ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Young

The University of Rochester has receiveda gift of approximately $500,000 from alumnus Roger B. Friedlander to renovate the Welles-Brown Room and the main lobby of the Rush Rhees Library. A prominent member of the Rochester business community, Friedlander was concerned that the room and lobby had lost their original feeling of elegance and comfort. The renovation of the room will include: replacement of the furnishings, installation of new lighting and electrical work, as well as a sound amplification system, improved back lighting for the stained glass window, and restaining the walls. Renovations to the main lobby will remove the turnstile barriers, install a new state-of-the-art security system, clean the brass chandelier and stone walls, and improve wall display cases.

The Library of Congress National DigitalLibrary (NDL) Program has received a $3.5 million grant from AT&T. A portion of the grant will go toward digitizing materials from the Library of Congress’s collections of Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F. B. Morse, including Bell’s sketch of the first telephone and Morse’s first telegraphic message. The goal of the NDL Program is to make freely available over the Internet millions of items by the year 2000, in collaboration with other institutions. This site can be accessed at http://www.loc.gov/.

Rider University has received a $40,025grant from the New York Community Trust-John Robert Gregg Fund for the preservation of the Louis A. Leslie collection of shorthand materials. In 1983, the late Leslie, an authority on shorthand, bequeathed the collection of shorthand materials from around the world. The collection contains every shorthand system invented and hundreds of systems that were unsuccessful but influenced later authors. The Leslie Collection includes books inscribed in shorthand by such shorthand authors as Sir Isaac Pitman and John Robert Gregg, as well as complete files of shorthand periodicals and shorthand books in European languages, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese. Less common languages such as Tagalog, Thai, and Erse are also represented. The collection also includes letters that Civil War soldiers wrote in shorthand to magazine editors and to their wives or girlfriends, shorthand renditions of the Bible, and various well-known works of literature.

The Friends of the Detroit Public Library,acting on behalf of DALNET, the Detroit Area Library Network, received a grant for $100,000 from Ameritech to fund a twophase project to promote public awareness of and to provide end user training for the new Southeast Michigan Information Hub. Once it is fully developed, the hub will serve people throughout the 17-county Detroit regional area in their educational, cultural, research, professional, and recreational endeavors. It will enable DALNET libraries to reach beyond the walls of the library and deliver text, images, sound, and video to the desktop level and eventually to public kiosks.

The National Gallery of Prague has beenawarded a grant of $180,000 from the Getty Grant Program to support the MicroGallery, featuring 2,000 digitized images of works of art from the National Gallery’s permanent collections. Upon its completion in 200001, the MicroGallery, an interactive computer information system, will allow National Gallery visitors access to art images accompanied by extensive information through touch-screen monitors, with text in Czech and English. The program will be available in all permanent exhibitions of the National Gallery.

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; email: ayoung@ala.org.

The University of Michigan (UM) Libraryhas received a grant of $430,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand UM’s “Making of America” project. Known as “The American Voice, 1850-1876,” this conversion effort will expand the online collections and tools developed during the original “Making of America” project and will seek to establish benchmarks and guidelines for the digital preservation of materials. The primary purpose of this effort will be to produce a handbook for the Mellon Foundation and the library community that documents a model of accomplishing both preservation and access. Over 7,500 monographs will be converted and added to the current “Making of America” online collection of 19thcentury American journal articles and monographs. Directed by Maria Bonn, The American Voice will draw upon the preservation, system development, interface design, and digital conversion expertise of the UM Library. The foundation collection for this project can be found at www.umdl. umich.edu/moa/.

Acquisitions

Robert and ElizabethBarrett Browning’s last poems have been acquired by Baylor University (BU) in Waco, Texas. A six-line manuscript, a rendering of an “Inscription on an Ancient Sundial at Newquay, Cornwall,” appears to be the last poem written by Browning. It is a meditation on the transience of life and presence of death—a close parallel to the “Epilogue” of Asolando, which has always been accepted as his farewell poem. Afair copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s last poem, “The North and the South,” was signed and dated “Rome. May 1861,” just one month before her death. It was written in honor of Hans Christian Andersen, Danish author of popular children’s stories. These poems were acquired through donations by the Guardian Angels, the friends’ group for the library.

The Cloister of the Clasped Hands in Baylor University's Armstrong Browning Library, featuring an 1853 bronze sculpture by Harriet Hosmer, which commemorates the great love story of the Brownings.

Also featured at the Armstrong Browning Library is the McLean Foyer of Meditation, which was created to inspire great thoughts and to memorialize the life of Robert Browning. Golden Jubilee events will take place in 2001 to celebrate the construction of the building and to showcase the collection of research materials founded by A. J. Armstrong in 1918.

The Pearl Herlihy Daniels Historical MapCollection has been received as a gift by the University of Delaware from her sons— Thomas Herlihy III and the Honorable Jerome O. Herlihy. The collection contains more than 100 historic maps, many of which depict Delaware and the surrounding region at various points in history. Also included in the collection are more than 80 reproductions of historic maps, original artwork and reproductions of Delaware scenes by Jack Lewis, Robert Shaw, and other artists, and a collection of map reference books. Several boxes of Daniels’s papers accompany the collection, including correspondence, typescripts, and notes of articles and lectures, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and miscellaneous materials. Daniels, who died December 1994, was an avid collector of historical maps, particularly maps depicting Delaware and adjacent areas.

Papers of former U.S.Congressman Eligio (Kika) de la Garza from South Texas were acquired by the University of Texas PanAmerican. The university received 717 boxes of archival materials, 588 of which were forwarded from the donor’s congressional office in Washington, D.C. and 129 of which were forwarded from his office in McAllen, Texas. The materials included in these boxes are legislative documents, political campaign documents, constituent inquires and requests, photographs, maps, trophies, plaques, and awards. ■

C&RL News■ May 1999 / 405