Q:  What is your current position and tell us a little about your responsibilities.

A:  I am the Humanities Bibliographer at UMass Amherst's W.E.B. Du Bois Library. As such, I'm responsible for materials' selection, library instruction, departmental liaison, and research consultation for the departments of Classics, English, Germanic and Scandinavian Studies, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Slavic and East European Studies, and Theater; interdisciplinary programs in Film, Medieval Studies, Modern European Studies, and Religious Studies; and general reference desk work.

Q:  As the American Literature subject contributor to the new Resources for College Libraries, what aspect of the American Literature field do you feel has changed the most since 1988?

A:  Along with the re-creation of the canon in American Literature, I think one of the most interesting developments has been the burgeoning variety of means of publication afforded by computers and the World Wide Web set against a background of continuing and even increasing strength in the traditional field of print publishing.

Q:  There have been so many technology advances since 1988, how has this impacted the material published on American Literature?

A:  I should think that the development of full-text databases for secondary source material combined with similar robust corpora in belles letters have made for a compelling presence of electronic material that has appeal to both the scholarly community and the public at large. In addition, the growing open access movement together with the increasing acceptance of electronic scholarly initiatives that now meet with academic and administrative approval (i.e., pursuits that are now seen as meritorious and worthy of consideration in promotion and tenure decisions) have helped to make much material available to the many who do not have ready access to subscription databases.

Q:  Would you consider any one major advancement or event in the field of American Literature as standing out above the rest?

A:  Nothing comes to mind right now, but that might just be a reflection of how intimidating I find that question!

Q:  How many new subject categories, would you guess, have evolved under the heading of American Literature since 1988?

A:  Along with the advent of a new century and millennium, there are new schools of literary criticism to acknowledge, the expanding world of ethnic literature to incorporate, and the need to be flexible in defining the very nature of genre given the need to delineate the effects of the computer revolution and the Internet on the nature of authorship and the future of publishing.

Q:  What are the challenges that you face tackling such a popular segment of academic literature?

A:  Given a budget that has remained basically unchanged for years, I could easily spend most if not all of it buying just American poetry in any given year. With the need to fairly and reasonably balance the purchase of primary and secondary source materials in print as well as to choose the best mix of electronic resources, one can only hope for the best and trust to the fact that the humanists for whom I'm making these choices are a wonderfully kind, understanding, and resilient group who have consistently coped with budget shortfalls and related setbacks and have still been there to assist me in selection and evaluation whenever they can.

Q:  Can you give us 3 must-have titles that you feel every library should carry in this subject?

A:  If there's one thing I've learned from raising children and now grandchildren it is that one does not have favorites! I would hope that any library that consults this list will be able to find available and purchase all that it desires!

Q:  Did you learn anything new or anything that surprised you about your subject area while working on this project?

A:  I've been a field bibliographer for the Modern Language Association's International Bibliography and an editor for the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature for many years now. As such, I've dutifully submitted all relevant materials from my coverage lists, but without the context of their use as a coherent collection within a particular kind of library. It was quite interesting to draw back from that level of scrutiny to examine many of the works I've indexed with the idea in mind of selecting them (or not) in order to form the core of a college collection. Especially challenging was working with the creative literature as that for the most part is not included either in the MLAIB or ABELL directly but only as reflected in literary criticism and historical studies.

Q:  What has this project brought to you, personally and/or professionally, that you did not anticipate?

A:  As with indexing journals for serial enumerative bibliographies, this kind of in-depth exercise forces one to look closely at what is being published, by which publishers, and by which authors. All of this helps to keep one aware of the ever-changing focus in the field, the waxing and waning of critical approaches, and the pre-eminence of one subgenre or another as shifting tastes and an erratic marketplace come into play. Also, I have found this a remarkably apposite tool to introduce to future librarians when I teach Collection Development and Management for Simmons College's Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Q:  What is your favorite ice cream flavor?

A:  Much to the chagrin of my granddaughters, I don't have a discernible sweet tooth, but if I did, I might be partial to something redolent of Guinness.

Q:  Where did you go to library school?

A:  The State University of New York College at Geneseo whose library school is now some 25 years gone.

Q:  How many titles have been selected for you subject area?

A:  2665

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