A Q&A with Penn’s Latin American Studies Librarian

Brie Gettleson speaks about her role as a subject librarian with the Penn Libraries and liaison for the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.

Brie Gettleson stands in the library stacks, hands folded. — Brie Gettleson, Latin American studies librarian in the Center for Global Collections, is now offering office hours at the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.

As the Latin American Studies Librarian in the Center for Global Collections, Brie Gettleson, is the research librarian assigned to students and researchers in the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS). In an effort to expand opportunities, Gettleson, who typically works with 15 to 20 students each semester now offers office hours at CLALS every other Tuesday from noon to 1 p.m.

She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and has lived and conducted research in Central America. Gettleson says she chose library work because she wanted to continue to research and work with students. The biggest challenge is convincing students that librarians want to help, she says. “It’s both our job and we like it.”

A librarian, she says, is “a no-risk, low-stakes kind of person to bounce ideas off of. We’re not grading. We’re just here to have a conversation and to help.”

In a Q&A with Penn Today, Gettleson talks about Latin American resources and makes the case for working with librarians.

What kinds of questions are students interested in exploring with you?

Undergraduate students come to me largely at two different moments: either for a specific research paper for a class or for a thesis or major project.

A lot of times, students come because they’re honestly having difficulty finding materials that relate to their research questions and topics. In the age of the internet, this can seem strange, but the problem is actually that there’s too much out there. I often have students who are coming to me because they’ve been Googling but are struggling to find quality peer-reviewed material. You have everything available to you, and trying to figure out how to efficiently parse through all of the resources can be really overwhelming, especially early in the research process, when you don’t have a really well-defined question. It can also be challenging when you’re trying to do research across multiple languages.

Students have been interested in things like government documentation of gender violence in particular Latin American countries. I also had quite a few undergraduate students reach out to me about how to work with Central American political posters after seeing an exhibition we did last spring, so that was the inverse, where the material itself led students to an avenue of research. Often we’re working with diasporic Latin American students at this this intersection of the scholarly and the personal that a lot of them are interested in pursuing.

What if students have an upcoming project or paper due but are not sure what they want to research?

In that kind of context, I would ask a student generally about their interests. What do they enjoy studying? What do they find themselves going back to? What do they like to read? What do they talk to their friends about? The goal is to find something that’s going to sustain them, by asking what classes they’ve taken, what they enjoyed reading in those classes, what they wrote about and if there is anything that they would want to take further.

What are the strengths of the Libraries’ Latin American collections?

Much of the collection has followed the historic interests of Penn faculty. We have a large Brazilian collection and a lot of material from Mexico and Central America, especially in Mesoamerican archeology over at the Penn Museum Library. In the Kislak Center, there is a substantial Inquisition collection in the Henry Charles Lea Library, and we’re always collaboratively looking for new additions. Both the Kislak and general collections also feature a wealth of materials in Latin America’s Indigenous languages, from colonial manuscripts to bilingual children’s literature.

One of the areas that I’m particularly interested in growing is contemporary ephemera: posters, zines, flyers, and things like that. Students, especially undergraduates, respond to this kind of visual material evidence of social and political movements from various countries from a more contemporary time period. Much of the material I’m trying to track down is material that represents other kinds of voices, including those of indigenous, Afro-descendant, and LGBTQ people that that aren’t always going to be represented by the dominant narrative and may not be found in traditional mediums.

The Center for Global Collections is also becoming more active in supporting open-access resources, which aligns with the priorities of Brigitte Weinsteiger, the Carton Rogers III Vice Provost and director of the Penn Libraries.

For example, there’s a collaborative partnership with the Penn Libraries, the Latin American Research Resources Project, and JSTOR to provide open access to hundreds of books, largely from Argentina. That’s supporting not just the research community at Penn but also around the world, including in Latin America. This also means that when students leave Penn, they still have access to these materials.

What do you read in your spare time?

A lot of science fiction: NK Jemison, Ursula le Guin, and Octavia Butler. I like that science fiction is based in the present but isn’t constrained by history in the same way because it can imagine alternatives.