Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

Ed. note: Send your grants and acquisitions to Ann-Christe Galloway, production editor, C&RL News, email: agalloway@ala.org.

The Binghamton University Libraries were awarded a Council on Library and Information Resources Recordings at Risk grant for the “Learning from Legends: Reflections on the 1960s Collection” project. The grant award is for $16,552 and was one of only 16 selected from the total of 51 applications.

The yearlong pilot project entails preserving, digitizing, and publishing a gift collection of original recorded interviews with 278 civil rights leaders, activists, women’s rights leaders, politicians, and Vietnam War veterans from the 1960s. The digitization of the recordings will make these historic materials broadly available to researchers and the public.

Once the audio interviews are converted from microcassettes to digital files, Binghamton will hire five students from the Equal Opportunity Program on campus to participate in an internship. The students will prepare metadata for the files and make minor edits, as needed. In the future, another cohort of students will select excerpts from the digital files and combine them with photographs, short biographies of the individuals interviewed, and other educational content and bring the files to publication as Open Educational Resources.

The “Learning from Legends: Reflections on the 1960s Collection” is part of the Libraries’ Center for the Study of the 1960s, which is the nation’s first virtual center promoting excellence in research, scholarship, teaching, and programs in the social, cultural, and political history of the United States during the 1960s.

Arizona State University (ASU) has been awarded a $380,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year implementation project to reinvent the library’s strategy and practice for open-stack print collections. The work will enable ASU Library to design and develop inclusive library print collections for ASU Library to engage, educate, and inspire scholars and learners of the ASU community.

Under the leadership of University Librarian Jim O’Donnell and Associate University Librarian for Collections and Strategy Lorrie McAllister, the project—“The Future of the Arizona State University Library Print Collection: A Collaborative and Data-driven Approach to Stack Design and Curation”—follows a yearlong planning process, supported by the Mellon Foundation, in which ASU Library identified issues and options affecting the design of the next generation of open-stack print collection for a research library.

As libraries adapt to new pathways for organizing information and access in the digital age, institutions face the important challenge of preserving print collections in ways that best serve the public. What becomes of the print collection that users see on open shelves in an age when more and more of libraries’ collections are shelved offsite? Rather than viewing these new forms of access as a threat to print, the ASU Library recognizes a vital opportunity to leverage the design and curation practices in ways that engage a broader spectrum of students and scholars in new ways.

The vision for revitalizing public engagement with print comes at a key moment in ASU’s plans to renovate its largest library—Hayden Library—and grow student enrollment to 200,000 by the year 2025. As a result, ASU Library must rethink every aspect of its services in order to innovate and scale support for scholars and learners who come from a variety of backgrounds and take many approaches to their education.