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Purpose
 
Contents
Introduction |
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... Stanford's libraries have been
crucial to developing a highly e∂ective and successful undergraduate writing program...
Andrea Lunsford and Malgorzata Schaefer, coordinator of instructional services, Information Center, in the stacks, Green Library.
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Mike Keller and his magnificent staff make enormous contributions every year to undergraduate research at Stanford. When I became director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, I immediately turned to the libraries for support in achieving the goals of this required writing sequence: to introduce students to university-level research; and to guide them in the process of articulating a critical research question, conducting the research necessary to answer it, and developing an extensive argument based on that research. The response I received from the libraries was not only gratifying but genuinely moving to me: I have never taught at a university whose libraries were more invested in the work of first-and second-year undergraduates. More specifically, the libraries (with the leadership of Malgorzata Schaefer, coordinator of instructional services, Information Center) developed a terrific on-line program, Stanford's Key to Information Literacy, for students to use in familiarizing themselves with the libraries even before they arrive on campus. In addition, Schaefer and her colleagues developed a special "PWR page" for students in first-and second-year writing courses to use as a valuable short cut to the resources they most frequently consult. And in what I can only call above-and-beyond duty, librarians provide detailed and specially tailored workshops for every single PWR1 class.
I am also especially indebted to John Mustain, rare book librarian and classics bibliographer, and Maggie Kimball, university archivist, both in Special Collections; and Elena Danielson in the Hoover Institution Archives. These librarians have opened the doors of Stanford's enormously rich resources to our first-year students. The results of this partnership are very exciting: PWR students now routinely publish their research in journals on campus, use their research to apply for numerous grants and fellowships and internships, and increasingly base their later work on honors theses or graduating papers on research they began in their PWR classes-with extensive support and help from Stanford's libraries.
In sum, Stanford's libraries have been crucial to developing a highly effective and successful undergraduate writing program and to bringing students to think of themselves as writers and as researchers from their first term at university. They deserve our most sincere thanks.
Andrea Lunsford
Currently the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English, Claude and Louise Rosenberg Jr. Fellow, and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Andrea Lunsford has designed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in writing history and theory, rhetoric, literacy, and intellectual property. Lunsford earned her BA and MA degrees from the University of Florida, and she completed her PhD in English at The Ohio State University (1977). Her interests include rhetorical theory, women in rhetoric, collaboration, cultures of writing, style, the graphic novel, and technologies of writing. She has written or coauthored fourteen books including The Everyday Writer; Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse; Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing; and Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women and the History of Rhetoric, as well as numerous chapters and articles. Her most recent book is Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies.
Lunsford has conducted workshops on writing and program reviews at scores of North American universities, and has served as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the Modern Language Association Division on Writing.
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