ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

• Cornell University Libraries, Ithaca, New York, has received a 143-volume collection of books about the history and design of lace. The books are from the collection of Elizabeth Kackenmeister of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, who died last year. Among the donated volumes are books tracing the development of a cottage industry around lace making and the changing designs and patterns of lace.

• George Washington University’s Gelman Library, Washington, D.C., has received a collection of 1,000 Chinese-language books from Chinese Ambassador Han Xu. The collection was donated by the State Education Commission of the People’s Republic of China. The gift includes a variety of works in politics, economics, education, the arts, geography and history.

•The Library of Congress’ Music Division, Washington, D.C., has received the largest composite gift of music materials in the division’s history. It consists of a large quantity of autograph music manuscripts, letters, and documents spanning the history of musical creativity from the 12th century to modern times. The gift will become part of the Moldenhauer Archives at the Library of Congress. The archives were established in April 1987 by an earlier gift from Hans Moldenhauer, the renowned pianist and author who died in October 1987, and were previously supplemented with major manuscripts of Johannes Brahms acquired in 1988 from Mary Moldenhauer, his widow. With this bequest, Moldenhauer also established the Moldenhauer Archives Foundation at the Library of Congress.

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Cambridge, have received a collection of ten rare early mathematics and mechanics books. The books are the gift of MIT alumnus John D. Stanitz, who for over thirty years worked to build an outstanding collection of historically important works in the areas of solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, mathematics, machinery, and energetics. The collection includes works by Leonard Euler, Niccolo Tartaglia, and Thomas Harriot.

•The Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio, have received the original photographs, drawings, and papers of engineer and explorer Robert Brewster Stanton from his 1889-1890 exploration of the Colorado River. The three and one-half linear feet of materials, including correspondence from William Henry Jackson, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, and other “men of the West,” were used by the donor, Dwight L. Smith, in editing Stanton’s diaries and notes for the 1965 book, Down the Colorado. This material, which augments the diaries previously given to the New York Public Library, includes materials given to Smith by Stanton’s daughter, Anne Stanton Burchard.

•The Ohio University Libraries, Athens, have received the Sammy Kaye Collection of memorabilia associated with the celebrated bandleader. Kaye (born Sam Zarnocay) graduated from Ohio University in 1932 with a civil engineering degree. The collection includes musical scores and arrangements, broadcast transcripts, phonographs, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, correspondence, and photographs which document Sammy Kaye’s career.

• The University of Alberta Library, Edmonton, has received a collection of Japanese books from President Hiroshi Kurimoto of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration. President Kurimoto’s father, who founded the Nagoya University, was a graduate of the University of Alberta (Class of 1931). The collection consists of 292 titles and 584 volumes worth about $32,000. About half of the books are on Japanese language and literature; the other half includes treatises on Japanese culture and history, materials on Buddhism, and general reference tools. Especially noteworthy is a newly revised edition of Tetsuji Morohashi’s authoritative Chinese-Japanese dictionary, Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, and the complete works of Japanese authors Sosetsu Natsume and Ogai Mori.

• The University of Massachusetts’ Healey Library, Boston, has received the personal library of Susan Schneider, late professor of history and director of Latin American studies at the university. The collection contains over 3,500 items, including 1,200 Spanish-language books and pamphlets, primarily of a political nature, published in Central America and the Caribbean during the 1970s and early 1980s. Many of the English-language books deal with Latin American affairs.

• The University of New Brunswick, Harriet Irving Library, Fredericton, has acquired the manuscripts, letters and publications of Canadian writer and editor Raymond Fraser. The acquisition was made possible by the Wu Library Fund, established by Hong Kong banker Yee-sun Wu. The Fraser collection includes about 30 manuscripts, 2,700 letters, and nearly everything he has published. His books include Poems for the Miramichi (poetry, 1966), The Black Horse Tavern (short stories, 1972), and The Struggle Outside (1975).

• Vanderbilt University’s, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Nashville, Tennessee, has acquired a collection of books, manuscripts and letters belonging to John Crowe Ransom and Peter Taylor. The material comes from the private collection of Stuart Wright, who is on the faculty at the School of Education at Wake Forest University. Ransom, a Pulaski native, was a member of the Vanderbilt faculty from 1914 to 1937 and was considered the leader of the Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt writers known for their writing and views on the South in the 1920s and 1930s. Taylor, a native of Trenton and a Vanderbilt alumnus, has won major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Ritz-Hemingway Award, given in 1987 for A Summons to Memphis as the best novel published in English during the preceding year. The new collection contains 605 volumes from Ransom’s private, annotated library, six of his unpublished poems, 182 love letters and numerous manuscripts.

• Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, Richmond, have received an anonymous gift of $100,000 from a former student to support their collections in art history and English literature. The gift is part of the campaign for VCU which recently passed $40 million on the way to its goal of $52 million. Income from the library endowments will help purchase new books which cannot be obtained using its regular budget.

Grants

• The Auburn University Libraries, Alabama, have received a $112,577 Title II-C grant for the cataloging of two major microform sets. The grant will contribute to OCLC’s Major Microforms Project. Confederate Imprints, a set of over 6,000 titles published in the states of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the French Revolutionary Pamphlets, a collection of 7,000 pamphlets, are scheduled for cataloging. The University of Alabama Library will be a subcontractor for the French Revolutionary Pamphlets project.

• The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, Illinois, has received a grant of $90,642 for the preservation of newspapers produced by the men in Civilian Conservation Corps camps from about 1934 to 1938. The grant will enable the Center to film these papers, produce service copies in microfiche, and produce a printed bibliographic guide that indexes the titles, companies and geographic location of the camps.

• The Chicago Public Library, Illinois, has received a $14,705 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a major humanities project that examines, describes and defines Chicago’s composite languages. The project will examine the history, language, and linguistics of the Chicago dialect of American English. The anticipated results of the America’s Polyglot City project include a series of public programs illuminating the City of Chicago and its diverse populations; an exhibition drawn from the library’s collections and other archives demonstrating the creative use of language by Chicagoans and their contributions to American English; and programs employing dramatic readings in English and other languages (with translations) and critical analysis to illustrate new methods for learning second languages.

• Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, has received a $16,665 grant from LSCA Title III funds to catalog 8,200 reference, geology, and forestry titles and add them to the OCLC database. The anthropology, natural history, archaeology, business, and local and southwest history holdings of six other special and public libraries in southwestern Colorado will also be converted: Mesa Verde National Park Museum Library, the Crow Canyon Center for Archaeological Research, Sand Dunes National Monument Library, Mancos Public Library, Archuleta County Public Library, and the Carnegie Public Library in Monte Vista.

• The Harvard University Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded a Title II-C grant of $120,000 to film materials too fragile or rare to withstand heavy use or interlibrary lending and to improve bibliographical control of its collection of master microfilm negatives. Some of the areas scheduled for microfilming are: 10-K reports of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Baker Library; rare books in block-print from the 13th to the 15th centuries in the Harvard-Yenching Library; and scrapbook collections including correspondence and ephemera of noteworthy U.S. women in the Scheslinger Library. Records of master negatives will be prepared for entry into the national databases.

• The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio, has received a grant of $63,000 in outright funds and $75,000 in federal matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funds will support a three- year microfilming program to preserve and provide access to over 14,000 cataloged Hebrew manuscripts in the collection of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. The project will facilitate access by American scholars to a manuscript collection that is particularly rich in materials from Yemen, Persia, North Africa, and other Sephardic communities.

• The Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library, has received the first half of a $100,000, two-year grant form the William Randolph Hearst Foundation to develop a library management information system. The Library will be among the first medical libraries to implement a management information system (MIS). The MIS will link the gathering and analysis of library statistics in one automated system.

• Idaho State University’s Eli M. Oboler Library, Pocatello, has been awarded a $60,000 gift from the Idaho First National Bank. The gift will be used to purchase the INNOVACQ automated serials control system. The installation of the system will be completed within approximately 12 months.

• Jacksonville University, Florida, has received a $500,000 grant from the St. Joe Foundation. The grant will be used to establish the duPont-Ball Library Endowment Fund, named after Alfred I. du- Pont and his brother-in-law and business manager, Edward Ball, who devoted the latter part of their lives to the enrichment and growth of northern Florida. The gift nearly doubles the library’s current endowment fund, the annual income from which will be used to maintain a balanced collection.

• Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has received a Title II-C grant of $64,800 for the cataloging of a microfilm collection of German Baroque literature. The grant will enable the Milton S. Eisenhower Library to complete the cataloging and make cataloging records available on both RLIN and OCLC. The library expects to complete the project by March 1990. The original collection, consisting of 2,363 titles written between the years 1575 and 1740, is housed at Yale University.

• The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center has received a $1 million gift from the Miriam and Harold Steinberg Foundation, lending support in the areas of education, medicine, and the performing arts. The Library has renamed the area that houses its drama collections The Miriam and Harold Steinberg Reading Room in recognition of the gift. The reading room houses more than 50,000 recordings and circulating and reference books on theater, including a large collection of published plays. The gift will provide funding to establish a new and expanded reading room into which both drama and dance collections will be consolidated. It also establishes endowments for the purchase of materials for the Library’s drama collections, and for the presentation of exhibitions. Eleven original ink drawings by the artist A1 Hirschfeld will also be given to the Library. They depict the playwrights of and scenes from five Pulitzer prize-winning plays.

• The University of Alabama Libraries, Tuscaloosa, have received a $125,000 grant from the Network of Alabama Academic Libraries, a consortium of seventeen academic institutions offering graduate education. The Network views the total academic library resources of its members as a statewide research collection and provides funds to coordinate resource sharing. The grant will be used to strengthen the libraries’ holdings of music scores and sound recordings. Resources added will include works by lesser known composers, along with critical editions in piano, orchestra and voice. Gaps in currently held critical editions will be filled. Coordinated scores and sound recordings will be added for piano and vocal performance and study. Retrospective journal backfiles will also be added.

• The University of Arkansas’ Ottenheimer Library, Little Rock, has received a $50,000 grant from the Ottenheimer Brothers Foundation to develop management resources. The grant will be used to expand the present management collection through the addition of state-of-the-art computerized information resources and the acquisition of additional monographs, journals and reference works. Five significant areas of business management will be developed: computer information systems, industrial management, international management, human resources management, and management and organization.

• The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, has received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to transfer its most important photograph collections to microfiche. It will be done using a process of reproduction which yields an image with a long tonal scale. Historical photographs from the Henry A. Schmidt Collection and the Cobb Memorial Collection will be reproduced onto tonal microfiche. The Henry A. Schmidt Collection consists of 1,016 original glass plate negatives made between 1890 and 1924 and are largely photographs of outdoor scenes of people pursuing their professional and domestic activities in southern New Mexico. The Cobb Memorial Collection includes 1,023 unique images, mostly of Albuquerque, between 1885 and 1910.

• The University of Vermont’s Bailey-Howe Library, Burlington, has received a Title II-C continuation grant of $100,000 for the identification, acquisition and cataloging of all Canadian documents on acid rain. The project, which began in 1987, will strengthen the resources of UVM to support its Canadian Studies Program and its acid rain research programs ongoing in the Colleges of Medicine, Agriculture and Life Sciences, the School of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forestry Station in Burlington. A selection of the identified documents will be forwarded to the National Agricultural Library and scanned, digitized, and mastered onto CD-ROM disks for distribution to 44 land-grant libraries as a full-text database on acid rain.

• Wayne State University’s Reuther Archival Library, Detroit, has received a grant from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, California. The grant will be used to cover travel expenses related to research for graduate students and other scholars using the Archives. The Archives’ holdings include the papers of nine labor unions, worker and social reform organizations and individuals active in the groups. In addition, the Archives have extensive material relating to urban and international affairs, social welfare organizations, women’s and black history, radical movements and civil rights.

News note

• Oberlin College, Ohio, dedicated its new $1.6 million addition to its Conservatory of Music Library on September 23. The two-story, 10,000- square foot addition, designed by architect Gunnar Birkerts, is the largest building project at Oberlin in 12 years and expands the 24-year-old library facility in the Conservatory complex by over 150% . It will house the book collection, current periodicals, offices, a seminar room, and expanded study space for students. In a subsequent phase of construction an elevator will be added to the structure, and the second floor, as yet unfinished, will provide for expansion of the collection and work areas.