ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Alfred University’s Herrick Memorial Library, Alfred, New York, has acquired an extensive archive of correspondence by novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), as well as the corrected typescript of her 1926 essay, “Jones and Wilkinson.” The items are a gift of Evelyn T. Openhym of Wellsville, New York, a longtime Alfred benefactor. The Woolf acquisitions, which date from 1897 to 1933, include nine letters to the novelist’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell; 22 to her brother, Thoby Stephen; another 17 and a postcard to essayist and art critic, Clive Bell; and a letter to Siegfried Sassoon. The latter two items have never previously been published.

•Bowling Green State University’s Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green, Ohio, has acquired a unique collection of books and periodicals, personal papers, and other research materials dealing with the counterculture of the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s. A gift of the estate of William F. Bingle, the collection reflects various aspects of Ringle’s teaching, research, and bibliographic work in the areas of cultural anthropology, ethnobotany, and ethnopharmacology, and covers such topics as radical social history and politics, the drug culture, mysticism and spiritual life, communal living, and the underground press. Several hundred rare small press monographs, plus broadsides, leaflets, flyers, pamphlets, and clippings are also included. Ringle, who spent seven years teaching anthropology at Iowa State University, established the Bluff Creek Theoretical Institute, what he hoped would become a subsistence commune of working scholars and artists in Boone, Iowa, where he lived until his death.

•The University of Pittsburgh Library has received a private library of 20th-century fine press books, first editions, autograph letters, wood block prints, and wood engravings from the estate of the late Martha Leuba. The collection consists of more than 11,000 volumes, including many rare and fine books; more than 1,000 original wood block prints and engravings; and nearly 1,000 classical records. Also included are more than 5,000 private press and trade books illustrated with relief prints; hundreds of examples of fine printing and fine press books; and works covering the history and background of 20th-century printing, relief print techniques, private presses, typeface design, typography and the alphabet, calligraphy, and printing processes. More than just a collector’s library, the collection also contains many books by and about George Santayana, George Saintsbury, Logan Pearsall Smith, Norman Douglas, T.S. Eliot, Louise Imogen Guiney, and others.

•The University of Texas at Arlington has acquired quired three major collections relating to the history of New Spain and Mexico. Two of the collections, which include 19th-century Mexican newspapers and books relating to the Mexican War, were purchased from rare book dealers in Mexico. The third collection, made up primarily of manuscripts and documents, was purchased from a New York bookseller. The latter is by far the largest, consisting of approximately 8,000 items produced in New Spain and Mexico from 1556 to 1954. Of special interest are documents relating to the famous landholders of Coahuila y Tejas, the Marqueses de San Miguel de Aguayo, Condes de San Pedro del Alamo. In addition, there are a number of manuscripts and documents relating to such Mexican leaders as Iturbide, Santa Anna, and Porfirio Diaz. Maximilian’s Empire is brought to light in the papers of Miguel Lopez, who was commander of Empress Carlotta’s regiment of dragoons. Other items pertain to the Mexican Revolution, including reports from Madero, memoirs of soldiers, telegrams from the battlefields, daily division reports, and communications sent between General Navarrete and Colonel Naranjo.

•The University of Texas at Austin has received a privately held collection of 68 volumes written or owned by England’s Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a noted jurist and scholar of Oriental languages who is considered to be the father of comparative linguistics. In 1786 while serving as a justice of the Supreme Court of India, he was the first to suggest that Greek and Latin were related to Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. The Jones collection includes books written or translated by Jones as well as books from his personal library, many of them first editions. Highlights of the collection include the first English-language grammar of the Persian language, written by Jones in 1771; the first London edition (1790) of Sakuntala, a classic play by the Indian author Kalidasa, translated by Jones from the Sanskrit; and Jones’s 1779 translation of the speeches of Isaeus, an ancient Greek orator, in causes concerning the law of succession of property in Athens.

•Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Libraries, Blacksburg, recently acquired the papers of Johanna E. Schroeder for the libraries’ International Archive of Women in Architecture. Schroeder is a native of the Netherlands and a retired professor of architecture at Virginia Commonwealth University. The collection consists of an extensive number of original architectural drawings and specifications of her designs, photographs, subject files, and correspondence. Also included are plans, contracts, and deeds for the Stichting Reitveld Schroder Huis (originally commissioned by her mother) in Utrecht, designed by Gerrit Thomas Reitveld.

Grants

•Brandeis University Libraries, Waltham, Massachusetts, have been awarded an $800,000 challenge grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to endow their collections in the humanities. The grant will provide the libraries with an endowment of $3.2 million at the end of three years to be used to increase their holdings in Near East and Judaic studies, music, history, history of science, and literature. Areas of particular interest include medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, Holocaust studies, emigré literature, 20th-century European economic and diplomatic history, Spanish Civil War history, the scientific revolution, and Leonardo da Vinci.

•North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, have been awarded an HE A Title II-D grant of $36,357 to expand its services via electronic networks throughout the state. The funds will be used to upgrade computer hardware and software, which will make it possible to test and implement its circulation subsystem.

The NCSU Libraries have also been awarded, in conjunction with the National Agricultural Library, a $57,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant for an evaluation study on the transmission of digitized text. The objective of the study is to put in place a demonstration project to test the technical feasibility and the administrative structures necessary to capture, transmit, and receive machinereadable text through the national network. Much of United States and world literature on agricultural research remains difficult to access because of the high cost of acquiring materials.

•The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, have received $90,000 in grants in the past three years from the Hearst Foundation to make available for use five important collections in the Library for Communications and Graphic Arts, a library noted for its cartoon arts holdings. These collections—the Walt Kelly Collection, the Milton Caniff Collection, the Toni Mendez Collection, the Association of American Cartoonists’ archives, and the National Cartoonists Society’s archives— require support for the organization and cataloging of the materials for use as well as for preservation and database development.

•Stanford University’s Hoover Institution has received a $266,402 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the microfilming of Soviet government documents that date from the period 1917 to 1940, including laws and publications of ministries, people’s commissariats, congresses, and scholarly bodies.

•The University of California, San Diego, Library has received a total of $27,266 in LSCA funds for three separate retrospective conversion projects. One project will convert 6,000 music scores, another will convert 8,000 Chinese-language book and periodical titles, and the third will convert 3,500 pre-1965 adult fiction book titles.

•The University of Detroit has been awarded an HE A Title II-D grant of $125,529 to fund partial DALNET membership costs and equipment for the first phase of OPAC and circulation at the university’s Main Library. DALNET is a consortium of Detroit area libraries using NOTIS automation software. The project will enrich the quality of resource materials for students, faculty and independent researchers who will have access to the collections of the DALNET member libraries.

•The University of Idaho Library, Coeur d’Alene, has received a $50,000 gift from alumnae John and Joan Yuditsky to establish an endowment fund for the purchase of books, services, and equipment.

•The University of Kentucky, Lexington, has received a $1 million gift from the Toyota Motor Corporation to establish an endowment to increase the quality and quantity of collections in the library system. The gift is the largest cash gift ever received by the library and will greatly expand the resources available to students and faculty.

•The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, has been awarded a grant from the Getty Grant Program to modernize the records systems for the Vatican Archives in Rome. The modernized system will provide a comprehensive inventory of archive holdings available through RLIN.

•The University of Missouri, Columbia, Libraries have received a $500,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish two endowments for library collections in the humanities, one for acquisitions and another for preservation. The acquisitions endowment is expected to generate $90,000-$ 100,000 annually, which might purchase 3,000 volumes per year. Materials that will be underwritten by the endowment include musical recordings on compact disk; additional subscriptions to scholarly journals; foreign-language works; music scores; back files of important journals on microfilm; and databases or full-text retrieval systems on CD-ROM. The endowment for preservation is expected to produce $40,000 annually. The university has approximately three years to meet the challenge.

•The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York, has been awarded a grant of $89,930 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help preserve sound recordings in the school’s collections. The project will focus on archival recordings of the works and performances of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Howard Hanson, who directed the Eastman School from 1924 to 1964.

News notes

•Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., in cooperation with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and its Foreign Affairs Oral History Program, has established a foreign affairs oral history collection at the Lauinger Library. Ry the end of last year, forty transcripts of interviews with former State Department senior officers, mainly career and non-career ambassadors, were ready for use in the Special Collections Division. More than sixty other interviews are recorded and in the process of being transcribed and edited.

The United States Information Agency Alumni Association is also conducting its own oral history program of 50 interviews with retired USIA officers, and copies of these transcripts are being given to Georgetown’s library. This initial set of interviews is designed to capture the experiences of retired senior officers and to establish a broad base covering most countries of the world. The Oral History Program would like to work with scholars in the field of diplomacy to expand this collection and to make it as useful as possible. Anyone interested in developing this resource may contact: Stuart Kennedy, Foreign Affairs Oral History Program, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057; (202) 687-4104.

•The University of Missouri, Columbia, Libraries have entered their current subscriptions and standing orders (about 11,000 titles) into a database application that has been designed using Advanced Revelation software. The manipulation of this data permits subscription cost projections, holdings analyses, and vendor, publisher, and fund analyses. The data is being used for cooperative collection development, deselection, budgeting information, and other serials management decisions.

•The University of Tulsa Libraries have opened a Preservation Laboratory on the sixth floor of the McFarlin Library Tower. The 1,200-square foot laboratory was constructed by University Physical Plant personnel according to specifications drawn up by Tulsa’s preservation officer, Toby Murray, who also edits Conservation Administration News. Activities will include document and book repair, construction of protective enclosures for fragile or damaged materials, environmental monitoring, development of staff and user education programs, and the coordination of disaster recovery and salvage operations. A hands-on disaster recovery training workshop is being conducted this month to prepare members of the Disaster Recovery Assistance Team to deal with any library disaster that may occur.

•The Washington University Libraries, St. Louis, now have an official preservation logo, the result of a campus-wide contest sponsored by the libraries’ preservation program. The logo will appear on posters, bookmarks, plastic bags, and other materials designed by the preservation staff. The winning design, a pair of hands cradling a book inside a heart, was created by Wei Chen, a third-year doctoral student in physical chemistry. The contest piqued his interest because he uses the Chemistry Library extensively and has experienced first-hand the damage and deterioration of the books there.