Dear PhD Students in the Humanities:

We are looking forward to your participation in this year's Humanities Computing/Introduction to Electronic Resources training day, scheduled for September 23, 2003. We anticipate that you will find this introductory program invaluable to your work as research scholars, and ask that you read through the information below, as well as the enclosed packet. Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact Stacia Kozlowski (staciak@northwestern.edu) or Jeeyuhn Yoon Kang (jyo806@northwestern.edu). Please return both the computing questionnaire and the class registration form no later than Monday, September 8. You may complete and send these forms electronically, by following the links in this URL <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/collections/sept232003/index.html>. You may also mail your forms to Stacia Kozlowski, Graduate Program Assistant, Department of English, University Hall 215, Evanston, IL 60208-2240.

The aim of the September 23 sessions is to ensure that entering doctoral students have a solid working overview of those electronic resources that are relevant to their research and are readily available, either generally via the web, or as proprietary databases which are restricted to members of the Northwestern community. While sessions such as the ones being offered on September 23 cannot come close to being exhaustive, they can be an extremely useful beginning.

All participants will attend a 90-minute morning training session on EndNote, a bibliographic software product that humanities scholars are discovering is a powerful tool not only for locating and organizing bibliographic information, but also for managing research databases containing abstracts, text excerpts, and reading notes. So that we may structure these sessions to match the level of computer expertise of the group, we ask-if you have not ready done so by e-mail earlier this summer-that you complete the brief questionnaire enclosed, and return it along with the other necessary papers in this packet. This session will be followed by a 90-minute Faculty Forum, in which Northwestern professors will present examples of their own work in producing intricate, original scholarship using electronic media.

The afternoon of the 23rd will be devoted to subject-specific sessions. Eleven afternoon sessions have been developed, based on the disciplinary interests of the participants, who represent an array of subject areas/departments; these sessions are described on the attached form. We ask that you use the form to select and rank your top two choices for each afternoon session. Each student will take two afternoon classes. The intention, you will see from the list, is to offer cross-disciplinary training with a focus on resources which are not easy to master. The ultimate aim is to offer sessions that span the topical and disciplinary interests of the incoming students. We are not offering any general library reference training on September 23, although we will alert you to other such opportunities.

The schedule of the day's events, and the questionnaire and session selection forms, are included in this mailing. We will determine the time slots for individual sessions once we have received all students' choices.

We look forward to seeing you on September 23.

Sincerely,