[Mollie Freier]

I’ve created a bare-bones site, which is here. I plan to use it to maunder around ideas that keep coming up for my book. Even though I think that I know exactly what I want to do with it, more ideas keep cropping up. It’s good because the work stays interesting, but bad because I really want to finish it.

[Mollie Freier]

I took a course last summer on Metrics, and was grateful that we humanists don’t have to rely on such things as Journal Impact Factor or H-index. I found Altmetric very interesting, and I’ve been following a publication of mine ever since. Here’s the link to my article “The Librarian in Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.” Without Altmetric, I don’t think I’d know that I’d been cited in Wikipedia. And Twitter has generated a lot of downloads for this article–back in January, someone posted the link to someone as they were forming a private DM group on Harry Potter, and (apparently) a lot of people saw that tweet and downloaded the article. I can now fantasize about the no-doubt spirited discussion of my work that took place in that private DM group–or that didn’t take place.

Basically Altmetric will add to your rating (the number in the rainbow doughnut) every time someone publicly tweets about your work.

You can also check Google Scholar for citations to your work–and you can look up those well-respected scholars there, too.

[Mollie Freier]

Finally got up the nerve to upload my book proposal for  Book ‘Em: Libraries, Librarians, and Information in Mystery Fiction, 1970-2018. I hope to get this item (with a sample chapter) submitted by the end of the month.

I realized that we need to add more subject headings in detective fiction–there’s a subject heading for Golden Age, but not for cozies or for hard-boiled novels.

 

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Mollie Freier.

[Mollie Freier]

I was curious about what might have been uploaded that would interest me, and was pleasantly surprised that the list of suggestions based on my profile yielded two documents of interest, a syllabus on a text-mining course taught by a librarian, and an article from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on the challenges to scholarly communication.

However, I didn’t have much luck with sources on mystery and detective fiction. I tried searching for “cozy” in all fields and got nothing. I then tried “detective fiction,” and got many hits that were of no interest to me. I know that my searches were very broad, but I would like to think that anyone uploading materials on cozy mysteries or detective fiction would have tagged them appropriately. However, I did find a workbook on text analysis that looks very interesting, although “detective fiction” was not mentioned in the table of contents at all, it turns out to be a companion text (maybe–I haven’t really read it yet) for a course whose content includes the “birth of detective fiction.”

I was very pleased with the documents that were easily found and retrieved; however, I think that my experience reinforces my belief that I need to get my colleagues who do research on mystery and detective fiction to join HC and post their work.

[Mollie Freier]

I’d already joined some groups and followed two people, but I checked out the membership of the groups I’d already joined and added some people to follow. I also found a group on Digital Pedagogy that intrigued me, so I joined that.

The group on Detective Fiction doesn’t have a lot of traffic–people have posted some work, but there didn’t seem to be any discussion. I did post a question about any work people were doing on cozy mysteries, but I really don’t expect an answer right away.

That said, I intend to post a link to Humanities Commons and the Detective Fiction group to an e-mail list on mystery and detective fiction, and I’ll probably post on Twitter as well. There’s a good deal more going on in the field than is reflected in that group.

[Mollie Freier]

Here’s what I have so far: https://hcommons-staging.org/members/mollief/. I’ll probably tinker with it a bit more.

[Mollie Freier]

My name is Mollie, and I’m Professor and Head of Public Services in the Olson Library at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, MI (on the south shore of Lake Superior). My academic background includes the M.S, in Library and Information Science, as well as a master’s and Ph. D. in English (all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

I’m currently working on a book about libraries and librarians in mystery fiction (tentatively titled Book ‘Em: Libraries, Librarians, and Information in Mystery Fiction from 1970-present). I’m also exploring digital humanities, not only as a librarian, but in some work about Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.

I’m so glad that this group was started. Thank you.

[Author]

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