ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the field

ACQUISITIONS

•Georgetown University,Washington, has received a major research collection relating to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the alleged subsequent career of John Wilkes Booth. The collection, gathered by E.H. Swaim of Eden, Texas, contains materials which some historians have used to substantiate their claims that Booth was not killed at the Garrett Farm in Virginia following the assassination, but that he survived to die peacefully in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1903. Letters and affidavits from persons who were involved in the events surrounding the assassination, members of the Booth family and their acquaintances, and individuals who claimed to have known Booth later in Texas and Oklahoma form the bulk of the collection. Of further interest is a considerable file of photographs, including the original tintype, ca. 1872, from which Booth was identified with the man using the name of John St. Helen.

Georgetown has also made available to scholars the papers of David Rankin Barbee, the Washington Post journalist and historian who devoted nearly 30 years to the study of Abraham Lincoln, Rose O’Neal Greenhow, and the history of Tennessee. The collection includes, besides extensive correspondence with historians Albert J. Beveridge, Henry Steele Commager, and Paul M. Angle, all of Barbee’s own research files and the manuscripts of three unpublished works.

•Syracuse University,New York, has finished processing the largest collection of Venetian historical manuscripts in North America, housed in the Ernest Stevenson Bird Library. The library forming the Leopold von Ranke Manuscript Collection, acquired from the noted historian in 1887, includes 4,000 pamphlets, 430 manuscripts, miscellaneous private papers and letters, as well as 17,000 monographic volumes. Syracuse has completed cataloging the manuscript portion of the library and made it available to scholars. The manuscripts consist of materials from the 14th-18th centuries preserved in Italian archives: diplomatic reports, memoranda, diaries, chronicles, and histories. The original owners of many of the bound manuscripts were the Venetian patrician families of Nani and Da Ponte. At the core of the collection are more than 100 dispatches from Venetian ambassadors written from 1500 to 1800. A catalog of the manuscripts was published in December 1983 by Syracuse University Press. About 50% of the remaining portion of the Ranke library can be accessed through OCLC.

•The University of California, Berkeley, Manuscripts Division at Bancroft Library has received more than 200 photocopies of letters, telegrams, sketches and photographs from the collection of the Grand Duchess Mariia Alexandrovna, daughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. The letters date from the last third of the 19th century and consist of correpondence from her mother the Empress, her father the Emperor, her ladies in waiting, and other friends. The copies were made available by the Executive Committee of the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco.

The Berkeley General Library has also received a comprehensive collection of indexes to more than 42 provincial Russian periodicals dealing with the Russian Orthodox Church in the Imperial period.

•The University of Dayton Library, Ohio, has purchased the major part of the library of the former St. Leonard’s Franciscan Seminary in Centerville, Ohio. The collection includes 1,600 rare books, 2,500 reference books, 5,500 journal volumes, and about 33,000 other books, most of which cover the subjects of philosophy and theology.

•The University of Illinois, Urbana, has received a collection of Little Black Sambo materials collected by the late Mimi Kaplan, librarian and professor of children’s literature at Governor’s State University. The collection, numbering about 100 items covering 75 years of publishing, includes books, records, games, coloring books, puzzles, and other printed materials. The original book, written by Helen Bannerman in 1899, was withdrawn from open circulation in libraries throughout the United States in the early 1960s as a result of the lobbying efforts of the Working Group for the Eradication of Color Prejudice.

•Villanova University’sFalvey Memorial Library, Pennsylvania, recently added its 500,000th volume with the acquisition of an illuminated manuscript of works by St. Augustine produced in Florence, ca. 1456-1480. The volume, which contains the Confessions along with three other works, exhibits miniature portraits and delicate penwork decoration.

• Wheaton College’sBilly Graham Center, Wheaton, Illinois, has acquired the papers of the Woman’s Union Missionary Society, an evangelical group founded in New York in 1861. The records document their missionary work in India, China, Japan, Burma, Pakistan, Greece, and Cyprus.

GRANTS

•Cornell Universityhas been awarded a grant of $1.5 million from the Pew Charitable Trust for the development and installation of an integrated information system for the Cornell Libraries. The chief components of the system will be a complete acquisitions system, an online catalog, a circulation system, and a serials control system. The library system will be linked to the larger university system to form a local area network. The project will also collaborate with the Research Libraries Group to effect the best interface with RLIN.

•Dalhousie University,Halifax, Nova Scotia, has received a $50,000 grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to strengthen their African government documents collection. The funds will be used to acquire microform document collections of English languagespeaking African nations south of the Sahara.

•New York University’sRobert F. Wagner Labor Archives has received a $114,671 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to conduct a two-year labor records survey in metropolitan New York. In collaboration with Cornell University and the George Meany Archives of the AFL-CIO in Washington, the Wagner Archives will use the funds to lay the groundwork necessary for a comprehensive, cooperative collecting strategy to preserve labor collections of historical value.

The Wagner Archives has also received $14,695 from the New York Civil Service Technical Guild to conduct oral history interviews with retired Guild officers and members and produce an illustrated history of that organization. Records documenting the union’s past will be assembled for deposit at the Archives, providing an important source for the little-known history of white collar and professional unionism in New York City.

• Ohio State University,Columbus, has created an endowed fund for history books with a gift made by OSU alumnus Paul Watkins. The fund will be used to purchase books, microforms, and computer-based materials for the History Library. Watkins is currently the manager of a bookstore near the campus.

•Southern Illinois University’sMorris Library, Carbondale, has received $86,145 from the Illinois Board of Higher Education to continue its retrospective conversion of serials and other materials for use in the Library Computer System (LCS), the automated circulation system used by 23 academic libraries in Illinois.

•The University of California, Los Angeles, Management Library has been awarded a grant of $9,700 to purchase library materials on the topic of U.S.-Japanese business relations. The grant was awarded by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Committee, with matching funds from the Graduate School of Management’s Pacific Basin Economic Study Center.

•The University of Georgia Library, Athens, has established an endowment to bring scholars and lecturers to the university to address issues of interest to the library faculty. The fund, named in honor of W. Porter Kellam, director of libraries from 1950 to 1973, will provide support for faculty and staff development and enrichment.

•The University of Toronto Faculty of Library and Information Science has received a $116,000 grant from the Library and Community Information Branch of the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture to fund a new supplement to Canadian Selection. The basic volume, published in 1978, was designed for small and medium-sized libraries as a selection aid to books and periodicals about Canada, published in Canada, or written by Canadians. The new supplement, to be compiled by Mavis Cariou, will include material published through 1984.

NCES DATA NOW available

The National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education, has announced that due to funding cutbacks they will be unable to publish the institutional data on libraries collected in the 1981-1982 Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS). NCES has, however, made this data available to ACRL for publication.

Library Statistics of Colleges and Universities, 1982 Institutional Datacontains over 180 pages of statistics on over 3,000 community college, college, and university libraries in the United States. The data is presented in three tables:

Table 1, Collections in Colleges and University Libraries, by State or Other Area and Institution.

Table 2, Library Operating Expenditures of College and University Libraries, by Category of Expenditure and by State or Other Area and Institution.

Table 3, Indexes Concerning Operating Expenditures, Bookstock Held at End of Year, and Library Staff (FTE), College and University Libraries, by State and Other Area and Institution.

The HEGIS program was initiated in 1966. The most recent study published by NCES covered 1979.

Copies of this book are available prepaid from ACRL at $12 for ACRL members and $16 for nonmembers. The ISBN is 0-8389-6640-3. Orders should be sent to ACRL/ALA, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611.

We would like to extend our thanks to Mary Jo Lynch of the ALA Office of Research and Paul Mertins, Richard Beazley, and Robert Heintz of the National Center for Education Statistics for their help with this project.