Computer reconstruction of a 17th-century theater created by Bryn Mawr's CLIR fellow, Christa Williford

Ten academic libraries around the country are participating in a postdoctoral fellowship program, kicked off at Bryn Mawr this August, that is developing a new model of training for scholarly library professionals. Sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the program aims to acquaint scholars with new career opportunities in libraries — and to give libraries the benefit of scholars' disciplinary expertise.

A two-week orientation at Bryn Mawr, led by Bryn Mawr Chief Information Officer and Director of Libraries Elliott Shore, introduced the first cohort of 11 CLIR fellows to broad issues in the rapidly changing field of librarianship and information management. Now the fellows, all recent Ph.D.s in the humanities, are installed in their individual libraries — at Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins University, Lehigh University, North Carolina State University, Princeton University, the University of Alabama, the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia and Yale University — pursuing a wide variety of projects. The fellows will meet electronically each month in a virtual classroom designed by the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science to hear lectures and engage in discussion. Shore leads the meetings along with a guest lecturer.

Bryn Mawr's CLIR fellow is Christa Williford, an alumna of Indiana University's Ph.D. program in Theatre and Drama. Before coming to Bryn Mawr, Williford held a fellowship at the University of Warwick in England, where she studied 17th-century French theater and became adept at three-dimensional modeling and computer visualization of historic theater architecture and set design (see a Web site she developed here). Williford's fellowship project concentrates on three areas: instructional technology, special collections and collection development.

Williford's current instructional-technology project supports Senior Lecturer Jeff Cohen's Cities course on the history of Philadelphia architecture. The class meets at various sites in the Philadelphia area and tours the historic buildings that are its subject; Williford accompanies the class, taking digital photographs. With the help of the Education Technology Center staff in Guild, she hopes to develop a Web-based image archive that will allow students to share observations about the structures they study. ETC staff members are also helping her create a tool that will allow students to collaborate on an annotated bibliography for the course.

In Special Collections, Williford is working to digitize information about a collection of advertising trade cards, with the goal of making it available to the public as a Web-based resource. She is also observing the selection process for a planned library exhibition, next spring, on historic European maps of non-European countries. Her collection-development project may involve work on a Tri-Co Web resource containing information for bibliographers.

Shore, who served on the fellowship program's steering committee, says that the fellows will create new roles for themselves that complement the expertise of librarians with the traditional M.L.S. degree. "Both information management and humanistic scholarship have become increasingly specialized and professionalized," says Shore, who is also a professor of history. "This has created a sort of gap between the producers and the stewards of knowledge. We hope that the CLIR fellows will find ways to bridge this divide."

Williford says that she has already learned a great deal about issues in librarianship and information management and their effect on scholarship. "I don't expect this program to give me skills that will replace those of traditional librarians," she says. "You wouldn't want to set me loose as a cataloger, for instance. But there are some library positions for which a scholar's qualifications are very helpful. This kind of training program is new, but I foresee it fostering mutual respect between librarians and scholars."

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