ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Iowa State University, Ames, has received the papers of the late Roswell Garst, perhaps Iowa’s most famous farmer. Initiator of the experimental feeding of corncobs to produce beef, the use of hybrid seed corn and commercial fertilizer, Garst is also credited with opening up the agricultural sales and exchanges with Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1950s. The collection covers forty years of Garst’s activities and contains correspondence, records, documents, audio tapes, publications, and memorabilia.

• The University of California, Santa Barbara, has now completed the most comprehensive collection on the west coast of the works of British author W. Somerset Maugham (1874- 1965). The major part of the collection was assembled and donated to the library by Raymond Toole Stott, Maugham’s official bibliographer and friend, during the 1970s. The final items were added through a bequest in Stott’s will. The collection now includes nearly all the rare early books, first editions, unusual variants, and a series of letters which Maugham wrote to Stott.

• The University of Illinois’ Asian Library has received a gift of nearly 500 volumes of current Chinese publications from the National Central Library in Taiwan, Republic of China. The collection, which consists of a wide range of subject fields including many multi-volume sets of Chinese calligraphy and art works, was on exhibition at ALA Annual Conference in Philadelphia.

• Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York, has acquired the 53 notebooks comprising the manuscript journals of John Burroughs (1837-1921), renowned American naturalist. The notebooks cover the period from 1876 to 1921 and are devoted principally to his observations of nature, although there are also many literary and political comments. Burroughs was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Ford, and entries in the journal relate to these famous people.

GRANTS

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received a $100,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a pioneering project to develop appraisal guidelines for archival records in science and technology. Under the grant, the Institute Archives and Special Collections of the MIT Libraries will draw up appraisal guidelines and test their use in several research settings. The project will not be confined to MIT, but will draw upon archival and technical advice from other universities, science and technology-based corporations, and two state archives. This will enable investigators to test the general applicability of the guidelines in various settings.

• Ohio State University has received a Title II-C grant from the U.S. Department of Education in the amount of $101,017 to expand the OSU Libraries’ nationally-recognized Charvat Collection of American Fiction. The collection will be extended in 1983 to include works of American fiction published during the first quarter of the 20th century. Many of the works in the collection are by obscure authors whose novels were widely read when they first appeared, but have since been largely forgotten. The books are of interest to social historians and bibliographers rather than literary historians.

• The State University of New York at Buffalo has received a Title II-C grant of $104,063 to increase bibliographic access to the university’s collection of 20th Century poetry in English. The grant will support the conversion of bibliographic records to machine-readable form and the incorporation of those records into OCLC.

• The University of Kansas Library, Lawrence, has been awarded a Title II-C grant of $148,500 by the U.S. Department of Education. The award will fund a project to catalog 6,000 valuable Central American titles within the library’s existing holdings, and will provide for the hiring of five full-time project staff, an OCLC terminal and printer, student assistance, and some binding and preservation of the more fragile items. This grant provides first-year funding for what the library has submitted as a proposed three-year project to catalog 20,000 Central American titles. A random sample of uncataloged titles in the library’s Central American collection showed that fewer than half appear on OCLC, and that over half the titles are not included in published holdings of the University of Texas or Tulane University.

• The University of Pittsburgh’s School of Library and Information Science has been awarded a $264,016 contract by the U.S. Naval Training Equipment Center to provide technical assistance in the development of a technical library/information center for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces School at Jubail, Saudi Arabia. Frank B. Sessa, professor emeritus, University of Pittsburgh, and captain, USNR (ret.), will serve as senior project director. The 12-month project will include a needs analysis, selection, classification, and cataloging of a basic collection of technical books and journals, purchase of library furniture and equipment, and preparation of library administrative and procedural manuals.

NEWS NOTES

• The Library of Congress has completed a study of existing governmental library resources and services, jointly funded and sponsored by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS). More than 400 Federal libraries of all types were studied through personal interviews and mail questionnaires. They included health, technical and other special libraries as well as academic, school, and general libraries in the Midwest, Southwest, and Pacific Coast regions. The overall recommendation of the study, entitled Toward a Federal Library and Information Services Network: A Proposal, addresses the need for a full-service, multitype Federal library network based on existing resources and services. The plan of action proposed indicates goals and implementation suggestions that the Federal library community can use as a guide. Responsibility for further action, the study states, depends on the Federal Library Committee. Copies of the 130-page report are available for $6 each from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402 (Stock No. 030-000-00138-9).

• The Peabody Institute Library, Baltimore, became part of the Johns Hopkins University on July 1. It will be administered by Johns Hopkins’ Milton S. Eisenhower Library as part of its Special Collections Department, but will retain its separate identity and stay in its present downtown Baltimore location. The Peabody’s collection of 250,000 volumes is outstanding in early science, with additional strength in the Greek and Latin classics, Romance languages, English and American literature, and genealogy. ■ ■