ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

ACQUISITIONS

•Illinois State Historical SocietyLibrary, Springfield, has acquired a collection of the letters and manuscripts of U.S. Senator Lyman Trumbull (1813-1896) to add to their existing collection of Trumbull family papers. Included are letters from Trumbull and his brothers and sisters to family members in Jackson, Michigan, mostly dating from the 1840s and 1850s.

•New York Public Libraryhas purchased a collection of important papers and documents by and about Herman Melville (1819-1891), including the first draft of a portion of the author’s first published novel, Typee (1845), as well as hundreds of family letters and memorabilia. Other rarities are a fragment from the short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” three letters signed by Melville, and over 500 letters from Melville’s mother, wife, and other family members. The collection also contains three large family trunks and other artifacts. New York Public Library possesses one of the largest collections of Melville material in the world.

•Oklahoma State UniversityLibrary, Stillwater, has received the papers of Paul Miller, now chairman emeritus of the Gannett Company. The papers, which record the beginnings and growth of news networks in America, include writings, photos, documents, news stories, and personal correspondence that reflect Miller’s early career and his term as president of the Associated Press.

•The Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, recently acquired the historical papers of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. The collection, dating from 1861 to 1934, comprises minute books, annual reports, correspondence, posters, and souvenir programs. Established in 1881, the Association was important in the history of amateur sports in Canada.

•The University of Denver’s Center for the Study of Library Architecture has received, as a gift from David Kaser, his architectural consultation papers, plans, and programs for the years 1958-1975. Kaser, a former president of ACRL, has advised in the development of over 60 college and university library buildings in the United States, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Among the library buildings represented in the gift are the Vassar College Library, the Western Illinois University Library, the Vanderbilt University Library, and the University of Wisconsin Library.

•The University of Notre Dame Libraries, Notre Dame, Indiana, have received the first installment of a major collection of ten incunabula donated by Astrik L. Gabriel, director emeritus of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. The first volume received is the Postilla cum sermonibus evangeliorum by Nicholas Dinkelsbuhl (Strassburg, 1496), one of only two copies known to exist in the United States. This work and the additional titles to be received will significantly enrich the libraries’ already strong collections in theology and medieval studies.

•The University of Pittsburgh Libraries have received a unique collection of unpublished draft manuscripts by Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), the first President of Czechoslovakia. The manuscripts were presented to the Libraries by the University’s Czechoslovak Nationality Room Committee in a special ceremony on March

6, Masaryk’s birthday. The papers, either written by Masaryk or by his instruction, are mostly unpublished drafts of letters, memoranda, and messages in either English or Czech addressed to American and European statesmen during the final phase of World War I and in the early period of the country’s independence.

•Wichita State University,Kansas, has received over 600 books and periodicals on mesmerism, animal magnetism, and hypnotism from Dr. Maurice M. Tinterow, editor of Foundations of Hypnosis. The collection includes works by Nicolas Bergasse, Hippolyte Bernheim, James Esdaile, Franz Anton Mesmer, the Marquis de Puységur, and other figures who contributed to the development of hypnosis. It also includes the only known copy of James Braid’s Satanic Agency and Mesmerism Reviewed, in which the word “hypnotism” was coined.

GRANTS

• Centennial College of Applied Arts and Technology,Scarborough, Ontario, has been granted $151,710 from the Ontario Government for the creation of an automated vertical file index, compilation of film and videotape catalogs, and the development of a specialized trade magazine index. The index will be made available to other libraries and interested organizations.

•Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning,Philadelphia, has received a $200,000 grant from the Pew Memorial Trust to upgrade and modernize its Main Library collection of works concerned with Semitic languages and literature, Arabic and Islamic studies, and Jewish studies and Rabbinics. Two of the project goals are to convert its classification to the Library of Congress system and add OCLC terminals. The College has also been awarded $41,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve its collection of Genizah documents, part of a vast trove of ancient and medieval manuscripts found in the 1890s in a Cairo synagogue’s storage area. The documents are being deacidified and sealed in polyester film.

•Harvard UniversityLibrary has been granted $249,834 under the Strengthening Research Libraries Resources Program of the U.S. Department of Education to support preservation microfilming in 1983-1984. The grant will pay the salaries of a small staff and enable the Library to preserve, disseminate, and facilitate the use of approximately 1.2 million pages of fragile and rare publications and manuscripts. This year the Library will give special attention to its outstanding collection of European publications of the World War II period and will continue its experimentation in the preservation and bibliographic control of collections of ephemera.

•Indiana UniversityLibraries, Bloomington, have received a $230,080 Title II-C grant to improve nationwide bibliographic access to their collection of folklore research materials. The project will include preservation microfilming of certain serial titles, adding the collection to the OCLC database, and organizing, indexing, and archivally storing materials in the Lilly Library’s Dorson Collection.

•Johns Hopkins University’sMilton S. Eisenhower Library, Baltimore, has received a $71,456 Title II-C grant for the bibliographic control and preservation of the James G. Birney collection of anti-slavery pamphlets. Data on the collection of 1,200 items will be entered into the RLIN database, and a short title index of the records will be compiled and distributed nationally.

•Northwestern University ,Evanston, Illinois, has been awarded a grant of up to $57,000 by the Council on Library Resources to conduct an evaluation study of activities designed to teach the use of an online public access catalog. The study involves the creation of an instructional model for the development of a training program that could be adopted in a number of different online catalogs in academic library settings. A key component of the model will be the utilization of online transaction monitoring as a source of data on user performance. The project began on July 1 and runs for 16 months.

•Rider College,Lawrenceville, New Jersey, has received a grant of $300,000 from the Pew Memorial Trust for a three-year automation project to broaden the library’s resource-sharing capability. The library plans a retrospective conversion using the OCLC database, installation of an online public catalog and circulation system, and freezing the card catalog.

•Tulane University’sWilliam Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, New Orleans, has been awarded a second grant of $25,000 by the Rockefeller Foundation to continue the cataloging of popular music in print and manuscript form. The goal is to process some 10,000 pieces, including sheet music, orchestrations, and band arrangements dating from the 19th and 20th centuries.

•The University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded a Title II-C grant to improve its Czechoslovak and Russian Pacifica collections. Two major goals are the cataloging and preservation of the Masaryk-Beneš Collection and filling major gaps in pre-1945 Czechoslovak periodical holdings.

•The University of Illinois Library, Urbana, has received a grant of $20,113 from the Illinois Humanities Council for its project entitled, “William Shakespeare: Not of an Age, But for All Time.” Melissa Cain, English Library, and Michael Mullin, English Department, are codirectors of the project, which premiered at the annual Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Bloomington, in July and August. It features an exhibit of Shakespeare material from the library’s collection, preperformance lectures given by humanities scholars, a viewer’s guide and other printed educational material dealing with the staging and interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays.

The University Library has also been given its largest single endowment fund. E. Kenneth Gray, a retired physician and Illinois graduate, gave over $450,000 through the University of Illinois Library Friends to support purchases of books for the Rare Book Room and other special collections. The funds will eventually be used for the establishment of a $5 million endowment for library acquisitions.

•The University of Kansas Library, Lawrence, has been awarded a $114,313 Title II-C grant for a project to catalog 5,000 Central American titles.

•The University of Nevada, Reno, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to train a Basque librarian and to begin cataloging the internationally-known Basque research collection. The funding creates a cooperative venture between the UNR Library, the UNR Basque Studies Program, the Basque government (in Vitoria, Spain), and the newly-formed University of the Basque Country. The UNR Basque collection of

15,0 items is particularly known for its works on ethnic nationalism and Basque emigration patterns and was started 20 years ago with a core collection of 700 books from the personal library of noted French Basque scholar, Philippe Veyrin.

NEWS NOTES

• The Association of American Library Schools, State College, Pennsylvania, has changed its name to the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). The name change reflects the many developments which have taken place in the Association since it was founded in 1915. Its goal is to promote excellence in education for library and information science as a means of increasing the effectiveness of library and information services.

•Columbia University,New York, announced plans to build a new $3 million Rare Book and Manuscript Library with funds raised through donor contributions. The library will occupy portions of the top floors of Butler Library on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. Walls and partitions throughout the interior will be primarily glass, while floors and furnishings will be oak. The library, designed by New York architects Cain, Farrell and Bell, is scheduled for completion in the fall of 1984.

•The Library Company of Philadelphia is hosting a project, organized by the State and University Library of Göttingen, West Germany, to record every item printed in the German language in America before 1830. Werner Tannhoff of the Göttingen Library has made the Library Company his American headquarters for the project and is compiling information on books, broadsides, and almanacs printed as early as 1729. The final product will be a multi-volume work entitled The First Century of German Language Printing in the United States of North America, expected to be published in 1985. The entire project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association), an organization similar to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Göttingen Project coincides with the 300th anniversary of the founding of Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. Many German-American imprints in the collections of the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania will be featured in the joint “Germantown 300” exhibit to open in October, 1983. ■■

CLR Invites Applications for the 1984-85 Internship Program

The Council on Library Resources invites applications for the 1984-85 Academic Library Management Intern Program. A maximum of five librarians will be chosen to spend nine months working with directors and senior administrative staff at host libraries.

Each intern will be awarded a stipend equal to basic salary and benefits (up to $25,000) for the nine-month period. Some assistance with moving and other expenses will also be provided.

Applicants must be citizens of the United States or Canada, or have permanent resident status in either country. Experience, education, references, and other factors will be considered in selecting interns. Nearly all past interns have had at least five years of professional library experience.

Applications must be postmarked no later than October 3, 1983. For further information and application materials, write Academic Library Management Intern Program, Council on Library Resources, 1785 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20036; (202) 483- 7474.

AFRICANA AWARD

The Archives-Libraries Committee of the African Studies Association (U.S.) seeks nominations for the third biennial Helen F. Conover-Dorothy B. Porter Award for excellence in Africana bibliography or reference work. Any Africa-related reference work, bibliography or bibliographic essay published separately or as part of a larger work during 1981, 1982 or 1983 can be nominated for the 1984 award, which includes a prize of $300. Nominations must be received before the end of December, 1983.

Conover was senior bibliographer in the African Section of the Library of Congress, serving 32 years before her retirement in 1963. Porter was librarian of the Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University, retiring after 45 years of service in 1973. The 1980 award was presented to Julian Witherell for his The United States and Africa: Guide to U.S. Official Documents and Government-Sponsored Publications on Africa, 1785-1975 (Washington: Library of Congress, 1978). The 1982 award went to Roger Hilbert and Christine Oehlmann for their Foreign Direct Investments and Multinational Corporations in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Bibliography (Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 1980).

To recommend a title or for further information, please contact: Joseph J. Lauer, Chairman, ASA Subcommittee on Bibliography, Technical Services Department, University Research Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024. ■■