ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants

The American Antiquarian Society(AAS) has been awarded a three-year grant of $750,000 from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund of New York City to support initiatives to in- crease awareness and use of the Society’s independent research library. The AAS, the third oldest historical society in the United States, maintains a library of Ameri- can history and culture that includes materials printed in the United States dating from the establishment of a press in 1639 through 1876.

Dalhousie University Libraries in Halifax,Nova Scotia, have received a grant of $23,000 from the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) to increase library holdings in American studies. The award is the sequel to the visit by an American Library Fellow who spent six months evaluating the library’s American studies collection. The funds will allow purchase of publications about American business, black and native studies, history, literature, and politics. The Library/ Book Fellow Project, administered by ALA and funded by the USIA, is designed to increase international understanding of the United States.

The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Collegehas been awarded $2,480,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to improve and extend the existing Louisiana library networks. The resulting system will operate through the statewide fiber optic telecommunication network managed by the state’s Office of Telecommunications Management. When the project is fully implemented, Louisiana citizens will have an electronic window to information resources stored in libraries and databases in Louisiana and throughout the world.

The Newberry Library of Chicago hasbeen awarded a three-year grant of $1.3 million from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The grant will be used to establish the Newberry Library Lyceum, which will offer a variety of public programs, exhibitions, concerts, lectures, readings, and seminars. The Newberry

Library, which opened in 1887, includes materials from the late Middle Ages to the end of the Napoleonic Era. American works date from the earliest settlements in this country to the present.

Princeton University’sFirestone Library has been awarded a $600,000 grant from the King Fahd National Library of Saudi Arabia to support the library’s pathbreaking Arabic book preservation project. The grant is part of a long-term partnership between the two libraries to microfilm and preserve Princeton’s 110,000-volume collection of Ara- bic and Islamic materials, the only such project for Arabic books in the world. Begun in 1989 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project has gained support from other government agencies and private donors.

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries haveestablished two endowments. The S. Dillon Ripley Library Endowment of $278,000 honors the former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who founded the libraries 25 years ago. The endowment, which was established on Ripley’s 80th birthday with contributions from some 200 well-wishers, will support acquisitions in the 18-branch system. An endowment of $343,000 from the sale of duplicate books in the natural history collections will be used to support special collections purchases.

The University of California, Riverside, hasreceived three grants totaling $1.1 million— $525,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities; $325,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and $250,000 from the Department of Education. The awards will support the completion of the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue project, the cataloging of all books published in Great Britain or its colonies between 1701 and 1800. The project, which began in 1977, is expected to be complete in 1995 and will include a half-million titles. Books and documents, such as handbills, flyers, and pamphlets, are recorded by author, title, subject, date, publisher, and where the copies are held. Up to one-third of the entries exist only as a single known copy.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science has been granted $60,000 from the Temple Foundation, matching a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to support the Preservation and Conservation Studies Program. The funds will be allocated to conservator student stipends, which will allow qualified and talented students to complete the highly intensive program for the training of preservation administrators and conservators for library and archive materials.