Reference Interview with Kim Holifield of the de Grummond – Read It Real Good

Hi y’all. I’m in the last semester of a Master’s Degree in Library Studies at UW-Madison and I’m taking a class on Reference Services. For an assignment, we could choose anyone to shadow or interview who provides reference to a population. I challenged myself to find a professional reference provider of children/youth related-materials who did not work in a public library setting. I started researching institutions with children’s literature collections and was successful in finding this helpful list. 

First, I reached out to The Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota because they are in the same upper Midwest region as I am. I got an email from their curator (who suggested I wasn’t really looking for a collection like theirs and should consider talking to public library reference staff), but she never got back to me about setting up an interview. Next I contacted the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at The University of Southern Mississippi and got a very enthusiastic response about setting up an interview.

On February 28th I had a wonderful Zoom chat with Kim Holifield, the Assistant Curator and Archivist of the de Grummond Collection. Our interview was more of an open conversation where I asked her a few specific questions:

• How is preparation for your book festival going & what is your role as a curator with the festival?
• How big is your team? You have such a large collection…
• I noticed that before 2011, the Ezra Jack Keats Awards were hosted by New York Public Library. Was Keats’ work already at the de Grummond then? Is that part of why the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation came to the de Grummond to be the new home of the award?
• How do you feel about your role as a person who provides reference in so many ways? Can you talk more about the daily work you do?
• Do you all work with professors who teach children’s literature? Are there a lot of children’s literature-focused courses at your university?
• Can you talk about how you feel working with the materials? To get to sit with history and people’s art. How do you feel about that responsibility as a librarian?

Reflection:

Through our discussion, I learned that the de Grummond is one of the largest collections of children’s literature in the world (around 300,000 books and 1,500 authors/illustrators’ original materials). They also house young adult books, graphic novels, and comics. Though their collection showcases many well-known authors and illustrators, they also make an effort to shine a light on the work of lesser-known authors and illustrators.

I learned a lot about the major event they put on called the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival (which will take place April 9th-11th this year) and the Ezra Jack Keats Awards. For the Children’s Book Festival, Kim Holifield works with Curator Karlie Herndon to create the exhibits. At the de Grummond they have permanent and rotating exhibits. Some of their popular permanent exhibits are for Tasha Tudor, Ezra Jack Keats, and Margaret and H.A. Rey, but especially during the festival period, the other exhibit spaces change to focus on the work of visiting authors and illustrators. For example, because author/illustrator Will Hillenbrand will be a featured speaker this year, his art and writing will be highlighted in the exhibits. In the lobby of the de Grummond, every year they display and celebrate the winners of the Ezra Jack Keats Award. The de Grummond works with the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation to house the Ezra Jack Keats Awards and staff works with a part time Ezra Jack Keats Coordinator. They also work with the department of library science to put on the book festival. Kim Holifield shared how the festival gives the authors and illustrators invited the chance to reflect on children’s books creators they grew up admiring and  is a celebration of children’s book history.

The fact that the de Grummond is able to accomplish so much with only a team of 3 people is amazing. Their team is a curator, assistant curator and a collections specialist. Kim Holifield is not only the assistant curator, but is also their archivist. She accessions and processes the collection. Student workers help her with the accessioning but she processes the materials. She has a background in English, U.S. History and taught for fifteen years. The de Grummond is working to increase their outreach to local schools and to invite teachers and students to visit campus and the collection. The de Grummond has also digitized a significant portion of their collections, so people are able to access their materials and resources that way. Anyone can access the digital collections; you don’t have to be in the state of Mississippi. They also work with children’s literature professors in the English department, who bring their undergrad and graduate students to visit the collections. 

I enjoyed learning the story of how Keats found his way to the de Grummond in the 1970s and trusted it as a repository that would steward his art and manuscripts. Harvard was interested, but they wanted to pick and chose from his collection. Keats wanted a place that would take it all indiscriminately. I got to learn a bit about Professor de Grummond and how she started to build the collection; she’d send letters to authors and illustrators saying she’d take all and everything! The de Grummond was happy to house Keats’ entire collection and to share his story with the world.

I asked Kim how she feels about reference. She told me she loves it and handles most of the research and reference questions, but because they are such a niche collection, they don’t get as many reference requests as other collections. Sometimes she can go months without research inquiries, but she’s had everything from three in a day to a few a week. This is in line with our conversations in class; some libraries/research collections don’t see the volume of reference requests they used to. She receives requests from graduate students who are able to visit campus, but has also worked with international researchers looking for information and/or scans. She enjoys tricky requests and digging to find answers for patrons. The de Grummond also sometimes gets questions from community groups and organizations from the hometowns of authors and illustrators whose work is featured in their collection. 

While chatting about reference with Kim, I thought of the quote from our textbook “The best reference librarians develop an intuition for when to be information providers and when to be information literacy instructors” (Cassell & Hiremath, 2018). Reference is about the balance between showing and telling, giving the tools and providing a space for exploration, learning, and growth. At the de Grummond, staff provide access to rich resources as well as a physical space for research and learning.

I wrapped up our conversation by asking Kim how she feels about working with the materials and the responsibility. She feels it’s an honor to be given these materials, to take care of them, to be entrusted with the authors/illustrators’ legacies. She talked about being able to see the depth of work that went into the manuscripts (marks and edits on pages) and art (sketches, drafts and crumpled papers), first hand. She also talked about the joy of being able to read children’s fanmail and the honesty and appreciation in those letters to authors and illustrators.

Thank you to Kim Holifield and the de Grummond for gifting me your time. I’m so glad I got to learn more about the work you do to preserve children’s literature for generations to come. I can’t wait to come down and visit one day!

References

Cassell, K.A., & Hiremath, U. (2018). Reference and Information Services : An Introduction: Fourth Edition. Ala Neal-Schuman.