Collection Policies

DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Subjects covered :  Subjects covered include English and comparative literature, language and linguistics.

Departments and users served :  The Department of English serves primarily the College of Arts & Sciences.  The collection serves the primary goal of the department and college, which is to educate students to respond to the needs of a contemporary information age from the perspective of a broad-based literary and cultural heritage.  The program and collection is built around a varied and comprehensive curriculum in literature, language, creative writing, composition, folklore, and critical theory.

Degrees granted :  The Department of English and Comparative Literature offers undergraduate and graduate study towards the BA, MA and PhD degrees.  MA students have a choice of five tracks: literature, creative writing, professional writing, and linguistics.  The PhD program emphasizes modern and contemporary British and American literature.

Special programs :  The English Department also has a Graduate Certificate in Professional Writing. 

The Department of English's Weinberger Center for Drama and Playwriting and the Elliston Poetry foundation attract students interested in those two areas of creative writing.

Research focus, grants, and special funding :  The research focus at the graduate level is modern and contemporary British and American literature, creative and professional writing, and rhetoric and composition pedagogy.  The focus of the linguistics program is mainly anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics.

The Elliston Poetry Foundation provides grants for students in the poetry creative writing program.  It also funds a poet-in-residence and the Elliston Poetry Collection, which is a special collection in Langsam Library which is administered by poet and curator Jim Cummins.
 

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE COLLECTION

Location of collection :  The collection is located in Langsam Library, Archives and Rare Books and the Southwest Depository storage facility

Other collections supporting program :  The Elliston Poetry Collection and the Archives and Rare Books Collection support the program, additionally.

Collection history :  Reflecting faculty research and the various programmatic changes throughout the years, the collection includes all periods of English and American literature - Old English, Middle English, Renaissance, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century and Twentieth-Century.

Certain areas of the collection have greater depth than others and reflect faculty, current and emeriti, research interest, notably Renaissance Drama and Shakespeare, Eighteenth-Century and the Romantics.

General level of current collecting :  The collection supports course work in literary studies, rhetoric, linguistics, pedagogy, critical theory, technical writing and creative writing.  The linguistics collection is interdisciplinary and supports courses from eleven departments at the University.  The linguistics collection represents descriptive linguistics, syntax and semantics, phonology and morphology, historical linguistics, and language variation.  Materials for rhetoric and composition studies, journalism and linguistics and language study are collected at the level of instruction.  Multi-cultural literature and women writers have been emphasized in the collection this past decade and are collected at research level.  Commonwealth writers from Africa, India, Canada and the Caribbean are collected at research level.  Within the last decade the Early Americana collection has been gathering research level strength in the area of printing and book history.
 

SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF THE COLLECTION

Call Number Range :

General Collection
P   English language and linguistics, 
PR  English or British Literature 
    Irish Literature
PS  American Literature

Current and retrospective :  Retrospectively, research areas of particular depth include the Renaissance, specifically drama, the Eighteenth Century, and the Romantics, specifically William Blake, Celtic literature, and modern and contemporary poetry

Currently, multi-cultural literature and women writers have been emphasized in the collection this past decade and are collected at research level.  Commonwealth writers from Africa, India, Canada and the Caribbean are collected at research level. 

Within the last decade the Early Americana collection has been gathering research level strength in the area of printing and book history.

Time period collected :  All historical periods of British and American literature, including Celtic, Irish, colonial or commonwealth, African, Caribbean and English language translations of European literature are collected at the basic level.

Levels and treatments :  Most areas in English and American language and literature are covered at research level. English language translations are collected at basic or instructional level.

Languages :  Only English language materials, including translations in other languages and national literatures, are acquired. 

Geographic areas :  Geographic areas in the collection include primarily American and British literature, as well as commonwealth/colonial, African, Caribbean, Irish, continental and other national literatures in translation.  The English bibliographer cooperates with the Romance, German, Jewish, Arabic, Middle Eastern studies bibliographer to collect literature appropriate to the study of language, culture and other interdisciplinary programs.  Language/linguistic materials involving the study of Indo-European languages are collected to support general reference/informational needs, including dictionaries and language atlases.

Types of resources :  Types of resources include monographs, journals, conference proceedings, society publications

Resource formats include print, microform and digital.  Many of the digital full-text and bibliographic databases are available through the OhioLINK consortia.

Electronic resources acquired for UC only use are often proposed for acquisition through the approval of the  Electronic Resource Committee.

Endowed areas :  Endowments for English include the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund, Taft Arts and Sciences Fund, the George Elliston Poetry Foundation
 

ACQUISITION PROCESS

Approval plans are profiled through Yankee Book Peddler.  Firm orders are placed through vendors and other book distribution sources. Out-of-print catalogs, rare book and special collection catalogs are used for retrospective collection development. 
 

Rosemary Franklin
7/19/00