About the English Reading Room

When the English Reading Room (ERR) was established in 1950 under the dedicated stewardship of the founding librarian Grace Hunt, departmental reading rooms with core disciplinary collections and comfortable reading appointments were not uncommon on large university campuses such as UCLA. The original ERR holdings were formed from the bequeathed personal book collection of Frederick Blanchard, the first Chair of the English Department, along with an endowment from Blanchard’s estate which supported acquisitions. From its inception, the ERR has been a cherished departmental resource serving a community of scholars.

Over time, the ERR gained subsequent benefactors, including Bradford and Josephine Booth, Hugh Dick, Majl Ewing, Lily Bess Campbell, Joan Palevsky, Josephine Miles, Nancy Ross, the Nancy Rhodes Trust, the family of Shari Levitt, James and Geneva Phillips, and many other faculty members and patrons of the English Reading Room. Such ardent support allowed the ERR to survive and thrive throughout the years, and in 2003, a considerable bequest from the estate of Grace Hunt helped ensure that the ERR would remain a robust and vital department resource. In 2004, the ERR was renamed to honor the memory of Grace Hunt. Welcoming and devoted to the scholarship of students and faculty users, the Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room commemorates the individual who embodied those very traits herself.

Students and faculty of the UCLA Department of English enjoy access to the collections and resources housed in the ERR. A departmental library such as the ERR is uniquely positioned to supplement and complement the enterprise-level library resources and services offered by the University Library. The ERR offers user-focused services and resources in support of the teaching and research mission of the Department of English. Its primary users include undergraduate English majors, English Department graduate students, and English Department faculty. Under the stewardship of the English Reading Room Librarian Lynda Tolly and the faculty advisors of the English Reading Room Committee chaired by Professor Arvind Thomas, the ERR maintains a thoughtfully curated collection supporting the scholarship and teaching of the department.

Materials housed in the ERR include imperative critical works, standard editions of canonical authors, as well as works of emerging authors. The ERR collection also supports emerging areas of disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship aligned with the teaching and research interests of department faculty. Space limitations necessitate careful collection assessment and rightsizing to balance the need for quiet and comfortable user space with collection space. Therefore, the ERR maintains a collection of approximately 30,000 volumes, including primary texts, academic monographs, and selected reference resources. The ERR also maintains subscriptions to principal journal titles as well as subscriptions to some smaller press journals and periodicals that are not readily available online. As trends in format usage continue to evolve, the ERR Librarian will need to continue balancing the scope, size, and composition of the collection with increasing demands for user space to meet the ongoing needs of department constituents while also meeting the evolving technology needs of users.

Since the collection is carefully curated and managed, the ERR provides a useful and authoritative browsing collection for students. In addition, ERR services include personalized research support to the students and faculty of the department. The ERR Librarian offers disciplinary-focused information literacy and library research instruction as well as sophisticated reference and research consultation services to users, including in-depth research consultation services. The ERR Librarian makes good use of professional development and continuing education opportunities to remain informed of current trends in academic libraries and applies appropriate practices in order to provide the highest quality of service to ERR constituents.

For more than 50 years, the ERR has enjoyed the devotion of many students and faculty members. Some have called the reading room the “heart of the department” since it provides a space for English majors to read, write, study, and feel at home. Indeed, both anecdotal and quantitative data confirm that the ERR provides essential resources to the students of the English Department, both in terms of user space and collection use. In a city as large as Los Angeles, and on a campus the size of UCLA, the ERR helps foster a sense of community and belonging. The ERR also serves as an amiable site for Literary Salons hosted by Creative Writing faculty as well as providing a venue for readings by students in the Creative Writing program. Reading events hosted in the ERR provide an intimate setting for interaction between students and visiting authors.