ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News From the Field

ACQUISITIONS

William L. Shirer has given to the Coe College library the original manuscript and notes of his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer was a 1925 graduate of Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

A collection of more than five hundred rare books, manuscripts and original drawings, including a first edition and letter by Walt Whitman, has been given to Columbia University. It is the gift of the late Solton Engel and Mrs. Engel of New York.

Syracuse University has acquired original manuscripts and correspondence of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, part of a gift from the estate of the late sculptors James Earle Fraser and Laura Gardin Fraser, in whose home Robinson lived from time to time for nearly twenty years.

The Robinson papers are being transferred from the Office of Academic Development to the Carnegie library, where scholars may consult them.

AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS

University of Illinois has received a $17,169 grant from the U.S. Office of Education for social science research in the field of librarianship. As principal investigator, Herbert Goldhor, director of the U. of I. graduate school of library science at Urbana, will be released half time from his duties to prepare a book on how to do such research. The book is an outgrowth of a course, “Principles of Research Methods,” which Goldhor teaches each fall semester to doctoral students.

ALA, in cooperation with the American Institute of Architects and die National Rook Committee has announced the opening of nominations for the 1968 fourth annual Library Buildings Award program for excellence in the architectural design and planning of libraries. Entries may be submitted by registered architects practicing in the United States for libraries which have been erected here or abroad, completed after January 1, 1963. The program is open to buildings in the following classifications: academic (junior college, fouryear college, university, special); public libraries (including county and state); and school libraries (up to and including secondary schools.)

A jury will be appointed by the American Institute of Architects and will consist of three architects and one representative each of the American Library Association and the National Book Committee. Three librarians will be named to represent each class of libraries. The jury will select one or more of the entries for First Honor Awards for Distinguished Accomplishment in Architecture and will also select for Awards of Merit in Architecture as many exhibits as it deems worthy.

A brochure detailing criteria for the award will be mailed to all members of the American Institute of Architects. Entry forms must be completed by December 14, and submissions in brochure form must be received by January 22, in time for the jury meeting at The Octagon.

The Indiana University libraries announce the continuation of their program designed to give intensive instruction to prospective rare book librarians. The facilities and collections of the Lilly library will be used as a training center. Two Fellows will be selected for a study program intended to familiarize them with bibliographical methods, the antiquarian book trade, and the organization and management of rare book and special collection departments or libraries.

Any graduate of an accredited library school, or person otherwise qualified by experience in the rare book field, and under forty-five years of age, who desires to specialize in rare book librarianship may apply for a fellowship. Fellows are required to remain in residence in Bloomington, Ind., from July 1, 1968, through June 30, 1969, engaged in study programs assigned by members of the Lilly library staff. Each Fellow will receive a stipend of $5,000 for the twelve-month period, payable in twelve monthly installments of $416.66 each. At the conclusion of the year, Fellows are expected to find employment in rare book divisions of college, university, and public libraries or in the rare book trade.

A committee consisting of Robert A. Miller, director of libraries; Cecil K. Byrd, university librarian; Jane G. Flener, assistant director of libraries; David A. Randall, librarian, Lilly library; and William R. Cagle, assistant librarian, Lilly library, will select the Fellows. Fellows will be notified of appointment on or before May 1. Applications must be received in Bloomington on or before March 15. Requests for application forms or inquiries may be directed to William R. Cagle, Assistant Librarian, Lilly Library.

BUILDINGS

The future Library of Congress James Madison memorial building, the much-needed third building for the national library and the memorial to President James Madison, will be constructed by the Architect of the Capitol under the joint direction of the Senate Office Building Commission, the House Office Building Commission, and the Joint Committee on the Library, after consultation with a committee designated by the American Institute of Architects. The Librarian of Congress has established a program in terms of the needs of the library and has developed its program for the third building in terms of overall plans for the coordinated use of the new structure with the two present buildings. The departments of the Library of Congress that will occupy the Madison building, according to present plans, are as follows: The office of the librarian, the administrative department, the copyright office, the law library, the legislative reference service, the processing department, and six divisions of the reference department—the geography and map, manuscript, music, prints and photographs, rare book, and serial divisions.

Emory University broke ground on Sept. 21 for its new $7 million library for advanced studies. The new library, to be completed in twenty-one months, will provide space for over a million books and private study space for over one thousand two hundred persons.

A contribution of $1,275,000 has been made to Elmhurst College by Mr. and Mrs. Albert C. Buehler, Sr., of Barrington, 111., for the construction of a new library.

MEETINGS

Nov. 5-8: Division of university extension of University of Illinois announces the 14th annual Allerton Institute, on Trends in American Publishing sponsored by the graduate school of library science, at Allerton Park.

INTERNATIONAL SCENE

On September 1 the ALA International Relations Office established a new headquarters at 1420 N Street, N.W., in Washington, D.C. Ralph T. Esterquest, librarian of the Francis A. Countway library of medicine in Boston is on a one-year leave to serve as director of the International Relations Office; the assistant director, David R. Hoffman will continue in the Chicago office of the International Relations Office. ALA has signed a contract with the Agency for International Development to provide continuing service to AID in the planning and implementation of overseas library development activity. David T. Donovan, project officer and Juliane M. Heyman, assistant project officer, will work primarily with the Agency for International Development and other government agencies in activities related to this contract. A newsletter, which will assemble information concerning library development in Asia, Africa and Latin America, will be issued by IRO, Washington.

The death of Jaroslav Drtina, secretary of the Federation of Czech Librarians and dean for many years of the library school at Charles University in Prague, has been reported by Sidney Jackson on September 9.

Beginning in mid-September, a daily interlibrary transit service now links the libraries of twelve Ontario universities. The stationwagon service will enable the libraries, located across the province from Windsor to Ottawa, to receive interlibrary loans of all types of library material much more quickly than is possible by mail. The transit scheme is one of the cooperative projects administered by the Ontario Council of University Librarians, representing the fourteen universities, and has been approved and financed by the Committee of Presidents of Universities of Ontario. Operating five days a week, the transit system should enable a library to receive a book from another university library within (at most) thirty-six hours after requesting it by teletype. Headquarters for the transit system are at York University, Toronto, where the project director will be Robert Hitchman. Two Ontario universities, Laurentian at Sudbury and Lakehead at Port

Arthur, will not be served by the motor vehicle system, but extensive use will be made of air parcel post to speed service to them.

MISCELLANY

The Council on Library Resources has contracted with R. A. Morgan Company, Palo Alto, California, for the construction and testing of a prototype of a bibliographer’s camera. The photographic and optical engineering firm will construct an autofocus camera intended to copy at from 1:1 to 1:2 magnification catalog or other bibliographic entries from books onto a paper master to be reproduced on 5 x 3 inch paper, or card, the copies to be processed in a scaled-down office-copying processor. In the second phase of the project the camera will be tested for three months at the Stanford University library under the supervision of Allen B. Veaner, assistant director of university libraries.

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has been awarded a contract in the amount of $198,700 from the United States Office of Education which will support an 18-month study of the availability in United States libraries of original source documents containing information of chemical and chemical engineering interest. In the course of the study, CAS will analyze holdings of nearly 400 libraries throughout the United States and will also study the interlibrary loan activities of a smaller sample of libraries to ascertain how effectively the lending mechanism aids in fulfilling document needs.

The study will take advantage of a computer-searchable bank of data on library holdings now being compiled as a cooperative undertaking by CAS and the United States and foreign library communities. This data bank will include information on holdings of some twelve thousand scientific and technical periodicals. This number comprises about 35 per cent of the periodicals currently being published throughout the world.

A research program designed to devise better ways of coping with the information explosion —especially a body of scientific literature that doubles in size every eight to ten years has been announced by the U.S. Office of Education. The new Library and Information Sciences Research Program is authorized under Title II of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Thirtyeight projects are being undertaken by educational institutions, libraries, and organizations in nineteen states and the District of Columbia.

Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass., will attempt to design a program for its students that will use computers and “dial-access” communication systems to bring library services to their dormitory rooms.

Researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., will explore future library manpower needs and attempt to devise methods of selection, recruitment, training and utilization of personnel to satisfy the increasing demands of information centers and libraries.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., will seek to develop a computerized system for the management of biological and geological specimens in order to make them more readily available to students at all levels and to specialists in the subject areas.

A research demonstration project will be set up in Detroit, Mich., to investigate the problems of providing maximum library services in a rapidly expanding metropolitan area.

An investigation of the current situation regarding the relationship of copyright law to the requirements of present and future information dissemination systems to be undertaken by researchers in Washington, D.C., will attempt to develop a better accommodation between copyright law and information technology.

Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records will be on sale by the Library of Congress to all interested libraries by July 1968. MARC records were developed under the direction of the library’s information systems office in the last year and tested in the pilot phase of the MARC pilot project from November 1, 1966, to July 1, 1967.

To satisfy demands for copies of a MARC test tape, the Library is preparing a sample tape containing several thousand records in the current (MARC I) format for training and experimentation by the library community. The content of this test tape will remain constant —i.e., it will not be updated, and it will contain catalog citations only for English-language monographs.

A brief summary of the project has been issued under the title Project MARC: An Experiment in Automating Library of Congress Catalog Data (16 p.). A limited supply is still available from the Information Systems Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540.

Libraries which would like to display the winning books in the 1967 Southern and Midwestern Books Competitions should apply to Lawrence S. Thompson, Department of Classics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506. Some twenty to thirty books are in each of these exhibits, and they may be kept for one month. Locked cases are necessary. Printed hand-lists are available. There is no charge for the exhibits, but each library must be responsible for insurance and carriage charges.

Mrs. Elizabeth R. Usher, head of the art reference library at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, will lead the Special Libraries Association during its 1967-68 Association year. Her election was announced at the recent SLA 58th Annual Convention in New York City. Serving with Mrs. Usher are the following newly elected association officers: President-Elect, Herbert S. White, executive director of NASA Scientific and Technical Information Facility, Documentation, Inc., College Park, Maryland, Chairman of the Advisory Council, Charles H. Stevens, Project In trek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.; Chairman-Elect of the Advisory Council, Mrs. Charlotte S. Mitchell, head librarian of Miles Laboratories, Inc., Elkhart, Indiana; Treasurer, Jean Deuss, head cataloger, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; and two new Directors, Mrs. Gloria M. Evans, librarian at Parke, Davis & Company, Detroit, Michigan, and Efren W. Gonzalez, director of technical communications in the Scientific Division of Bristol-Myers Products, Hillside, New Jersey.

After nearly thirty years in the Stechert-Hafner Building in New York City Special Libraries Association has moved its headquarters into new quarters in Manhattan. Effective September 11, the association’s new address became 235 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10003.

A current literature display on information science and technology has been prepared under a grant of $15,900 from the National Science Foundation. The grant was awarded to the Special Libraries Association and the work has been done under the supervision of the Documentation Group of the New York Chapter of SLA, originators of the proposal. The basis for the collection is volume two of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, now in preparation.

The collection will probably be made available on loan to library schools.

The Annual Review is divided into chapters on subjects of interest to librarians and information scientists, such as library automation, file organization, content analysis, and user studies. The material will be arranged in order by chapter and reference number, and the Annual Review will serve as a catalog of the collection. It is believed that this will be an up-to-date and evaluated collection of recent literature in information science.

Library schools interested in borrowing the collection should write to Special Libraries Association, Information Science Literature Display, 31 East 10th Street, New York, New York 10003.

Marietta Chicorel has been appointed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) as the United States contact for international projects and inquiries relating to periodicals and serials. Miss Chicorel is a member of the IFLA Committee on Periodical and Serial Publications.

Inquiries relating to international periodicals and serials projects may be directed to Miss Chicorel at the R. R. Bowker Company, 1180 Avenue of tire Americas, New York, New York 10036.

NLW theme for 1968, “Be All You Can Be —Read,” was announced in June during the San Francisco Conference of ALA. The 1968 National Library Week is scheduled for next April 21-27.

The National Library Week Program and the Children’s Book Council announce a new order fulfillment plan for National Library Week display and promotion materials. This year, for the first time, the two organizations will jointly share the shipping and billing facilities maintained by the Children’s Book Council.

This jointly-controlled, exclusive shipping service, beginning in November combined with United Parcel Service delivery in certain areas, will eliminate the delays which have affected some NLW orders in past years.

Correspondence and payments for past NLW orders should still be directed to NLW headquarters, One Park Avenue, New York. A catalog and instructions for ordering new display and promotion items will be issued in November.

A user-oriented immediate-response computerized library system is being developed by the State University of New York at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. The online, real-time system, called the SUNY Biomedical Communication Network, will link the three State University of New York medical center libraries and the University of Rochester medical center library. The SUNY libraries are located on the campuses at Buffalo, Syracuse (Upstate Medical Center), and Brooklyn (Downstate Medical Center). The library of a fourth SUNY medical school now under development at the University Center at Stony Brook will be linked to the network.

Scheduled to begin operation in September 1968, the network is a pilot project for a possible university-wide computerized library. A staff of twenty-two full-time librarians and information and computer specialists are creating the system.

The network will make it possible for faculty, researchers and students to search the list of recent medical books and journal articles available in the participating libraries in less than two minutes. The list includes almost one million items which have been published in the last five years.

As part of the project, books are being indexed by chapter.

In the future, libraries at the British Museum, Oxford University and Cambridge University in Great Britain and additional United States universities may be linked to the network.

The network will work toward the development of centralized ordering, shared cataloging, improvements both for internal operations and expanded reader services.

Depth indexing should provide information as to the efficiency and desirability of leading the user to materials not revealed by the conventional card catalog entry.

A major advantage is that the user will not have to describe any information from secondary sources to locate material. This minimizes the chances for error, speeds use of the library, and if interlibrary loan is required, eliminates the time-consuming and costly step of verification, since all input data has already been verified for accuracy. The multiple transcriptions involved in present interlibrary loan activities are also eliminated.

Under the computer system, input-output terminals that look like typewriters will be located in each member library. The computer will ask the user several questions to define the problem in as specific terms as possible; for example, the reader will be asked what type of information he wishes—author, title or subject. If he asks for an author or title search he will be asked to indicate whether book, journal records, or both are to be searched. If he desires a subject search, the appropriate headings will be requested and he will supply them in his own form, with further interrogation by the computer defining them if necessary. Such things as languages, time, and population (i.e. age group) may be defined. In less than two minutes, the computer will sort through records of magazine articles and medical books, and type titles of those which will fill the request.

When the reader selects a book, the computer will give him the call number if the book is in the library he is using.

At the Upstate Medical Center, the computer will also check to see if the book is out and when it is due, inform the user, then send a letter to the current borrower telling him the book is needed by another.

If the book is not in the user’s library, the computer will automatically arrange an interlibrary loan and provide the approximate delivery date. When the user selects an article in a magazine available on any one of the sixty state university campuses, the computer will automatically make a request for a duplicate of the article.

To accomplish this, the Upstate medical center has been directing a program since September 1966 that will put over fifteen thousand book titles and data describing seven hundred fifty thousand medical journal articles into a computer memory bank.

The books include all those owned by participating libraries which have been published since 1962. Articles include those in periodicals received by libraries in the network, those in the twenty-two thousand periodicals currently received by all sixty state university campuses and the articles in MEDLERS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System), a monthly index of three thousand of the world’s most important medical journals published by the National Library of Medicine.

The Upstate Medical Center Computer Center which will house the SUNY Biomedical Communications Network is currently in the planning stage. The network is now headquartered in the Upstate medical center library.

The Southern Education Reporting Service library, which has been collecting material on race relations since 1954, is compiling a directory of primary and secondary source material on the Negro in America. Already located are seven hundred libraries and organizations having collections on the American Negro, slavery, reconstruction, urban sociology, civil rights movements, and so forth.

The collections are located in traditional libraries—city, state and university—as well as in special libraries maintained by government agencies, activist organizations, research institutes, and churches. Considerably more sources are believed to exist, and SERS wishes to locate them—picture collections, newspaper clipping files, books, manuscripts and unpublished material, or correspondence.

Whatever the form of the material, if it bears any relationship to the subject of Negro life and history, the SERS librarian would like to have a brief note giving the name, location, area of specialty, type and quantity of materials. It is anticipated the directory will be published sometime next year. Information may be sent to Walter Schatz, Librarian; Southern Education Reporting Service, 1109 19th Avenue South; Nashville, Tenn. 37212.

PUBLICATIONS

A grant from the Council on Library Resources to ALA to enable its recently established Information Science and Automation Division to publish a quarterly Journal of Information Science and Library Automation, has been made in the amount of $21,009.

The new journal, limited to substantive material, is planned to allow librarians to look at the literature as a whole and to encourage a systems approach to automation. This is particularly important as library automation begins to move from the theoretical and experimental stages to the establishment of operating systems.

Library Manpower: Needs and Utilization,the proceedings of a special conference on library manpower held in Washington in the spring of 1967, cosponsored by the Office for Library Education and the Library Administration Division of ALA with the cooperation of the National Book Committee, is available from the ALA Publishing Department, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611, at $1.50 per copy. Please remit with order when possible.

The Documentation Group of the Washington, D.C. Chapter, Special Libraries Association announces the publication of the Proceedings of their 1966-67 lecture series, entitled, Practical Problems of Library Automation; priced at $2.00 per copy. Checks should be made payable to: Documentation Group, Washington, D.C. Chapter, Special Libraries Association and prepaid orders should be sent to: Miss Ellen Mahar, 4341 Nebraska Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016.

The Report on the Consumer Survey of New Serial Titles, directed by A. F. Kuhlman for the Joint Committee on the Union List of Serials and the Library of Congress, has been published. The committee has sent one copy of the report to all libraries and agencies that subscribe to and/or participate in or cooperate with New Serials Titles and to library schools accredited by ALA. The purpose of this survey has been to determine with the help of users of NST how useful it is as a comprehensive current union list of serials and how it can be improved so as to provide effective bibliographical control of serials that started publication since January 1, 1950.

Research in Educationis an important new indexing and abstracting service published monthly by the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) of the U.S. Office of Education. Each issue covers newly issued research reports, as well as descriptions of research in progress, not only under USOE sponsorship but from private and other public agencies as well. RIE has four sections: report resumes, report indexes, project resumes, and project indexes. Indexes are by investigator, subject, institution, program, and contract and grant number. Arranged by accession number, the abstracts are succinct and comprehensive, and the descriptors are listed for each. All reports abstracted are available for purchase in hard copy, or microfiche from Bell & Howell Company in Cleveland. RIE itself may be subscribed to for $11.00 per year (or $13.75 foreign) from the Government Printing Office.

The Library-College Journal; A Magazine of Educational Innovation is scheduled to appear with volume I, No. 1, in January, 1968. This will be a quarterly publication devoted to observation, opinion and research pertinent to the academic library’s involvement in all phases of teaching, learning, and independent study. The Library-College Journal will carry quality articles and departmental features which will be intended equally for those in college and university administration, academic librarianship, and classroom teaching. It will be published by The Library-College Associates, Inc., and will have the following persons as editorial advisors: Louis Shores, Florida State University; Dan Sillers, president of Jamestown College, N. Dakota; Robert Jordan, Council on Library Resources; W. Stafford North, dean of instruction at Oklahoma Christian College; Thomas Minder, director of Pittsburgh Regional Library Center; Sister Helen Sheehan, librarian and trustee at Trinity College of Washington, D.C.; and Howard Clayton, librarian at State University of New York, Brockport, N.Y. Subscription rates for the new journal will be $8.00 per year. Further information concerning The Library-College Journal may be obtained from Howard Clayton, Box 173, Brockport, N.Y., or from any of the editorial advisors.