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 University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill has received $1.75 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will allow the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) at the Wilson Special Collections Library to preserve and digitize rare audiovisual recordings from UNC’s libraries and from six partners across the state. Speeches that U.S. Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy delivered at UNC- Chapel Hill, recordings of Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, performances by North Carolina icons Andy Griffith and Doc Watson, and street scenes filmed across North Carolina in the 1930s are among the items that global audiences and researchers will soon be able to hear and view online. The three-year grant, the largest ever made to the university libraries, will address collections from SFC and other parts of the Wilson Special Collections Library, as well as at six partner institutions across the state. SFC will partner with six institutions through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, a statewide digitization and publishing program based at Wilson Library. The State Archives of North Carolina, the Southern Appalachian Archives at Mars Hill University, and the Forest History Society in Durham have already committed to work with SFC. The library will hire two audio engineers and two audiovisual assistants to manage audio preservation and digitization at its studio in Wilson Library, as well as a software developer. A specialized contractor will handle film and video materials. Digitized materials will be available through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and Wilson Special Collections Library digital collections portal.

University of California (UC)-Davis Library has received a $3.3 million commitment from Warren Winiarski, grape grower, winemaker, land preservationist, and philanthropist, to build a comprehensive collection of wine writers’ work in the world at the library at the UC-Davis. Dedicated to preserving the heritage of wine and its international cultural importance, Winiarski has supported the UC-Davis Library for many years. The Winiarski Family Foundation’s gift will preserve and increase access to the library’s collection of work from some of the world’s most prominent wine writers, including Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. Broadly defined, wine writers include wine book authors, editors, wine journalists and critics, wine columnists, bloggers, and other editorial wine content creators. With this support, the library will grow its collection of storytellers who influence both the wine industry and public appreciation of wine and make their work accessible on a global scale.

The Washington University in St. Louis Libraries’ (WUSTL) Film and Media Archive has been awarded a grant of $27,228 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to fund the project “Level Playing Field: Digitizing and Disseminating William Miles’ ‘Black Champions’ Interviews.” The yearlong grant will allow the libraries to digitize interviews filmed for Miles’ three-part documentary series, which aired on pubic television in 1986. Portions of the interviews used in the final programs will be reassembled with those that were not included, so that unrestricted, complete access copies can be delivered via the web. The project will make available, for the first time, 32 complete interviews, totaling 18 hours of content. In addition to digitization, the project includes the creation of athlete biographies and the enhancement of metadata records. Interview subjects for the documentary series include former St. Louis Cardinal Curt Flood, Olympic medalist Wilma Rudolph and football player and film star Jim Brown. Covering sports from the early years of the 20th century through the 1980s, the interviews shed light on a range of significant topics, including Negro League baseball; treatment of African American athletes before and during desegregation; international competitions, such as the Olympic Games; and many other noteworthy subjects. An Emmy Award winner and Academy Award nominee, Miles (1931–2013) was an accomplished African American documentary filmmaker whose films focused on the cultural experiences and achievements of African Americans in such diverse realms as the military, the space program, sports, and New York neighborhood life. His works include “I Remember Harlem” (1981), a comprehensive look at the New York borough’s diverse history; “Men of Bronze” (1977), the definitive story of the black American soldiers in World War I known as the “Harlem Hellfighters”; and many others. The WUSTL acquired the William Miles Collection in 2005 from the filmmaker. Materials in the collection include interviews, stock footage, manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs.

Washington University Libraries’ Film and Media Archive will digitize the “Black Champions” documentary with the help of an NHPRC grant.