Little is known about the intellectual journey of advanced undergraduates engaged in the research process. Moreover, few studies of this population of library users include students' personal essays as a point of analysis in their scholarly pursuits. To gain insights into the research trajectory of apprentice researchers at the University of Michigan, the Library examined the personal essays that students submitted for its inaugural undergraduate research award. These essays chronicled students' intellectual growth and development throughout the research process. Drawing on observations about the unique needs of these students, the authors analyze the implications for library instruction and services.

Librarians are excellent research collaborators, although librarian participation is not usually considered, thereby making access to research funds difficult. The University of Michigan Library became involved in the university's novel funding program, MCubed, which supported innovative interdisciplinary research on campus, primarily by funding student assistants to work on research projects. This article discusses three different MCubed projects that all benefited from librarian involvement. These projects spanned across many areas from translational research to systematic reviews to digital humanities. Librarian roles ranged from mentoring and project management to literature searching. IntroductionTraditionally, librarians have adopted supportive roles in their research collaborations with faculty. While such roles still exist within academic librarianship, there is an increasing emphasis on librarians as partners within research collaborations. 1These partnerships include grants, systematic review publications (a specific type of comprehensive literature review), and other projects that benefit from librarians' specialized skillsets. The ability to contribute funds to a research collaboration creates a more balanced partnership, allowing librarians to more fully contribute to projects with other faculty researchers. The University of Michigan (UM) University Library values collaboration and participation in research, which is evident through the library's participation in the MCubed program, a recent pilot program designed to fund innovative interdisciplinary research on campus. The University Library participated in the program, providing an opportunity for the authors of this paper to propose projects, find interdisciplinary collaborators, and contribute funding to conduct research. Most important, because librarians were equal contributors of funding, they engaged in these Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Librarian Involvement in Grant Projects 273 projects as full collaborators, paving the way for stronger relationships with faculty and future research opportunities.The inability to obtain funding is a common barrier to librarian involvement in research initiatives. In 2009, Gore et al., after discovering that a only a quarter of research articles published in top health sciences library journals identified funding sources, noted that "funding for health sciences library research remains either limited or nonexistent."2 Yet, at the same time, funding is perceived by Association of Research Libraries (ARL) library directors to be one of the most effective mechanisms for promoting research among librarians.3 Further, there is evidence to suggest that funded research is associated with "substantially higher impact" than nonfunded research. 4 Not only did participation in the MCubed program provide librarians with funding opportunities, it also set the stage for meaningful collaborations with nonlibrary faculty across campus, which is generally underreported in the literature. 5This paper outlines three int...

Librarians are excellent research collaborators, although librarian participation is not usually considered, thereby making access to research funds difficult. The University of Michigan Library became involved in the university's novel funding program, MCubed, which supported innovative interdisciplinary research on campus, primarily by funding student assistants to work on research projects. This article discusses three different MCubed projects that all benefited from librarian involvement. These projects spanned across many areas from translational research to systematic reviews to digital humanities. Librarian roles ranged from mentoring and project management to literature searching. Introduction Traditionally, librarians have adopted supportive roles in their research collaborations with faculty. While such roles still exist within academic librarianship, there is an increasing emphasis on librarians as partners within research collaborations. 1 These partnerships include grants, systematic review publications (a specific type of comprehensive literature review), and other projects that benefit from librarians' specialized skillsets. The ability to contribute funds to a research collaboration creates a more balanced partnership, allowing librarians to more fully contribute to projects with other faculty researchers. The University of Michigan (UM) University Library values collaboration and participation in research, which is evident through the library's participation in the MCubed program, a recent pilot program designed to fund innovative interdisciplinary research on campus. The University Library participated in the program, providing an opportunity for the authors of this paper to propose projects, find interdisciplinary collaborators, and contribute funding to conduct research. Most important, because librarians were equal contributors of funding, they engaged in these Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Librarian Involvement in Grant Projects 273 projects as full collaborators, paving the way for stronger relationships with faculty and future research opportunities. The inability to obtain funding is a common barrier to librarian involvement in research initiatives. In 2009, Gore et al., after discovering that a only a quarter of research articles published in top health sciences library journals identified funding sources, noted that "funding for health sciences library research remains either limited or nonexistent." 2 Yet, at the same time, funding is perceived by Association of Research Libraries (ARL) library directors to be one of the most effective mechanisms for promoting research among librarians. 3 Further, there is evidence to suggest that funded research is associated with "substantially higher impact" than nonfunded research. 4 Not only did participation in the MCubed program provide librarians with funding opportunities, it also set the stage for meaningful collaborations with nonlibrary faculty across campus, which is generally underreported in the literature. 5 This paper outlines thr...

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This special issue examines the novel as a tool of political engagement through which women writers have challenged prevalent notions of the American West as masculine, anti-modern, and untouched. These pervasive master narratives present unique challenges to scholars attempting to uncover and recover women's writing that resists or undermines popular and pervasive notions of the American West. Even thirty years after Annette Kolodny's foundational study, The Land Before Her (1984), more recent work by Nina Baym, Krista Comer, Melody Graulich, Cathryn Halverson, and Victoria Lamont has shown there is considerable work to be done to account for women writers' engagement with the West as an imaginative and political space. And for good reason. The preoccupation with the American West as the frontier and promise of Anglo-American supremacy has given rise to the scholarly preoccupations of legitimacy and reinvention. Scholars seeking to study and recover literature that resists longstanding notions of the American West are therefore faced with the unique challenge of establishing the legitimacy of their subjects of study, as well as the expectation to "reinvent" the scholarly landscape. For example, Annette Kolodny, whose feminist and ecocritical interventions in western literary studies are now considered central to the field, faced critiques early in her career that, in Victoria Lamont's words, "dismissed her feminist work as 'faddish' and 'not really literature'" ("Big Books Wanted" 312). Critical works such as Kolodny's

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This article examines Beverly Lewis's highly popular trilogy The Heritage of Lancaster County, a series often cited as inspiring the Amish romance novel trend. Although Lewis did not invent the Amish romance, the high visibility that her work enjoys in the media, and the conventional wisdom that she was the first to develop the genre, means that subsequent novels are necessarily responding to and adapting Lewis's texts. Looking at Lewis's trilogy as a foundational text, this article analyzes the ways in which it draws on Gothic conventions to perform evangelical cultural work (to use Jane Tompkins's phrase). Considering the trilogy as a Gothic text within the context of Christian publishing highlights the ways in which it functions as an extension of evangelical outreach: the narratives both celebrate Amish community values and adherence to tradition while using Gothic tropes of confinement and escape to emphasize the idea that the Amish are narrow-minded and overly rigid. Ultimately, this article argues that Lewis's novels use the Gothic to argue that the antidote to Amish rigidity is evangelicalism.

This article takes as its case study the challenge of data sets for text mining, sources that offer tremendous promise for DH methodology but present specific challenges for humanities scholars. These text sets raise a range of issues: What skills do you train humanists to have? What is the library's role in enabling and supporting use of those materials? How do you allocate staff? Who oversees sustainability and data management? By addressing these questions through a specific use case scenario, this article shows how these questions are central to mapping out future directions for a range of library services.