ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Marquette University has receivedmore than $143,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities K-12 Education Program to conduct a summer 2000 institute, “America’s First Nations: American Indians in Social Studies Curricula.” The institute, co-directed by Mark Thiel, assistant archivist, will include hands-on engagement ranging from ancient mammoth-hunting sites, readings guided by well-known researchers, and time to use archival and museum collections for classroom projects. More information on the project is available at http://www.marquette.edu/library/neh/.

Johns Hopkins University's Milton S.Eisenhower Library has been awarded $500,000 in initial funding for one year from the Hodson Trust to establish a research institute to develop innovative technologies that enhance scholarship. Conceived as a university-wide resource, the institute will provide facilities, personnel, and expertise in the development of technologically enhanced instructional models. The institute will also conduct independently funded research and development on faculty training methods and materials using new technologies in teaching, particularly electronically enhanced teaching, for on-site and distance education courses. Since 1996, a portion of the Hodson Trust’s gift to Hopkins has supported the library’s expanding digital initiatives.

East Carolina University (ECU) hasreceived $3,470 from the North Carolina Humanities Council to sponsor the symposium “Triumph of the Human Spirit: Friday Jones and His North Carolina Slave Narrative,” held October 15-16, 1999. The symposium and an exhibition focused on the life of the Friday Jones (1810-87), a former slave from Wake County, North Carolina, who in 1883 published Days of Bondage: Life of FridayJones, being a Brief Narrative of His Trials and Tribulations in Slavery. ECU’s Joyner Library holds the only original copy of the publication reflected in the OCLC database.

Furman University received $10million from the Duke Endowment, a private foundation established in 1924 by industrialist and philanthropist James B. Duke. $95 million of the pledge will allow the university to begin a $25 million expansion and renovation of the James B. Duke Library. The facility must be refurbished to accommodate the increase in the student population, new information and research needs, and growth of a collection now totaling more than 400,000. The expansion will also include the Center for Collaborative Learning and Communication, a multimedia commons, collaborative study rooms, and a 24-hour study/computing area.

The New York Academy of MedicineLibrary was awarded a $435,000 grant by the Andrew Mellon Foundation to be used over a two-year period. The grant will fund four projects designed to upgrade the library’s online catalog and to make records of the library’s holdings more accessible to the public. As part of the project, the library has hired Alice Browne as rare book cataloger. A second project will be the conversion of 125,0 monographic catalog entries to electronic form by OCLC, Inc. Upon completion of this work, all books in the Academy Library will be represented by records in the online catalog.

The University of Virginia has beenawarded a $200,000 Challenge Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its Electronic Text Center. With this grant, matched four-to-one by private fundraising over a four-year period, the library will create a $1 million endowment that will be used to expand online cultural and research sites. A portion of the NEH funds will go immediately to train and support graduate students, as well as to keep computer hardware and software up-to-date, and to provide quick-response digitizing support. Once the endowment is fully funded, it will provide tens of thousands of dollars every year for the Etext Center’s primary goals: to build and maintain an Internet-accessible collection of texts and images in the humanities, and to nurture a user community adept at the creation of these materials.

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

The New York Public Library's

Research Libraries’ Barbara Goldsmith Conservation Laboratory has received a $40,000 grant from the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training to create two multimedia resources for training in the conservation of endangered paper artifacts. Through distribution in various formats—a Web site, CD-ROM, and full-motion DVD— the training materials will depict selected basic and advanced techniques for the examination, analysis, and treatment of books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, photographs, and other paper-based items. The two productions funded through this grant will address basic analysis and documentation of paper and microanalytical testing of media.

The Kelmscott Press edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1896, is now in the collections of the Huntington Library.

Photo credit: Huntington Library

Acquisitions

A collection of T. S. Eliot's books andpamphlets have been donated to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University by Donald C. Gallup, retired curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. The 47 boxes and 2 file drawers contained major portions of Gallup’s T. S. Eliot collection, the product of more than 60 years of bibliographic research. The gift includes an array of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and anthologies containing texts by Eliot, in addition to more than 400 publications about the poet. Gallup had already donated his extensive collection of Eliot in translation, and in 1998 he presented to the library more than 100 books with titles taken from Eliot poems.

A collection of William Morris (1834-96)—the British designer, artist, poet, illuminator, printer, multifaceted craftsman, and utopian socialist—has been acquired by the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The collection, assembled by architects Sanford and Helen Berger, is rich in examples of embroidery, stained glass, textiles, drawings and ceramics and numbers more than 2,000 volumes. It also contains business records from Morris’s business enterprises—Morris & Co. and the Kelmscott Press—and full-size designs used by the company in creating tapestries and stained-glass windows. There are also books authored by Morris, books from the library of Morris & Co., and special dedication and proof copies of Kelmscott Press books showing Morris’ genius as a typographer, illustrator, and graphic designer.

Alexander von Humboldt's EssaiPolitique sur le Royαume de lα Nouυelle-Espαgnewith the accompanying atlas titled Atlas Geographique et Physique du Royαume de la Nouvelle-Espagne were donated to the University of Texas at Arlington by the Summerlee Foundation of Dallas. The four volumes and atlas were published in Paris in 1825-27. Humbolt, a German scientist, spent five years in the Spanish dominions of the New World from 1799 to 1804 and recorded these experiences in a series of works stretching over decades after his return to Europe. One of the first of these was the Essai Politique. The atlas is important for its inclusion of Humboldt’s great map “Carte Generale du Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne,” originally executed by Humboldt during his stay in Mexico (1803-04), and covering two large folio double sheets. ■