ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News From the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The University of Montreal Libraries is proud to announce that it has received a gift of 3,500 to 4,000 Canadiana books and manuscripts valued at approximately $500,000 from Mr. Louis Melzack, a Montreal bookseller and collector. The collection will probably be available to the public sometime in the fall 1972 at the new Melzack Room of the special collections department.

The library also acquired 5,000 original propaganda posters printed by all sides during World War I. In order to put them into usable format, we have had them photographed and put on slides. The Social Sciences and Humanities Library will be able to serve the interested researchers during the fall of 1972 with the slides. The originals are also available, of course.

• A rare collection of letters, photographs, and mementos of the nineteenth century American actor Edwin Booth has been acquired by the library of California State University, Northridge. According to Norman E. Tanis, director of the library, purchase of the collection from the actor’s great-granddaughter, Ms. Edwina Booth Cutting, was made possible through the generosity of friends of the library.

Included in the Booth collection is an autographed program dated March 22, 1865, the 100th consecutive performance of Hamlet at New York’s Winter Garden Theater. The program, which was issued to commemorate the record-breaking run, includes the text of the play and an essay on Hamlet. Another rare program in the collection is that of an 1886 joint appearance by Booth and the noted Italian actor Tommaso Salvini.

Among the collection’s numerous photographs is one showing Booth with another great American actor, Lawrence Berret, which is thought to be the only photograph taken of the two actors together. A rare phonograph recording of Booth reading Othello’s speech to the Venetian senate is also included in the collection. The recording was repressed from an original Edison wax cylinder recorded by Booth in limited edition in 1890.

Ms. Cutting stated that a signed letter written in 1879 from Booth to G. H. Howard may be the only extant copy of the actor’s original correspondence. Also included in the collection is a charming note in Booth’s handwriting to his grandchild. Ms. Cutting also presented the library with personal objects such as a stamp box, a humidor, and a pewter plate which belonged to Booth.

The extensive collection of 253 items contains 128 photographs of Booth and members of his family. The twenty-two books include biographies by Booth’s daughter Edwina and sister Asia, and the reminiscences of his leading lady, Katherine Goodele. An autographed edition of the play “Edwin Booth” by Milton Geiger is included. Also in the collection are newspaper clippings and articles, additional theater programs, and handwritten theater passes which Booth gave to his friends and family.

• Fred W. Hanes, dean of library services at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, has announced the recent acquisition of the Newton Collection of early dictionaries which adds significantly to the Cordell Collection of Dictionaries at Indiana State’s Cunningham Memorial Library. The purchase, made possible through a continuing grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, adds 500 volumes to the 1,000 already in the Cordell Collection.

Roy Newton, a retired professor of English at Ferris State College, Big Rapids, Michigan, assembled his collection of dictionaries over several generations. An avid connoisseur of the word, he became one of the very few major collectors of dictionaries in the United States while taking special care to concentrate on American lexicographers, especially Webster and Worcester. And it is these American dictionaries which add an important dimension to the British items that form an outstanding part of the Cordell Collection.

With the new additions, historians of the American-English language will be able to trace in detail the evolution of American lexicography from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century up to the present day. The books will also contribute toward an understanding of the printing and publishing history of American dictionaries and their place in cultural history.

In addition, an important series of English dictionaries was acquired in the purchase. Nathan Bailey, Robert Ainsworth, and William Perry are only a few of the lexicographers represented in this segment of the Newton purchase.

• A new Ohio State University collection will give scholars access for the first time to microfilms of rare documents reflecting church-state relations at the time of the fall of the Byzantine Empire and conquest of the Ottoman Turks. The only complete archive in the world of Serbian manuscripts from the Hilandar Monastery of Mt. Athos, Greece, the 824 manuscripts, edicts and charters, were microfilmed under the direction of Professor Mateja Matejic of Ohio State’s department of Slavic languages and literatures.

ACRL Membership

September 30, 1972 12,151

September 30, 1971 11,763

September 30, 1970 11,834

The university has published a new 165-page checklist of the Hilandar materials microfilmed during the summers of 1970 and 1971 with the assistance of Professor Walt D. Craig in 1970 and Professor Matejic’s son, Predrag, in 1971.

The Ohio State collection, when completed, will also include microfilms of hundreds of Byzantine, Bulgarian, Russian, and Valachian documents. The project is supported by a $14,-237 Endowment for the Humanities grant matched by $18,064 university funds for the current year.

The next phase of the project will cover classification of the manuscripts in several broad categories for publication in a catalog, with the most valuable ones singled out for priority treatment. A system of detailed classification and description will be worked out and tested with the assistance of scholars here and abroad.

The present collection includes material on folk medicine, music, superstitious interpretations of natural omens, and religious rites and liturgies of the Byzantine time. It consists of 824 complete manuscripts totaling some 320,-000 pages, 600 edicts and charters, including ones from the Byzantine time between 1009 and 1453; Greek, Bulgarian, Valachian, and Serbian documents.

GRANTS

• Grants totaling nearly $5 million dollars to six independent research libraries and twenty-four university presses have been announced by Nathan M. Pusey, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Pusey added that these grants represent a further step in a larger effort being pursued currently by the foundation to aid scholars and scholarship, chiefly in the humanities, in a period for many institutions of acute financial stringency.

Grants totaling $2,500,000 were made to six independent research libraries to provide funds on a continuing basis to enable the directors of these libraries to make their unique collections more accessible to and more actively used by qualified scholars working in the various fields of humanistic learning which are served by their invaluable collections.

The libraries included in this program are the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the American Antiquarian Society Library in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia.

The grants to the presses—varying in amount from $40,000 to $150,000, depending upon the size and scope of operation—were made to enable them to increase the number of scholarly works they will be able to publish over the next several years by providing a source of funds for the subsidies such publications require. The presses were asked, in expending the funds, to make special efforts to aid young scholars publishing first or second books. They were also encouraged to experiment with technological improvements to reduce publication costs. A supplementary grant was made to the American Council of Learned Societies to which other, for the most part smaller, member presses of the Association of American University Presses may apply, in a program the council will announce, for subsidies for scholarly works in the humanities which they may wish to publish.

The presses to which individual grants were made are those of the following universities: California, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Illinois, M.I.T., McGill-Queens, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Princeton, Stanford, Texas, Toronto, Washington, Wesleyan, Wisconsin, Yale, and a consortium of universities in New England.

• The Institute of Library Research at the University of California at Berkeley has received a grant of $77,000 from the Office of Education of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to undertake an eighteen month study, nationwide in scope, of library and information problems of prison populations. Reliable, current data will provide a basis for improving library services toward achieving their full potential in the rehabilitational process. Statistical data on adult correctional library services was last compiled in 1966 in a nationwide survey done by a joint committee of the Association of Hospital and Institutional Libraries and the American Correctional Association. Library services available to juveniles in correctional institutions have never been surveyed on a nationwide basis.

Information will be gathered in site visits to selected facilities in exemplary states, personal interviews, and surveys of existing documents.

Initial efforts of the I.L.R. project have been directed toward problems of providing access to legal research materials for prisoners. In response to a recent Federal Supreme Court decision which established the right of access to the courts, a conference, jointly sponsored by the American Correctional Association and the Institute of Library Research, was held in Washington, D.C. Participants were correctional administrators, librarians, and attorneys representing such groups as the American Bar Association, the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association of Hospital and Institutional Libraries, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Social Responsibilities Round Table of ALA, the Library Committee of the American Correctional Association, the School of Library Service of Columbia University, and the Institute of Library Research at the University of California.

Activities of this new project will be directed toward the development of guidelines for improving services, and the development of a handbook of current practices and statistical data. Plans are being made for a demonstration library to be established in one or more correctional facilities.

Charles P. Bourne, director of the Institute of Library Research, will serve as principal investigator and Ms. Marjorie Le Donne as project director. Consultants for the project are: Richard McGee, president of the American Justice Institute and formerly director of the California Department of Corrections; Ira Phillips, executive secretary of the Association of Hospital and Institutional Libraries; Dr. E. Preston Sharp, general secretary of the American Correctional Association; Marion Vedder, formerly associate library supervisor, New York State Library and chairman of the Library Committee of the American Correctional Association.

• The University of Minnesota Bio-Medical Library has been awarded a three-year grant of $361,729 from the National Library of Medicine to develop a “minicomputer” system. A low cost, stand alone, library-controlled computer system will be developed with on-line visual terminals which can handle all data processing for a medical library, including serials control, book ordering and accounting, cataloging, circulation, and computer-assisted reference. The project will expand on the automated procedures which are presently in operation in the Bio-Medical Library. Glenn Brudvig is head of the Library and Audrey Grosch is project director.

• The Graduate School of Library Science at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been awarded a grant of $7,601 from the State Library of Pennsylvania to conduct a workshop which will explore ways in which large libraries may share resources among themselves. The workshop will be held at the Hershey Hotel, Hershey, Pennsylvania, in January of 1973.

A group of thirty librarians from large libraries in Pennsylvania will be invited to attend and will, together with outstanding resource people, investigate ways in which their informational materials and expert staffs may be shared in order to provide better library service to all citizens of the state. Such topics as shared or coordinated acquisitions, union lists, common storage of little-used items, use of telecommunications to transmit materials and bibliographic citations, and the sharing of specialists will be studied. Brigitte L. Kenney, assistant professor, is director of the workshop.

MEETINGS

December10-13: An international symposium on the role of books and other educational materials in meeting the educational and economic goals of developed and developing countries will be held from December 10 to 13 it was announced today by conference director Francis Keppel. The meeting, limited to fifty invited participants, will take place at a conference center outside New York City.

The conference is being sponsored by the ad hoc committee for U.S. participation in International Book Year, 1972. Both general sessions and small group meetings will bring together individuals responsible for economic development planning, educational planning, and specialists in the creation, publication, distribution, and use of educational materials in the several media. Representatives from such nations as Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand, United Arab Republic, United Kingdom, and the U.S.S.R. have been invited to participate.

The conferees will be furnished in advance with working papers prepared specifically for this meeting. The papers will be denoted to an examination of the following areas: (1) the essential educational component of economic development; (2) the qualitative needs and fiscal allocations for educational materials and libraries; (3) educational strategy in developing countries; (4) the practical considerations involved in the production and distribution of books and other educational materials.

Keppel noted that conference sessions will contribute to a final report which will contain findings and recommendations with a guide for future use by both participants and others. The conference is designed to achieve a more productive collaboration among specialists concerned with educational and economic planning. The report will serve as both a theoretical base and a practical guide to increasing the effective use of educational materials in meeting national goals.

Conference director, Francis Keppel, former U.S. Commissioner of Education, and dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University is now chairman of the board of General Learning Corporation. Cochairmen of the ad hoc committee for U.S. participation in International Book Year are Emerson Greenaway, librarian-emeritus of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and Theodore Waller, president of the Grolier Educational Corporation.

April29-May 3, 1973: Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, West Indies will be the site of the Eighteenth Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, April 29-May 3, 1973. The Library Association of Trinidad and Tobago and the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, will be cohosts for the seminar. The conference will sponsor a series of workshops on matters relating to Caribbean Acquisitions, Latin American bookdealers, library exchange programs, new bibliographic tools for Latin American studies, and the training of Latin American librarians. Special attention will be given to National, Regional, and International Planning for library services.

Registration in the Eighteenth Seminar is $15.00 for members of SALALM and $25.00 for nonmembers. Preprint working papers are included in the registration fee, and are available only by registering in advance. Librarians and scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean may attend the seminar without paying the registration fee and will receive a set of the working papers. Librarians and students from Trinidad and other islands in the West Indies will be admitted to the conference without charge but must register and pay a fee of $7.50 if they wish sets of the working papers. The conference coordinator is Ms. Irma Hannays, Librarian, Industrial Development Corporation, Salvatori Building, P.O. Box 949, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Information on the content of the program and working papers may be procured from Donald F. Wisdom, Serial Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540. For other information, refer to the Executive Secretary, Ms. Marietta Daniels Shepard, Organization of American States, Washington, DC 20006.

MISCELLANY

• Two graduate programs of library education have been officially accredited by the American Library Association according to an announcement issued by the Committee on Accreditation at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. The newly accredited programs are offered by the School of Information and Library Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo (George S. Bobinski, dean), and the Division of Library Science, Southern Connecticut State College (Evelyn R. Robinson, director). This brings the number of library schools offering programs accredited under the 1951 Standards for Accreditation to 57.

• The two largest scientific abstracting and indexing services of the United States have announced their decision to undertake an extensive program of operational cooperation and coordination. BioSciences Information Service (BIOSIS) of Biological Abstracts and the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) will endeavor to coordinate coverage, eliminate duplication of intellectual and other processing effort in the production of their publications and services, and develop a degree of compatibility that will permit their services to be used effectively in combination.

Officials of BIOSIS and CAS said that results of cooperative programs undertaken over the past several years indicate that coordination at an operating level could lead to lower costs in processing information and improve the utility of the services provided by both organizations. Coordination of indexing practices and the establishment of an effective means of interconnecting the indexes of the two services would allow much of the present duplication in processing effort to be eliminated and thus assist the biologist and the chemist in their search for information.

Some specific objectives agreed upon by BIOSIS and CAS are:

Development of a single index to library holdings of periodicals covered by the two services.

Establishment and use of a common system for identifying documents.

Development of compatible terminology authority files. In areas of overlap, use of the same abstracts in both services, where feasible, and possible eventual elimination of duplicate publishing of abstracts in certain areas of the primary literature, accompanied by coordination of indexing policies and practices.

Adoption of common processing standards and development of compatible computer-readable, microform, and printed services where feasible.

•Automated catalog card production from Library of Congress MARC tapes is the objective of a new project which was initiated on April 1 at the Institute of Library Research (ILR) at the University of California, Berkeley. An adjunct of the University-wide Library Automation Program, the U.C. Bibliographic Center (BIBCENTER) Pilot Project will provide prototype service of presorted card sets individually customized for a given card catalog. Four U.C. campuses are participating in the development and pilot operation: Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Cruz.

Under the general supervision of Charles Bourne, director of ILR and acting director of University-wide Library Automation Programs, the BIBCENTER has a small system development staff comprised of programmers and librarians and is managed by Jay Cunningham. The participating campuses are providing a significant amount of design work, programming contribution, computer time, and other resources. The MARC tape subscription now being maintained by the UCLA University Research Library will render the source cataloging data on an interim basis. A special advisory and resource committee guides BIBCENTER policy and development. Members of the committee are: Michael Berger, head, Bibliographic Records, U.C. Santa Cruz; Margaret Capron, Catalog Department, U.C. San Diego; John Knapp, head, Library Systems Office, U.C. Berkeley; and Esther Koch, head, Cataloging Division, U.C.LA.

While the LC-MARC operations are being established, the center will plan the expansion of its operations to include the approximately 800,000 titles in the recently converted U.C. Union Catalog Supplement 1963-67 data base, as well as the support of original conversion to machine form of records not found in these existing files.

• Cornell University Libraries has merged two previously separate interlibrary loan units within its reference department. The former Interlibrary Service (lending and photoduplication) and the Bibliographic and Reference Center were combined on October 1 to create a new unit—Interlibrary Lending and Cooperative Reference Services (ILACORS).

The distinctive services performed by each of the previous sections will be continued in the merged unit although with less duplication of effort than formerly. The Bibliographic and Reference Center, which is funded by the South Central Research Library Council, will retain its identity in the new ILACORS unit, and continue all of its present activities for member libraries: transmitting NYSILL (New York State Interlibrary Loan) requests; supplying fast-service photocopy; answering reference questions; and supplying catalog card copy. The lending and photoduplication section will continue to be responsible for filling photocopy and loan requests which are sent to Cornell University libraries from outside the university. This includes Cornell’s contract with NYSILL.

• Princeton University’s Gest Oriental Library, now numbering more than a quarter-million volumes, has moved to modern, expanded facilities in Palmer Hall. The move is the first phase of a rearrangement of the Princeton library which will locate Princeton’s extensive Arabic, Persian, and Turkish collection, as well as the East Asian collection, in the connecting buildings housing the faculty offices and classrooms used by scholars and students in the East Asian and Near Eastern fields. Housed for the past twenty-four years in increasingly-cramped quarters in the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library, the Gest Collection is now reopened to readers on the second and third levels of Palmer Hall. Occupying some 15,000 square feet of floor space in the west and central portions of the building the Gest Library offers open-stack access to books in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.

• The Health Sciences Library of the University of Washington has moved into its new quarters which occupy approximately 50,-000 net square feet in the new teaching increment of the Health Sciences Center. The expansion from 20,000 square feet will allow the library to increase its capacity from 120,000 volumes to 235,000 volumes and the number of reader stations from less than 300 to about 950. When completely furnished, approximately 400 carrels will be available, 20 group study rooms, a public lounge with easy chairs and sofas and exhibit space, 2 A/V rooms, a typing room, and a 24-hour study facility. Carrels are to be equipped with power outlets for A/V equipment, as will the group study rooms, some of which will also have TV monitors.

In addition to the Reserve Room on the third floor and staff quarters including the Reference Service and the Pacific Northwest Regional Health Sciences Library offices on the second floor, the library will house Drug Information, MEDLINE, and TOXICON Centers as well as an Independent Study Program Room. The latter is to be used by approximately a quarter of the incoming medical students for online access to a computer at Ohio State University.

PUBLICATIONS

• The August 1972 issue of the list of Graduate Library School Programs Accredited by the American Library Association is available upon request from the Committee on Accreditation, American Library Association, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611. Issued semiannually by the ALA Committee on Accreditation, the official list gives the name and address of each library school offering an accredited program, the name of the dean or director, and the name of the degree to which the accredited program leads. Library schools offering doctoral and post-master’s specialist or certificate programs are so designated on the list.

• The Rusiness Reaches Division of the University of Colorado School of Business has prepared two new publications: Bibliography of 1971 Publications of University Bureaus of Business and Economic Research and the summer issue of Colorado Population Trends.

The bibliography contains 1,593 listings from sixty-one research bureaus and forty-three schools that are members of the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business. The publications are cross-indexed by institution, subject, and author.

The bibliography may be ordered from the division at the University of Colorado, Boulder 80302. The cost is $5 per copy.

Qualified agencies may obtain free copies of the publication that lists trends from the Division of Planning, State of Colorado, 524 Social Services Building, 1575 Sherman, Denver, CO 80203.

• Four oral history interviews have recently been added to the series on California-Russian Emigres sponsored jointly by the Center for Slavic and East European Studies and the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library.

These interviews, like the seven produced earlier, capture on tape and transcript the memoirs of life and education in prerevolutionary Russia, specific events during the Revolution, and eventual escape. They are augmented by the Califomia-Russian Emigré Collection of papers. in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Richard A. Pierce, author and Russian History specialist, now on the teaching staff of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and Boris Raymond (Romanoff), on the faculty of the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada, conducted the interviews.

Bound, indexed copies of the transcripts are available for scholarly research at the Bancroft Library, and the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, both UC Berkeley, and the Department of Special Collections Library, University of California at Los Angeles.

It is possible to arrange for deposit of a specific interview in a library holding other materials on the same subject. The receiving depository will be charged the cost of reproducing the interview.

For further information about these interviews, contact Ms. Willa Baum, Department Head, Regional Oral History Office, Room 486, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.

• A study of the effects of abolishing fines for overdue materials has been completed by Robert S. Meyer, library consultant. The sixty-four-page final report, Two Fineless Years: A History, Analysis, and Evaluation, was prepared for the Alameda County (California) Library System, which discontinued charging fines in June 1970.

Three primary sources of information were used: (a) interviews with Alameda County Library staff, (b) a search of the professional literature of the past ten years, and (c) the library’s file of reports, memoranda, correspondence, and newspaper clippings on the subject. There is a bibliography of seventy-seven items that were quoted in the study. Altogether, this report accumulates the experience of twenty-six different libraries that have tried a fine-free operation, with their pro-and-con evaluations of the many consequences that resulted from it.

After discussing the various purposes for which libraries have instituted fines, and the arguments that have been offered for abolishing them, the major portion of the report deals with the actual effects of operating under a no-fines policy, in six categories: use of the library, the library’s collection, the library’s clientele, fairness to patrons, the library’s image and role, and the costs of library operation. The good showing of a fine-free operation in many of these areas will be of interest to librarians, trustees, and government officials.

The report is available from Robert S. Meyer & Associates, Box 2028 Dollar Ranch Station, Walnut Creek, CA 94595, for $2.25 to cover preparation, tax, and postage.

• The Union List of Scientific and Technical Serials in the University of Michigan Library, seventh edition, is now available. It includes more than 26,000 titles drawn from the holdings of twenty-four of the libraries in the University of Michigan library system. Each title entry gives the official main entry, library location, holdings, and call number. Some 7,200 cross references have also been provided to assist users. All new entries and corrections submitted to the editorial staff through March 31, 1972 have been included.

The seventh edition, which is in two volumes, may be purchased for $12.50 per set from:

Current Expense Division

Administrative Services Department

Room 1, Graduate Library

The University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, MI 48104 ■ ■