1994): 103-106.
Seel, June. "Gale's Literary Index CD-ROM." CD-ROM Professional 7 (1994): 177-178.
Sharma, Chandra Bhushan. "Standardising Hypermedia Format for Literary Studies." The Electronic Library 12 (1994): 353-359.
Sher, Dena N. "Poetry in Indexes." The Indexer 19 (October 1994): 102-104.
Shockley, Ann Allen. "Librarians, Archivists, and Writers: A Personal Perspective." In The Black Librarian in America Revisited. Ed. E. J. Josey. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1994: 316-23.
Smith, Jeanette C. "Selecting Fantasy Literature." Collection Building 13 no. 4 (1994): 19-23.
Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "The Text Encoding Initiative : Electronic Text Markup for Research." Literary Texts in An Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994: 35-55.
Spink, Amanda and Maurice C. Leatherbury. "Name Authority Files and Humanities Database Searching." Online & CDROM Review 18 (June 1994): 143-8.
Stanford Electronic Humanities Review. Stanford, CA: Stanford Humanities Review, 1994. [serial; twice a year; mode of access: E-Mail: sfranchi@leland.stanford.edu.]
Stebelman, Scott. "Vocabulary Control and the Humanities: A Case Study of the MLA International Bibliography." The Reference Librarian 47 (1994): 61-78.
Stigleman, Sue. "Bibliography Formatting Software: An Updated Buying Guide For 1994." Database 17 (December 1994): 53-65.
Sutton, Brett. "Literary Texts in Electronic Formats: New Approaches to Reading and Publishing." Educational Technology 34 (September 1994): 26-31.
Tibbo, Helen R. "Indexing for The Humanities." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45 (1994): 607-619.
Trimmer, Joseph F. A Guide to MLA Documentation: with An appendix on APA Style. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Warner, Beth Forrest and David Barber. "Building the Digital Library: the University of Michigan's UMLib Text Project," Information Technology and Libraries 13 (March 1994): 20-24.
Watson-Boone, Rebecca. "The Information Needs and Habits of Humanities Scholars." RQ 34 (1994): 203-216.
Wiberley, Stephen E. Jr. and William G. Jones. "Humanists Revisited: A Longitudinal Look at the Adoption of Information Technology." College & Research Libraries 55 (1994): 499-509.
Wilson, David L. "Humanist Wins Praise for Book on the Role of New Technologies," The Chronicle of Higher Education 41 (October 5, 1994): A22.
Wolff, Mark. "Poststructuralism and The ARTFL Database: Some Theoretical Considerations." Information Technology and Libraries 13 (March 1994): 35-42
Yerbury, Di. "Issues for the Humanities." In Changes in Scholarly Communication Patterns: Australia and The Electronic Library. Ed. John Mulvaney and Colin Steele. Canberra: Highland Press, 1994. [chapter pages unknown].
Back to the LES homepage
Comments may be directed to the Web Editor at ruotolo@virginia.edu. Last update: 9 September 2011