This article presents an e-view and review column. Result of an informal poll of librarians."What's the single most important consideration driving your acquisition of an e-resource?" and "What kind of library do you work in?" were the questions asked. Of the 328 responses, 167 came from academic librarians, 116 from public librarians, and 45 from special librarians. There was no single, outstanding "most important consideration," but definite patterns emerged. Among public librarians "easy remote access" was the top vote-getter in acquiring an e-resource. For academic and special libraries, "content" was most frequently named as the most important consideration. Budget was the underlying leitmotif for all. "No matter how fabulous the source and how much we want it, if the price is high we may not be able to acquire it," one respondent said. Other issues included the interdisciplinary nature of a file (something that meets multiple subject needs), flexible and fair licensing, powerful search ability, and the publisher's reputation/track record. The quote of the week comes from Blaise Simqu the CEO of Sage Publications on Sage's move online. CrossRef Search could answer the dreams of librarians and researchers alike. This pilot program involving 25 CrossRef publishers and societies lets pilot users search from CrossRef Search Pilot boxes on participating publishers' web sites. Results are from Google using Google's usual primo search and ranking algorithms. But get this: Google has indexed the full text of the articles on participating publishers' web sites, so results are filtered to the content from those publishers' sites.
The national model of literary history-with its developmental, teleological narrative of emergence and its vision of ineffable belonging and uniqueness-has lost much of its traditional pedagogical centrality, but it has not vanished. Rather, it has migrated from the center to what was once the periphery, where it now flourishes as a way of affirming the identity claims of hitherto marginalized groups. Literary historians speaking for such groups may openly acknowledge that the terms associated with the old historical narrative-evolutionary, continuous, organic, and the like-are largely fictive, yet these writers self-consciously embrace the fiction in order to appropriate its power. But this embrace entails serious risks: cynicism, enforced performativity, and repetition compulsion. A more powerful alternative lies in the emerging practice of mobility studies.
Reviews three books on Latin American literature. `The Cambridge History of Latin American literature,' edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria and Enrique Pupo-Walker; `The Latin American Short Story: An Annotated Guide to Anthologies and Criticism,' compiled by Daniel Balderson; `Mexican literature: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources,' edited by David William Foster.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Jonatas Conceição da Silva Jonatas Conceição da Silva CHARLES H. ROWELL: How would you describe contemporary Afro-Brazilian poetry? JONATAS CONCEIÇÃO DA SILVA: In the late 1970s and in the 1980s in Brazil we had different experiences as far as collective works by black writers. It was principally in the 1980s that we Afro-Brazilian writers were able to plan and coordinate three important national conferences for Afro-Brazilian writers—two conferences in São Paulo and one in Rio de Janeiro. From these conferences, we have the annals, the theses that were proposed and debated. The attempt to organize a collective work by black writers here in Brazil is already a tradition, in the sense that there have been diverse attempts in various states—Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and, perhaps, Pernambuco—to organize this kind of collective work. Those conferences were productive efforts—experiences that helped very much the process of writing literature, and even the issue of the mass production of the literature we write. It’s evident that beginning in the mid-1980s, with Brazil’s economic crisis, it became impossible to realize this kind of collective reunion for the valuation of literature. And, not only the reunions became impossible, but even collective literary production became difficult, very difficult. The only experience that has survived today, with respect to the collective effort, is Quilombhoje in São Paulo, and even so it is work carried out with many difficulties. The difficulties that we black writers have in our country are basically of two types: first, the difficulty of the perfection of the instrument, the literary object. The great majority of our writers come from the lower economic class, without literary tradition in the family, without literary studies. We are, the great majority of us, self-taught. So, good will, literary motivations, lyrical emotions are not enough to make or create a good l
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