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.

LYRASIS was awarded $1.2 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the next stage of community growth and technical development of CollectionSpace. CollectionSpace is the only collections management system led by a nonprofit and designed with input from the community. It offers forward-looking features that include mobile-friendly displays, an open application program interface, and a multitude of custom profiles for museums and other institutions that hold art, artifact, object, and specimen collections of all types and sizes. This new three-year award will fund three key areas to further the CollectionSpace build-out: user community expansion, accelerating progress on the technical roadmap, and the addition of staff to ensure continued high levels of service.

The UCLA Library has received a $5.5 million grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to launch Documenting Global Voices. This new international initiative will preserve at-risk cultural heritage materials and make them publicly available online on a UCLA-hosted website. Through Documenting Global Voices, the library will award grants to archives and cultural heritage organizations around the world. The program will focus on regions with limited capacity for preservation and where archival materials may be in danger of being lost. Documenting Global Voices complements the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, also funded by Arcadia, which provides grants to preserve materials from the pre-industrial era. The new initiative’s contents will include rare and unique materials of historical, cultural, and social significance dating from post-industrialization to the present. The first call for proposals opens December 1, 2018.

Acquisitions

The Stanford Libraries have acquired a copy of Thomas Laird’s Murals of Tibet, published by TASCHEN Books. This rare 498-paged item, measuring 19.7 by 27.6 inches and featuring a number of life-size reproductions of Tibetan Buddhist murals, is one of only a thousand copies produced. Murals of Tibet was produced by photographer Thomas Laird, who has been working in the Himalayas since the 1970s. For the past ten years he has been working to create life-size images of Tibetan Buddhist wall mural paintings, which have been displayed in galleries and private collections across the world. Murals of Tibet features images from the monasteries of Drathang, Gongkar Chode, Jokhang, Shalu, the Lukhang Temple, Jonang, Samye, Gyantse Palkor, the Potala Palace, Sakya, Drepung, and Nechung. These images are organized in a sequence that approximates the route that pilgrims might have taken when going on pilgrimage to these important sites of Tibetan Buddhist learning and practice. Captured using multi-image capture techniques, the paintings are reproduced in high-quality using five colors of ink, including gold. The volume is accompanied by a 528-page scholarly companion volume including contributions from Buddhologists such as Robert Thurman, Heather Stoddard, and Jacob Winkler. Murals of Tibet is available for viewing at the Bowes Art & Architecture Library. To access it, place a request for viewing with the Bowes Library staff at the circulation/reference desk.