ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Thirty-five Center for Research Librariesmember libraries have contributed $120,000 for the purchase of the complete microfilm edition of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. The set is now being deposited with the Center and will be available on loan to all Center members. The maps used for filming have been provided by the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. The microfilm reproduces 623,000 maps of 10,000 American towns and cities for the period 1867 1950, including all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Sanborn maps are large-scale plans that show the outline of each building, street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. Construction details are also noted. Filming by Chadwyck-Healey began in January 1983 and will be completed in early 1985.

•The Emerson College Archives, Boston, hasreceived a collection of theater clippings and reviews covering plays which opened in the Boston area from the late 1890s through the 1970s. Donated by theater critic Elliot Norton, these files include reviews written by him for the Boston Herald as well as those written by other critics. Also included are files pertaining to opera and dance performances, and biographical information on noted individuals in the performing arts.

•The Library of Congress Rare Book and SpecialCollections Division has acquired a copy of Vergil’s Opera printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1501. This early printed work contains the first full book use of the letterform known today as italic, and is also the first of a series of classical works printed by Aldus in a format smaller than quarto, making it the first portable secular book in print.

•Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey,has purchased a collection of criminal justice books and documents from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, which recently closed its east coast office. The collection includes approximately 8,000 books, 400 bound periodical volumes, 37,000 published and unpublished reports, 3,000 newspaper clippings, 175 subscriptions to criminal justice serials, and 6,000 documents on microfiche. Annual statistical reports from municipal, state, and federal agencies, original research projects and doctoral dissertations from American universities are among the valued primary source documents. The collection will be administered as a separate, special collection in the John Cotton Dana Library.

•Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illinois, has recieved a collection of railroad books, photographs, and memorabilia from the estate of William DiMarco, a member of Sangamon’s first graduating class. Included are over 2,000 photographs, many rare books, and a variety of timetables, annual reports, maps, and other materials on Illinois railroads.

Grants

•The American Philological Association, Columbia University, New York, has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a model project of preserving deteriorating important works in classical studies in microform. Scholars will be involved in determining which books and periodicals from the period 1859-1914 have the highest priority for preservation filming. Editorial work will be supported by the Mellon grant, while the NEH will support a three-year program of filming the works chosen by the editorial board.

•California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has received a gift of $500 from the Southern California Chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers to purchase energy-related books in support of students and faculty in mechanical engineering.

•CLASS, the Cooperative Library Agency for Systems and Services, San Jose, California, has received two LSCA grants: $97,600 for withdrawals from the database and evaluation of CATALIST as a monograph finding tool for California libraries; and $350,000 for corrections and changes to the database for publishing the 10th edition of CULP, the California Union List of Periodicals.

•The Library of Congress has received a grant of $99,700 from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation to continue the Washingtoniana Project in its Prints and Photographs Division for one more year. The project, begun last year under initial funding from the Cafritz Foundation, will culminate in the production of a guide to the division’s visual resources on the District of Columbia. There are an estimated 750,000 photographic images of Washington housed in the division, dating from the earliest known photographs from the 1840s to those of the 1980s.

•The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Cambridge, have received an HEA Title II-C grant to catalog books and serials in the Roman Jakobson Collection of linguistics. Most of the original cataloging will be for items in Russian, Czech, Polish, and other Slavic languages.

•The Metropolitan Toronto Library’s CanadianHistory Department has received a grant of $55,175 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to complete a second supplement to A Bibliography of Canadiana, published by the Toronto Public Library in 1934 and 1959. Part II of the second supplement, funded by a grant received from SSHRCC in 1983, will be published this fall.

•Rutgers University, New Rrunswick, New Jersey, has received a grant of $50,000 from the J. Paul Getty Trust in support of its Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae project. This is an international project of 37 countries to publish a pictorial dictionary of classical mythology (ca. 800 B.C.-400 A.D.). Each country studies the classical material in its public and private collections and sends its catalogue of objects to the Central Editorial Office in Basel, Switzerland, which distributes the information to authors. Artemis Verlag (Zurich/Munich) published the first double volume in 1981; the second double volume appeared last spring, and the remaining six will follow at twoyear intervals. Rutgers’ Center for the History of Art and the Humanities is the center responsible for all American material.

•The University of Cincinnati Engineering Library has received a grant of $5,000 from the General Electric Company’s Aircraft Engine Business Group Evendale Plant. The grant money will be used to automate the library’s cataloging and circulation functions.

•The University of Maryland at Baltimore’s Health Sciences Library has received a grant from the National Library of Medicine to develop, test, implement, and evaluate an electronic reference service system. Dubbed EARS (Electronic Access to Reference Service), the system will be a complement of the library’s electronic mail system, which is linked to its Integrated Library System. Users will be able to dial into the library’s computer via terminals or microcomputers to access the system for requesting computer searches, photocopies of articles, materials on interlibrary loan, or reference information.

•The University of Missouri, Columbia, Libraries have been awarded a $68,230 HEA Title II- C grant to catalog a microform collection of “Spanish Drama of the Golden Age.” The collection consists of 3,900 titles, mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries. The cataloging will be entered into the OCLC database.

•The Upper Peninsula Region of Library Cooperation, Marquette, Michigan, has been awarded an $836,200 grant by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to implement an Upper Peninsula-wide automated library system. Ten member libraries, including Northern Michigan University, Michigan Technological University, and Lake Superior State College, have been selected for the initial phase of cost planning and telecommunications installation. During the four-year grant period the project will develop as a model to demonstrate techniques for delivering continuing educational opportunities to persons living in a large, sparsely populated geographic region.

Changes at Choice

Choice,ACRL’s monthly print and nonprint review publication for academic libraries, has announced some changes in editorial policy.

Beginning with their September 1984 issue, each review will carry the name of the reviewer and the reviewer’s institutional affiliation. In making the change to signed reviews, Choice has reversed a policy of anonymity instituted with the founding of the magazine twenty years ago.

Choicebegan reviewing nonprint material in 1980 and expanded the nonprint coverage to include microcomputer software in 1984. The 30-50 nonprint reviews in each issue will now be featured in a separate section of the magazine to facilitate location and reference, and there will be crossreferences from the subject sections.

The editorial and advertising offices of Choice are located at 100 Riverview Center, Middletown, CT 06457; (203) 347-6933. Annual subscriptions are $95 domestic and $105 Canadian and foreign. Single copy sales are $9.