ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

★ ★ ★

News from the Hield

Acquisitions

• Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, has acquired the collection of the Rhode Island Medical Society. The donation of approximately 50,000 volumes was voted by the Society membership at its annual meeting in May. Founded in 1812, the Society is the eighth oldest state society in continuous operation. The collection contains numerous volumes of note, including Pliny’s Historia Naturalis (1501) and about 15 other 16th-century works. The oldest English-language title is A Discourse of the Whole Art of Chyrurgerie by Peter Lowe, published in Glasgow in 1612. Among many rare first editions is The Physiology of Friedrich Haller (1757). An unusual collection is one of non-medical publications by physicians, including works of fiction, poetry, history, travel, etc., including Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). Originally given to the Society in 1927, the extra-professional collection includes 1,200 volumes and an endowment, which Brown will assume for the collection’s maintenance and expansion. The Society materials also include long runs of the journal publications of various state medical societies, which will be added, with the Society’s current medical texts, to the Brown Sciences Library.

• The Center for Research Libraries’ Southeast Asia Microform (SEAM) Project, Chicago, has received microfilm copies of manuscripts from the Yogyakarta Palace in Indonesia, the gift of Sultan Hamengkubowono IX. The 120 rolls represent two collections: one of court histories and genealogies and one of dance, dance-drama, and musical notations. The films are the result of an Australian project to preserve the deteriorating documents. Sponsored in part by the Ford Foundation with the stipulation that copies be made available to American scholars, the films were presented to a SEAM representative at ceremonies in Indonesia. SEAM has launched a new project to film manuscripts in the Sonobudoyo Museum in Yogyakarta.

• City College of the City University of New York, Manhattan, has received a collection of 750 volumes and various journal issues relating to Scottish life and literature. The materials are the gift of emeritus professor Coleman C. Parsons, who taught English at the College from 1937 to 1971 and is the author of more than 100 articles on Scottish literature. Subjects in the collection range chronologically from the 15th-century poems of Robert Henryson to the 20th-century novels of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, with special emphasis on the Jacobites, Robert Louis Stevenson, Queen Mary of Scotland, and Sir Walter Scott. The poet John Davidson is represented in 13 first editions published between 1893 and 1910 by John Lane of London. Another first edition is Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). Early editions of Scott include a third edition of Lord of the Isles (1815) and a second edition of Marmion (1908). The immensely popular if now forgotten “lady” dramatist of Scotland, Joanna Baillie, is represented in a set of her Series of Plays in Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind (4 volumes, 1806-1812). Works of 18th-century British drama in the collection include a 1766 operatic adaptation of Fielding’s Tom Jones by Joseph Reed, and works by the prolific George Colman.

• The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, has acquired at auction an archive of 300 pages of manuscript material relating to Commodore James Barron and the Chesapeake- Leopard affair of 1807. Barron (1768-1851) was captain of the U.S. Navy ship Chesapeake when it was overcome by a British ship, the Leopard, looking for alleged British deserters. The materials purchased relate to the court proceedings of 1807-1808 and include correspondence, rough minutes of hearings, witnesses’ testimony, attorneys’ interrogations. Some of the items are previously unknown. The Barron papers are of particular value in shedding light on 19th-century court martial proceedings and will be added to Barron’s personal papers, already at the College.

William and Mary has also purchased an 1818 letter from President John Tyler to his first wife, in which he regrets that he will not be home for Christmas due to the pressures of public life.

• Columbia University, New York City, has received a segment of the correspondence of Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) in commemoration of the centenary of the British scientist’s birth. The letters are the gift of author, philosopher and civil libertarian Corliss Lamont, whose correspondence with Huxley began in the 1920s when Lamont, later a teacher at Columbia, was a graduate student. Included are 20 letters from Huxley and 12 from Lamont, covering a wide range of topics. Early letters offer advice to the young philosophy scholar, while later ones comment on Lamont’s successful legal challenges to Senator Joseph MeCarthy’s investigative committee in 1953 and, in 1965, of the U.S. Postmaster General’s censorship of incoming foreign mail.

• Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has agreed to serve as the depository of the archives of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society. Included are operating papers, correspondence, and financial records of the Division dating back to its founding in 1947. The archives have been placed in the Manuscript Collection as an open collection and have been listed in OCLC.

• Lehman College of the City University of New York, Bronx, has recently arranged and made available three collections of significance in the history of the Bronx. The records of the Fordham Manor Beformed Church, established in 1696 and the oldest church in the Bronx with a permanent ministry, have been processed. The collection of 18 cubic feet is comprised of record books, consistory minutes, correspondence, legal documents, church publications and programs, speeches, committee reports, photographs, maps and blueprints, and spans the years 1792 to 1967. Also organized are some 40 cubic feet of material from the Riverdale Neighborhood House, a social service organization, including minutes, correspondence, photographs and publications from 1883-1978. Lehman has also processed and described the working papers of journalist Jill Jonnes, author of We’re Still Here: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the South Bronx (1986). Included are 10.5 cubic feet of reports, newspaper clippings, correspondence, transcripts, interview notes and photographs documenting the political, social and economic forces which have shaped the area.

• The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., has received a collection of approximately 600 drawings, designs, letters, photographs, and other materials from the archives of industrial designer Raymond Loewy. The material was purchased at the auction of the Loewy archives in France following his death in 1986. Loewy is famed as the designer of such familiar items as the Coca-Cola bottle, the classic S–l locomotive, the Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, and the Studebaker Avanti automobile. Among the materials are a large water- color rendering of the exterior design of Air Force One which Loewy worked out in consultation with President John F. Kennedy; designs of automobiles, heavily annotated by Loewy, showing his influence and direction; photographs of the innovative 1934 Hupmobile, which he designed; sketches for the Russian Moskvitch car of the 1970s which was never built; and designs for the 1956 Cornell safety car. His work on the Exxon Corporation logo is represented by a number of variations on the final product. Among many photographs of Loewy himself is one which shows him as a proud 13-year- old sitting in a small racing car of his own design.

The Library has also confirmed that a draft of the Bill of Rights, written by Roger Sherman, is included in the papers of President James Madison. Apparently written by Sherman, a member of a House of Representatives, in July of 1789, the draft indicates his influence in adding the Bill of Rights as a group of amendments to the Constitution. Madison is considered the “father” of the Bill of Rights but is known to have favored the idea that amendments be interwoven throughout the Constitution.

• The New York State Library, Albany, has received a collection of materials relating to firefighting from Dr. Thomas Walsh of Albany. Items in the collection date from the 17th century to the present and cover topics related to the history of fires and fire-fighting throughout the United States, Great Britain, and Europe. There are long runs of several American and British periodicals and National Fire Protection Board manuals, large numbers of professional fire-fighting equipment catalogs and advertising ephemera. In addition to many photographs of fire trucks and other equipment, the collection contains substantial material on hydraulics and water supply, including a group of books on the construction of the Croton Reservoir in New York State. The core of the collection includes materials on the history of numerous fire departments throught the United States.

• Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, has acquired a missions periodical collection of nearly 800 items from the Overseas Ministries Studies Center, New Haven, Connecticut. Included is a wide range of Third World literature in English and other languages.

• Temple University Libraries' Urban Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have recently acquired the records of the Pennsylvania National Abortion Rights League (NARAL). The records reflect NARAL’s activities during the late 1970s as a pro-choice organization, as well as the views of the pro-life and religious organizations in the Philadelphia area.

Temple’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Department has also acquired a gift from Roger Knuth of RCA/CBS of 11,000 original pulp magazines and first and limited editions of science fiction and fantasy genre writings. The gift includes many complete or nearly complete American and British periodicals and many books by fantasy writer H.P. Loveeraft.

• The University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections has acquired a collection of the first 100 printed works of the Whittington Press. The collection includes one regular and one leather/special issue of each title, with the exception of the leather/special issues the Press printed for others. It also includes a complete run of the Press’s catalogs and an almost comprehensive run of its broadsheets, posters, ephemera, and marbling sheets.

• The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently received more than 1,000 volumes of Chinese books from a delegation headed by Dong- chang He, vice chairman of the State Education Commission of the People’s Republic of China. Included are new and old reference works, modern and traditional literature, works on art history and the social sciences, and volumes from the Contemporary China and Chinese Art series and the Great Encyclopedia series.

• The University of Rochester School of Medicine’s Edward D. Miner Library, New York, has received the papers of physiologist Edward Frederick Adolph (1895-1986). A scientist of international reputation, Adolph trained several generations of physicians and physiologists, and made major contributions to the understanding of the body’s regulatory functions and to the physiology of adaptation. The collection represents Adolph’s research, publishing and teaching activities at Rochester over a period of 61 years.

• The University of Texas at Austin has received a gift of 1,607 volumes in Chinese, including 644 titles, from the People’s Republic of China. The books were formally presented by Consul General Yaoli Ni at a ceremony in Houston and represent a careful selection of scholarly works. Many are in special library bindings and include dictionaries, encyclopedias and directories in the fields of language, literature, history, culture, philosophy, religion, economics, business and the arts. Other titles cover areas of science and technology. One 10–volume set, Tsou hsiang shih chieh (March Toward the World), contains the memoirs of Chinese diplomats, officials and scholars who visited foreign countries in the late 19th century. Of interest to researchers are volumes of the 1982 Population Census of China as well as Great Economic Events in the People’s Republic of China (1949-1980) and reprints of periodical titles from the time of the early Republic. Also included are deluxe editions of four of the most popular Chinese novels, The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Journey to the West, The Water Margin, and The Story of Three Kingdoms.

• The University of Tulsa’s Special Collections Department, Oklahoma, has received a collection of correspondence between poet, novelist and critic Robert Graves (1895-1986) and Scottish folk singer Isla Cameron written between 1961 and 1971. The collection includes 85 letters signed by Graves and 77 signed by Cameron, and was purchased from a London dealer. At the height of his career during the period of the correspondence, Graves had settled permanently on the island of Majorca, from which he travelled frequently to lecture or to receive public honors. The letters demonstrate that Graves and Cameron were close friends who gave one another support and encouragement. Graves discusses the two “Muses” who inspired much of his love poetry and speaks of his famous work The White Goddess and of his need to be in love in order to write true poetry. Graves, who never learned to type, wrote the letters in longhand.

Tulsa’s Special Collections Department has also issued a comprehensive guide to its collection of the materials of English novelist Paul Scott. Scott was visiting professor at Tulsa in 1976 and 1977 and is most noted as the creator of The Raj Quartet, the basis for the recent PBS series “The Jewel in the Crown.” Scott died in 1979. The collection includes materials relating to Scott’s novels, television and stage plays, lectures and addresses, as well as reviews, reader’s reports, press cuttings and radio reviews, magazine and newspaper appearances and a large number of draft book reviews and reader’s reports. It chronicles Scott’s life from 1960 until his death and contains virtually all his correspondence during the period, some 5,700 letters written to him and 6,000 by him.

Grants

• Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, has been awarded $250,000 by alumnus Finn M. W. Casper- son, chief executive officer of Beneficial Corporation. The funds will be used for the creation of a Map Room in the library’s new wing.

• Carnegie-Mellon University’s Hunt Botanical Library, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has received a grant of $12,268 from the State Library of Pennsylvania with funds provided by the federal Library Services and Construction Act, Title III. The grant will allow portions of the library’s card catalog to be converted into machine-readable form and to make its resources available on OCLC. The Pittsburgh Regional Library Center will undertake the conversion of approximately one-fourth of the collection, including its floristic and systematic literature.

Carnegie-Mellon, with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh, has also received an LSCA Title III planning grant of $58,673 to form a library consortium. The grant is effective in October. The establishment of a cooperative preservation and storage facility together with the Pennsylvania State University libraries and other research libraries is among the goals of consortium. Internships and cooperative staff development programs will also be developed.

• The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, has received a three-year grant of $250,000 from the Pew Memorial Trust for the conversion of a portion of its typewritten catalog records into machine-readable form. Approximately 60,000 of the Center’s remaining 200,000 catalog cards will be converted as part of the project, developed in conjunction with OCLC, which is contributing 25 percent of the project costs in services. The records will also be made available on RLIN.

• Columbia University’s School of Library Service, New York City, has been awarded $450,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for its postgraduate Conservation Programs. The grant will allow the School to admit 36 new students over the next three years for training as preservation administrators, and 18 students for training as conservators.

• Gettysburg College's Musselman Library, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, has been awarded a $14,676 grant by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The grant will fund the college’s participation in the Pennsylvania College and University Archival and Manuscript Repository Regrant Program. As part of the program, archivists will conduct a records inventory of the administrative offices, academic departments, and faculty governance committees; create records retention schedules based upon the records inventory; plan an orderly transfer of historically important records to the college archives; and begin arrangement of the most significant records. The regrant program is a cooperative effort of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the State Historical Records Advisory Roard.

• The Human Relations Area Files, Inc., New Haven, Connecticut, has received a $40,000 NEH grant and $50,000 from the National Science Foundation for the project “A Supplement to the Ethnographic Bibliography of North America.” Work on the two-volume supplement to the 1975 edition began July 1, and is expected to take two years. The Ethnographic Bibliography is the standard bibliographic reference work on Eskimos and North American Indians.

• Kent State University’s School of Architecture and Environmental Design, Ohio, has received a six-year, $600,000 grant from the Ohio Roard of Regents under its Academic Challenge program. More than $215,000 has been designated for the new architectural branch library, dedicated in April, including funds for renovation, furnishings, and a professional librarian’s salary. An alumni gift supplied carpet for the library and additional money has been pledged by alumni for the purchase of materials.

• Stanford University, California, has been awarded an LSCA Title III grant of $50,829 to serve as fiscal agent for the planning of a California statewide conference on library and information services for ethnic California. It is projected that Blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Pacific and Native Americans will constitute the predominant population of the state by the turn of the century. The goal of the project is to explore the implications of this ethnic shift and to help libraries respond to it. A planning committee of representatives from academic and public libraries around the state has been appointed by the State Librarian and has submitted a $212,000 conference proposal.

Stanford has also received an award of $146,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue the Mellon Internship in Preservation Administration for three years. The first Mellon award in 1984 allowed three postgraduate interns to develop planning and managerial skills and new technical knowledge. The present grant will fund three additional interns at the rate of one per year. • The State University College at Buffalo, New York, together with Canisius College and the State University of New York at Buffalo, has been awarded a $3,000 grant by the Japan Foundation for the acquisition of books on Japanese culture, history, and social life. The collection will be housed in the State University College library.

• The University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections, has been awarded a $22,000 grant by the Times Mirror Foundation to support the processing and preservation of the Los Angeles Times photographic archive. The archive contains more than two million negatives covering the period 1893 through 1981. The Times keeps its previous six years of negatives in its current research archive and transfers non- current negatives to UCLA annually. Funds for the current project will be used to re-box the collection and to convert and update an index microfilmed from old index cards to an online database which will provide broader access to the collection.

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has received a $918,163 endowment from the estate of Edmund Field, a 1916 graduate. Field was the grandson of Edmund Burke Fairfield, the University’s second chancellor, who served from 1876 to 1882. Income from the endowment will be used to enhance the collections.

• The University of South Carolina’s College of Library and Information Science, Columbia, has received $8,000 to fund the third and final year of a project emphasizing the state’s library heritage. A project entitled “South Carolina’s Library Heritage,” including articles, oral history interviews and an exhibit, is now available for tours. Plans are underway for a conference on South Carolina library history and the documentation of the experiences of black librarians in the state. Funding for the project has come from the Committee for the Humanities, the South Carolina State Library, and the South Carolina Library Association.

South Carolina’s Library Processing Center has received an LSCA Title III grant of $15,000 from the South Carolina State Library, not $1,500 as reported in the April 1987 C&RL News.

• The University of Waterloo, Ontario, has received a grant of $1,750 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to purchase a rare architectural dictionary for the Rosa Breithaupt Clark Collection. The grant was made under the “Fleeting Opportunities” provision of the Council’s “Support to Specialized Collections in University Libraries Program,” designed to help university libraries take advantage of unforeseen opportunities to buy highly desirable items. Such grants must be matched by library funds. Acquired was the Architectural Publication Society’s Dictionary of Architecture, published in London beween 1848 and 1892, a fundamental reference for the study of the history of architecture that has never been reprinted. Complete sets of the eight folios are now very scarce.

Waterloo has also recently been awarded a grant of $5,000 from the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation to conserve the Kitchener-Waterloo Record collection of 875,000 photographic negatives.

• The Vermont State Archives, Montpelier, and the Manuscripts and Special Collections Unit of the New York State Library have received an NEH preservation grant of $60,000 to microfilm the Stevens Papers. The Papers encompass the years 1700-1860 and focus on the territorial disputes that gave birth to Vermont as a republic in 1777 and as a state in 1791. Assembled by Henry Stevens Jr. (1791-1867), an important collector of Vermon- tiana and founder of the Vermont Historical Society (1838), they were sold by Stevens’ heirs to the New York State Library in 1875. Partially burned in the 1911 Capitol fire, their fragile condition has since restricted their use. Under the auspices of the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office, the Papers will be transferred to the Vermont State Archives for filming. Both states will receive copies of the films.

News notes

• The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, has become a full member of the Library of Congress CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials) program. As a full member, the Center will perform name authority work for its headings and authenticate its own records. CRL has been an active contributor to the LC Name Authority File since October 1986 and has “enhance” capabilities on OCLC for its monographic cataloging. It has been estimated that CRL will catalog 1,800-2,000 serials per year. Given the uncommon titles owned by the Center, its participation in CONSER will make an important contribution to the program’s goal of building a comprehensive serials database that encompasses all languages, subjects, and formats.

• The University of Florida’s Baldwin Library, Gainesville, has completed its imprint catalog for books in English before 1900 primarily for children, some 40,000 of which are held by the library. Although an index to the collection was published by G.K. Hall in 1981, the Baldwin Library has maintained chronological, imprint, and added entry files for all books added since. The files have proven useful in checking catalogs and bibliographies by imprint and in studying specific publishing houses, e.g., Darton, Tabart, Partridge, and Mahlon Day. Anyone compiling bibliographies of publishers before 1900 may wish to query Baldwin even though the focus is on popular materials and not primarily children’s books.

■ ■