ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Hugh Thompson

The Michigan Research Libraries Triangle(MRLT), a consortium of Michigan State University, the Uni- versity of Michigan, and Wayne State University li- braries, has been awarded a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title II-A pro- gram to electronically link its online catalogs and related files. The $300,000 grant will allow the MRLT to build upon the links among the three research libraries to provide library ser- vices to other Michigan residents and businesses via dial access, and to other libraries through statewide library networking.

Oberlin College Library has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation to support new collection preservation initiatives. The funds will be used over a three-year period to select books and other materials that are acidic to be sent for deacidification treatment or reformatting.

The State University of New York (SUNY) Council of Library Directors has been awarded a grant of $147,730 from the SUNY Office of Educational Technology. A pilot test using SUNYNet and the NOTIS X39.50 interface at the University of Buffalo will provide online access to Wilson periodicals index/abstract databases, the ERIC database, and the monographic collections of three university centers using NOTIS. The project is expected to lay the groundwork for substantial SUNY-wide shared collection management and for future document delivery studies.

Also at SUNY, the State University College at Geneseo, in conjunction with SUNY Plattsburgh, the State University Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome, Monroe Community College, and SUNY New Paltz, has received $27,750 from the SUNY Office of Educational Technology to purchase ARIEL software to be used in improving the interlibrary loan system. The new system will provide for document transmission over the Internet, and will result in cost reduction, more efficient use of staff, increased access to information, faster delivery, and higher-quality docu- ments.

The University of Michi- gan has been awarded a two- year grant from the U.S. De- partment of Education under the Foreign Periodicals Pro- gram to develop a nationally prominent and accessible collection of periodicals that chronicles the worldwide re- surgence of Islam. The bud- get for the first year of the grant is $74,000. The project will allow the university library to extend the scope of its current collections relating to Is- lam through purchasing scarcely held journals, newspapers, newsletters, and underground political publications in both Western and ver- nacular languages.

The University of Michigan Library has also been awarded a second year of funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title II-C program for a project to catalog 5,500 retrospective serial titles from the Labadie Collection in the Special Collections Library. The budget for year two of this project is $81,850. The Labadie Collection, a gift from Joseph A. Labadie, who was known as Detroit’s “gentle anarchist,” is known for its extensive materials on radical history in the U.S. In recent years, the collection has expanded to include substantial holdings in civil rights, the student protest and anti-war movements of the turbulent sixties, modern anarchist and Trotskyist literature, as well as material on gay liberation, radical feminism, pacifism, amnesty, and the anti- nuclear movements.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the Nebraska State Historical Society have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access to participate in the

Ed. note: Entries in this column are taken from library newsletters, press releases, and other sources. To ensure that your grant and acquisition news is considered for publication, write to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795.

U.S. Newspaper Program to preserve and provide access to all newspapers ever published in the U.S. Funding for the three-year project totals $498,631. The grant will be used to catalog the significant newspaper collections of the two agencies, including most newspapers published in Nebraska from its territorial days to the present as well as a unique collection ol Czech-American newspapers.

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville,Libraries have been granted $46,883 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to survey Tennessee newspapers in preparation foi a subsequent cataloging and preservation project. The addition of Tennessee brings tc 47 the number of states, and two territories, participating in the U.S. Newspaper Program.

Acquisitions

The papers of Dr. Horace J. McMillan, alocal area physician, community leader, and civil rights advocate, have recently been deposited with the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as part of its Africana component. The materials are an important record of Santa

Barbara’s first African American medical general practitioner and local civil rights advocate who made an enduring impact on civic affairs in Santa Barbara. As a community leader and ac- tivist, McMillan was a champion of affordable housing for low- income and minority people and was a primary mover in improving the quality of health services, housing, employment, and education in the Santa Bar- bara community.

The papers of Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer have been acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the Univer- sity of Texas at Austin from the author’s widow, Alma Singer, and a group of individual Texas donors. The archive con- tains correspondence, photographs, clippings, and notes, as well as manuscripts for much of Singer’s published works and several unpub- lished and untranslated works of fiction and drama. Also among the materials are page proofs, manuscripts, and other prepublication materials for Meshugah, Singer’s newly discov- ered posthumous novel that was published serially in 1981-83. There are also many per- sonal photographs.

Isaac Bashevis Singer c. 1974

An extensive collection of news clippingsabout the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska is now available in the Research Library of the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Vir- ginia. The materials from Michael Coumbe, a resident of Alaska—nearly 8,000 clippings taken mostly from Alaska newspapers—have been photocopied onto acid-free paper and bound into 55 volumes arranged chronologically from March 1989 to August 1990. The library has also acquired monographs on the oil spill to broaden its holdings on the disaster.

The archives of PEN American Center havebeen acquired by the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton Univer- sity Libraries. Since its founding in 1922 to pro- mote friendship and cooperation among po- ets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists, the center has become very active in the struggle for freedom of expression and a free press, and against arbitrary censorship and imprisonment of writers. Among the archives are let- ters from writers Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Pearl Buck, John O’Hara, and Henry Miller dealing with everything from defense of intellectual free- dom to applications for mem- bership. Of particular interest are files pertaining to the po- litical problems of writers un- der Nazi Germany, communist regimes, and military dictator- ships in Greece, Latin America, and other places.

Over 1,000 books ongames and gaming have been acquired from a private collector by the Uni- versity of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). The collection, which includes many European im-

Photo credit: Nancy Crampton prints dating from the 16th century, greatly extends the university’s holdings in this area. The purchase was funded by the UNLV Foundation, the College of Hotel Administration, and the Library’s Endowments.

Materials relating to the Los Angelesriots of 1992 are being archived at the University of Southern California’s Doheny Memorial Library by librarian Anthony Anderson. The material includes the Christopher Commission Report of 1991, along with 67 boxes of materials relating to the commission’s investigation of the Los Angeles Police Department following the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King. Also included are the Webster Commission archives, 58 boxes of materials on the city’s handling of the riots, plus more than 40 additional reports, books, and related government and privately printed documents. The collection even includes transcripts of sermons given from Los Angeles pulpits following the riots.