

Lincoln Land Community College professor/librarian Ryan Roberts’ passion for providing people access to information about well-known authors has given him a global platform.

Roberts, the official webmaster for several British authors including Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, has completed a sabbatical project expanding an online bibliography of Julian Barnes’ works (http://bibliography.julianbarnes.com).

“That’s something that as a librarian, being a part of a project that you can create a reference source that’s open to people around the world is meaningful to me,” said Roberts, 45, who has been with LLCC since 2000. “It’s looking at the traditional form of a (descriptive) bibliography through the new lens of online access.”

A 1993 graduate of LLCC, Roberts has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a master’s degree in library and information science; master’s degree in English; a certificate of advanced study, library and information science; and a certificate in special collections, library and information science.

Roberts and his wife, Tricia Hardway, have two children Keil, 8, and Ella, 4. They live in Williamsville.

What is it about English literature that drew you?

“I had my senior year at the U of I, I had a modern literature course, and we were required to read a variety of authors, Julian Barnes amongst them … and I read ‘Flaubert’s Parrot,’ which was Julian’s third novel.

“I read that, the required text, in the summer before my senior year. I read it, and by the second page, bottom of the second page, there’s a passage that says, ‘Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough?’

“At the time, I had a very strong interest in the American poet Carl Sandburg and had done a lot of research into his children’s stories, his ‘Rootabaga Stories,’ and was sort of steeped in Carl Sandburg studies at the time, and when I read that passage about basically about author worship … It resonated with me so much because that’s what I was doing with Carl Sandburg. …

“After I graduated from U of I with my English degree, that year that I delivered flowers, I then proceeded to march through all of Julian Barnes’ other books. …

“I started doing projects based on his books or his writings. In library information science, you do projects. Like for a course called Organization and Access of Information, one of the projects is that you can design a website, so this is 1996, pretty early days of websites … so I created a Julian Barnes website. For a bibliography class, I compiled a bibliography of his articles.

(Roberts compiled for his certificate of advanced study a bibliography of Barnes’ journalism with about 600 items. He began email exchanges with Barnes in 1998.)

“At a certain point, Julian said, ‘Hey, it might be better if the next time you’re passing through London you stop by my house and you go through my clipping books.’… I said, ‘Yes. Indeed.’ I turned to Tricia, and I said, ‘We need passports because we’re going to pass through London because that’s what we do as graduate students with no money.’ "

(After Roberts graduated with his certificate of advanced study, that summer in 1999 he and Tricia went to London, and he spent three days researching in Barnes’ home. His bibliography went from 600 items to over 900 items.).

You recently returned from sabbatical. Was this to update the bibliography?

“The bibliography I had done before was on his journalism, so what I’m doing now is a slightly different beast altogether. …

“What I ended up doing was an online bibliography of Julian Barnes’ publications that is online, searchable, organized by major categories of every book, and then what’s nice about being online is that you can tag it or index it, and then you can take a look at the images. … It’s free. …

“I had for over the course of two years posted 500 unique items from Julian Barnes’ publications, various editions, translations. I posted 500 items, but it took me two years of doing this. The sabbatical allowed me, in the course of one semester, to take it from 500 items to right now it sits at 1,185.

“What I did on the sabbatical was I traveled to London. I spent the better part of five days in his top floor photographing his books. … Then I would measure the book, and I would note how many pages it had, and I’d take all these notes. …

“The result of that is that I have this expansion of the bibliography that will provide a glimpse into not only into the books that have been published, the different editions, but graphically will depict all the covers as well, which is an interesting addition that you don’t get in traditional bibliography.”

 

Contact Tamara Browning: tamara.browning@sj-r.com, 788-1534, twitter.com/tambrowningSJR.
https://www.sj-r.com/news/20190303/someone-to-know-ryan-roberts-bibliographer-of-well-known-authors
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