ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Corpus Christi State University Library, Texas, has acquired the Dan E. Kilgore South Texas Collection. It contains approximately 7,500 monographs and 2,500 documents and manuscripts dealing with Texas as a part of Mexico, as a republic, and as a state. The time span is from the early 18th century to the present.

•The Hoover Institution’s East Asian Collec- tion, Stanford, California, has purchased 1,963 volumes of rare Japanese materials from a private book collector. Most of the books date back to the first half of the 19th century or earlier. They are primarily popular illustrated accounts of the age and reflect Japanese perceptions of the society, customs and manners, literature, art education, and the role of women. None of the books have been reprinted in this century.

•The Library of Congress, Washington, has been given a valuable archive of written and recorded material that documents the early days of radio. Shane O’Neil, president of RKO General, Inc., presented discs containing news, music, and drama, as well as scripts, musical arrangements, and information about the operation of WOR-AM in New York to the Library on September 18. Actor Tony Randall also took part in the presentation. The broadcasts in the collection contain historic news stories from 1922, when WOR first went on the air, through the 1980s. Included are stories about the attack on Pearl Harbor, the convening of the United Nations, and a plane crash into the Empire State Building in 1945; “Year in Review” broadcasts from 1936 to 1943; Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Orson Welles in “The Black Museum”; Beverly Sills singing the Rinso White commercial, and the Andrews Sisters singing for Coca-Cola.

•The National Archives’ Modern Military Headquarters Branch has opened for research approximately 194 feet of World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operational records from the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the first increment of an estimated 2,500 or more feet to be transferred over the next several years. The bulk of the records fall into several series of which the History Office files, 1941-1945, and the records of the Foreign Nationalities Branch, 1941-1946, comprise half. The remainder consists of administrative records, 1943-1945; the war diaries of the London Field Office; records relating to secret intelligence operations, 1942-1945; the Operation Group command file, 1942-1945; and scattered records of the Office of the Director, 1942-1945.

•Ohio State University’s Library for Communi- cation and Graphic Arts, Columbus, has acquired the archives of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. The Association, formed in 1957, is made up of some 300 North American newspaper editorial cartoonists. Among the materials are editorial drawings of recent U.S. presidents.

•The Ohio University Libraries, Athens, have been presented with 594 books and 212 other items by the Cultural Division of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The books provide reference resources and general works on philosophy, political science, medicine, history, and other topics. The gift volumes and scrolls were exhibited at the ALA Annual Conference in Dallas last June. The gift is the result of a special cooperative agreement between the National Central Library of Taiwan and the Ohio University Libraries. In return for the gift the libraries are providing training and practical experience in modern library systems and management for librarians from the National Central Library. The first two participants, Stella Hsiu-ying Chiang and Dennis Hsi-chang Wang, have just completed a three-month training program.

•The State University of New York at Buffalo’s History of Medicine Collection has received a gift of medical books by Frederick K. Neuberger, a Buffalo area otolaryngologist. The books were written and signed by his father, Max Neuberger, a renowned medical historian who helped establish the study of medical history as an academic discipline and the founder of an important history of medicine museum in Vienna.

•The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has made available to scholars a new research collection, the Archives of Scientific Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. The literary estates of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach consist of their correspondence to and from hundreds of noted philosophers and scientists, lecture and research notes from throughout their careers, their working libraries, and thousands of photographs and miscellaneous items. The Frank C. Ramsey papers consist exclusively of about 1,500 sheets of lecture and research notes, most of which are unpublished and of particular interest to Wittgenstein researchers. These materials were acquired and organized for use over a 10 year period.

•The Vanderbilt University Medical Center Li- brary, Nashville, Tennessee, has received the papers of Barney Brooks, chairman of the Department of Surgery at Vanderbilt from 1925 to 1952. The papers contain files of handwritten letters by Alfred Blalock, Evarts A. Graham, William S. Halstead, Cobb Pilcher, Canby Robinson, and many other medical luminaries of the early 20th century. The papers were donated by Mary Jane Brooks Evans, Brooks’s daughter.

Grants

•The American Antiquarian Society, Worces- ter, Massachusetts, has received two grants totaling $124,542 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grants will fund the Society’s long-term fellowship program and underwrite two series of public lectures in 1985 and 1986. The fellowships will allow scholars from all over the country to conduct research at AAS for periods ranging from six to twelve months. The first public lecture, on “Popular Music in Nineteenth-Century America,” will be held in the spring of 1985; the second lecture one year later will be organized around the theme of “Historical Writing in America.”

•Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, New Hampshire, has been awarded a $183,336 U.S. Department of Education grant to fund a project that will improve access to the library’s collection of New Hampshire imprints. Included in the collection are over 10,000 items printed by local presses prior to 1840. The access project is in three stages: converting manual records into machine-readable form and loading them into two of the national bibliographic utilities; conservation and preservation; and filling in gaps in the collection.

•The Harvard University Divinity School Li- brary has received a grant of $56,856 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to ensure preservation of and enhance access to the Paul Tillich manuscript collection.

•Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has received a grant of $125,000 from the Reeves Foundation for maintenance of the library.

•Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio, has received a $75,000 grant from the Pew Memorial Trust. The grant will be used to help fund installation of a system of electrically operated, movable compact shelving. The project of which this installation is a part is intended to upgrade the current library facility by creating additional and more attractive space for both readers and materials storage.

•The New Bedford Whaling Museum, Massa- chusetts, has been awarded a 1984 Conservation Project Support grant by the Institute of Museum Services. The award of $19,814 will be matched by the Museum and used to treat deteriorated volumes in its collection of over 1,000 manuscript whaling logbooks and journals. The goals of the project include restoration of fifty logbooks of which twenty will be “worst case” examples requiring full-scale paper and binding treatments. Also planned is the establishment of standards and procedures to be incorporated into a manual for future logbook repair and restoration, training a technician to assist in the project and carry out future work on the collection, and microfilming eighty logbooks formerly used as scrapbooks or added to the collection since the previous filming in 1981.

“How do these things work?”

ALA delegates to the 50th IFLA General Conference in Nairobi last August test the translation equipment. Left to right: Beverly Lynch, ALA President-Elect; Robert Wedgeworth, ALA Executive Director: and E.J. Josey, ALA President. The Conference, which attracted 800-1,000 participants, was hosted by the Kenya Library Association.

The new Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Library, Boston College.

Cr: Lee Pellegrini

•The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science has received $30,000 from alumnus William Helfand (class of 1952) to provide for compact shelving. Its installation will alleviate crowded conditions in the room housing the historical collections and will create much space for future growth.

•The Research Libraries Group, Stanford, Gal- ifornia, has been provided with a matching funds grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the amount of $162,666 for an archives and manuscript retrospective conversion project. Participating libraries include Columbia, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, SUNY-Buffalo, Brigham Young, Brown, Dartmouth, the New York Historical Society, NYU, Northwestern, Rutgers, and Michigan. These libraries will enter their records for special collections of archives and manuscripts into RLIN.

•Tufts University Library, Medford, Massachusetts, has received a grant of $100,000 from the Surdna Foundation for programs on information technology.

•The University of Nevada, Reno, Library has been awarded a grant of $15,000 by the Xebec Corporation to purchase materials on flexible manufacturing systems for the Engineering Library. Flexible manufacturing systems are systems used in advanced manufacturing technologies, such as sensors, robotics, and computer-aided design and manufacturing.

•Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, has been awarded two grants: the first is a grant of $20,000 by the James A. MacDonald Foundation for library computerization and online bibliographic services; the second is a grant of $25,000 by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation for a fund for the purchase of library books.

News notes

•Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, held ceremonies on October 14 celebrating the dedication and official opening of its new, $28-million central research facility, the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Library. One year ago the five-story building was named in honor of Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tip O’Neill, a 1936 graduate of Boston College. O’Neill addressed invited guests at the outdoor ceremonies on the library plaza and was feted at a dinner later in the evening. The new building has the capacity to house 1.25 million volumes, a 140-station public computer terminal area, nine classrooms, research office space, and the university Telecommunications Center. The O’Neill Library was designed by The Architects Collaborative, Inc., of Cambridge.

•The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, is now accepting, within certain guidelines, the deposit of library materials from its member institutions. The amount of material accepted will be limited to quantities that can be processed and made readily available for use based on current staffing levels. The Center’s ability to accept deposits of library materials was restricted for the past several years by a lack of adequate material processing staff and shelf space. Following the construction of a second building, the approval by the membership of a revised deposit policy, and a staff reorganization, materials may again be deposited under the new policy. Inquiries about type of materials suitable for deposit should be addressed to Esther Smith, Center for Research Libraries, 6050 S. Kenwood Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

•The Northeast Document Conservation Cen- ter, Andover, Massachusetts, participated in the salvage of paper currency from the Andrea Doria safe and will perform the restoration of the soggy bills. Mary Todd Glaser, senior conservator at the Center, served as a consultant to the project and was one of two paper conservators on hand when the safe was opened on August 16. Glaser assisted in removing bundles of waterlogged currency and was shown during the live television coverage separating and examining the bills. The material will be freeze-dried and eventually sent to the Center for treatment. Once the bills are dried, they will be separated, washed for removal of salt, alkalized, and dried again. The Center will then experiment on a small batch of the currency to find measures to strengthen the paper—sizing or polyester film encapsulation are possibilities.