The Companion Document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Research Competencies in Writing and Literature was recently approved by the ACRL Board of Directors! This companion was primarily written for academic librarians working with writing and literature programs, but is also useful for educators in those disciplines, other academic subject librarians, and anyone else who is interested. Many LES members worked hard on this project, so please join me in congratulating them on a job well done! You can read the ACRL Insider announcement about the Companion Document here.
Help LES plan for ALA Annual 2022!
It’s hard to believe it’s already time to start planning for ALA Annual 2022, but the LES Executive Committee is looking ahead! We’d love your feedback about meeting format for the conference. Here’s a quick, one-question survey about your preferences.
Fall 2021 Newsletter Now Available!
The Fall issue of Biblionotes is now available.
In this issue, get an update from LES chair Glenda Insua, find out what happens when Candice Dahl, a librarian at the University of Saskatchewan, takes an internship online, meet Sara Maurice Whitver, our new social media coordinator, and take our communication survey.
The editors invite you to contribute to the next issue by submitting articles to biblionotes at gmail dot com.
How do you keep up with LES? Please take our 1 minute survey!
The inquiring minds at LES want to know how you keep up with what’s happening in our section. Do you use Twitter? The blog? The listserv?
We’d love to know how you keep up with us now and what we could be doing better.
Please take our quick (1-minute) survey at http://tiny.cc/e2tjuz
Announcing our new Social Media Coordinator!
@LES_ACRL welcomes new Social Media Coordinator, Sara Maurice Whitver, who will be handling our twitter account. In addition to member news and section announcements, we hope to engage our community through live discussions and through connecting with professional or scholarly organizations associated with Writing Studies, Creative Writing, and other disciplines allied with English Departments. Join us on this new adventure!
Sara is Coordinator of Library Instruction and Liaison to the English Department at the University of Alabama, and is in the final stages of completing a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition. She is excited to tackle this new role in LES and looks forward to developing close connections with LES members on Twitter!
Biblio-Notes needs you!
Please consider sharing your work and ideas with the LES community by publishing in our organization’s newsletter, Biblio-Notes.
We are especially open to new contributors. 
Publish in Biblio-Notes!
- Brief articles are welcome (250-1000 words)
- Any topic of interest to the library and literature community will be considered (see below for suggestions)
- Submit your article as a Google Doc (preferred) or Word document to biblionotes@gmail.com
- Include your name and any details you would like to be included in your author bio (e.g., job title, affiliation, pronouns, email address)
- Use inclusive language, spell out acronyms, and avoid jargon
- Deadline: Monday, September 27
Article Ideas
Ideas for Biblio-Notes articles can include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Innovative projects related to LES at your library
- Strategies to develop inclusive and anti-racist literary collections, services, outreach and engagement initiatives, or instructional support
- Completed or ongoing research projects, scholarship, or other similar content
- How your library is navigating this stage of the pandemic
- Library instruction, instructional design
- Reports from library, archives, and literature conferences
Contribute to Regular Features
- Were you recently hired, promoted, published, tenured, or otherwise excellent? Did you publish or present recently? Your fellow LES members want to know! Share a short bio with information about your new accomplishment (50-100 words).
- Contribute to the “What’s In Your Bag” feature by writing a short book review (200-300 words).
Past Newsletters
https://www.ala.org/acrl/aboutacrl/directoryofleadership/sections/les/lesnewsletters
We are available to answer any questions you may have. We look forward to reading your submissions.
Cheers,
Stacy Reardon and Matt Roberts
Editors, Biblio-Notes
Meet LES Member Brian Matzke
The Literatures in English (LES) Virtual Participation Committee is highlighting LES members as part of a new series. If you would like to be included in this series, please submit to this Google Form.
Name:
Brian Matzke
Job title and location:
Digital Humanities and Reference and Instruction Librarian, Central Connecticut State University
How long have you been in LES?
Almost three years
Describe yourself in two or three words:
Nerdy, organized, anxious
What are you currently reading, watching, playing, etc.?
Reading: I just picked up Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and I’m really excited to start it. Watching: Mythic Quest on AppleTV. A really funny workplace comedy. Also reading a lot of animal encyclopedia entries and watching a lot of random dinosaur cartoons with my three-year-old.
What is something others may be surprised to know about you?
I can juggle.
What is your favorite aspect of your current position?
It’s always different. One day I’m creating descriptive metadata for a digital collection, the next day I’m writing a lesson on how to evaluate sources, the day after that I’m conducting an oral history interview with a local veteran, and the day after that I’m writing a paper analyzing a short story by Richard Wright.
What is in your toolkit?
Since I do a lot of work on digital humanities and data visualization, I really enjoy teaching about distant reading–both its uses and its limitations. I like getting to show people Voyant Tools for that: https://voyant-tools.org/
Along those same lines, I also really like the HathiTrust Bookworm: https://bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/. It’s similar to Google N-Grams, but utilizes HathiTrust’s metadata so you can refine your search more, and it also links right to the books in HathiTrust.
Meet LES Member Heather G. Cole
The Literatures in English (LES) Virtual Participation Committee is highlighting LES members as part of a new series. If you would like to be included in this series, please submit to this Google Form.
Name:
Heather G. Cole
Job title and location:
Curator for Literary & Popular Culture Collections and Head of Special Collections Instruction (as well as the liaison to the English department), Brown University Library
How long have you been in LES?
Four years
Describe yourself in two or three words:
Inquisitive, voracious
What are you currently reading, watching, playing, etc.?
I just started reading Christelle Dabos’s Mirror Visitor series, which I’m loving; I’m watching the French spy show The Bureau (it’s amazing), and playing the board game Wingspan (I’m a tabletop newbie, and this has me curious about what other well-designed and engaging board games are out there!)
What is something others may be surprised to know about you?
While my educational and professional background are in literature, for five years I was curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library, so I know lots of random trivia about TR!
What is your favorite aspect of your current position?
I love finding creative ways to connect students and faculty with primary sources.
What is in your toolkit?
Right now I’m so grateful for “Ethically Teaching Primary Sources that Reflect Histories of Violence, Hate, and Oppression”, compiled by RBMS’s Instruction and Outreach Committee: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YUrHSukciOrUfuDlBHs8JWyPaTa3sIPo/view?usp=sharing
Meet LES Member Carla Baricz
The Literatures in English (LES) Virtual Participation Committee is highlighting LES members as part of a new series. If you would like to be included in this series, please submit to this Google Form.
Name:
Carla Baricz
Job title and location:
Librarian for Literatures in English and Comparative Literature, Yale University
How long have you been in LES?
This is my first year!
Describe yourself in two or three words:
Kind, curious, eager
What are you currently reading, watching, playing, etc.?
I just finished Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, and I’m now reading Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Their Year of Marvels (it has fabulous woodcut illustrations by Tom Hammick – the wood was collected from the area around Somerset where the poets lived in 1798). I’ve been listening to a lot of Saint-Saens and Billie Holiday lately.
What is something others may be surprised to know about you?
I’m Romanian, but I grew up in the US and then lived for a while in the Czech Republic and Israel.
What is your favorite aspect of your current position?
The range of research questions I am asked.
What is in your toolkit?
I love working with Archive Grid to get a sense of other collections in the area or to find out where certain archives are held; I also love the Ulrichsweb Global Serials database for the perennial questions about journal indexing.
Meet LES Member Amanda Rybin Koob
The Literatures in English (LES) Virtual Participation Committee is highlighting LES members as part of a new series. If you would like to be included in this series, please submit to this Google Form.
Name:
Amanda Rybin Koob
Job title and location:
Literature and Humanities Librarian, University of Colorado Boulder
How long have you been in LES?
Just over a year
Describe yourself in two or three words:
nervous laugh
What are you currently reading, watching, playing, etc.?
I’m reading All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. I appreciate the mix of modalities (including poetry), and I’m learning a lot.
What is something others may be surprised to know about you?
I’m a very slow reader.
What is your favorite aspect of your current position?
I love being able to work with students and talk about their research — their curiosities bring me to life! I also really value my team within the libraries and our meetings where we learn together about a topic of interest. Right now we’re focusing on contemplative pedagogy.
What is in your toolkit?
I must admit that I bookmarked the Emoji Keyboard Online in early Spring 2020 and it has been helpful to me in communicating nuance and fun over Zoom chat and Microsoft Teams. https://coolsymbol.com/emojis/emoji-for-copy-and-paste.html?utm_source=chrome_ext_board
On a more serious note, a coworker shared CRediT with me last year: http://credit.niso.org/ This resource has helped me have productive conversations with collaborators to ensure that transparency in research credit is present from the beginning of our projects.