ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• American University in Washington, D.C., has been given the papers of the National Commission on the Public Service. The commission, known as the Voleker commission after its chair, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Voleker, was created in 1987 to recommend ways to improve the quality of federal government civil servants.

• Vanderbilt University’s Divinity Library has acquired the Judaica library and archives of Rabbi Nahum Norbert Glatzer, thanks to the generous support of Raymond and Arlene Zimmerman, with additional support from the Heard Library Society. The Judaica collection of more than 4,100 items includes writings by the great 19th- and 20th- century German Jewish thinkers. The archive consists of Franz Rosenzweig manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera; Martin Buber manuscripts and correspondence; and correspondence between Glatzer and the Zunz and Ehrenberg families. Also purchased with the collection are the Schocken Book Archives, several boxes of materials dealing with Schocken Books’ publications during Glatzer’s tenure as director.

Grants

• Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill libraries have received a grant of $100,000 for a two-year project as part of the Council on Library Resources (CLR) program “Setting Library Policies and Priorities in Research Universities.” Called “Cooperative Information Resources Development: A Constituency Based Policy Analysis,” the project will seek to enhance and refine longstanding, successful, cooperative programs to develop research library collections and information services. The universities will study how to extend cooperative collection development, particularly to the sciences and to electronic information, to develop mechanisms for ongoing faculty participation in cooperative information resource development, and to recommend a general policy and funding framework for interuniversity collaboration in providing information services. Faculty, university administrators, and librarians from the three universities will participate in a series of retreats to clarify the issues and to develop an action agenda for strong collaborative information policy in the future. The proximity of the three Research Triangle university libraries makes the development of creative strategies for cooperative access especially promising.

• Eastern Washington University in Cheney has been awarded $416,700 over a five-year period, by the Department of Education, to strengthen its holdings in support of the liberal arts curriculum. The grant calls for the addition of approximately 9,300 titles in Books for College Libraries. This effort will bring Eastern’s holdings of the BCL from 51% to over 70%.

• Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG) has been awarded $175,000 by the Henry Luce Foundation to support the third phase of a cooperative project to establish an international online union catalog of Chinese rare books in RLIN. The project will result in the creation of machine-readable records for a total of over 6,000 rare Chinese materials held by major North American institutions, France’s Bibliotheque Nationale, andPeking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both in Beijing.

• South Dakota State University Library in Brookings has received a grant of $8,000 from the Mary Chilton DAR Foundation, Sioux Falls, to assist with the establishment of a South Dakota room to house one of the state’s largest collections of South Dakota materials. The grant will be used to purchase lacunae, including municipal and county histories written within the past decade as many South Dakota communities celebrated their centennials.

• The University of Maine System libraries are currently implementing two grant programs. In association with the Maine State Library, the libraries have been awarded $56,950 by the Department of Education under its Title II-D College Library Technology and Cooperation Grants Program. The grant is for providing users of the University of Maine System online catalog access to the collections of the major libraries of the Maine Regional Library System. The holdings of the Maine State Library and the Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library will be added to URS US ‚ the shared online catalog of the U niversity of Maine System Libraries. Support for the project was also obtained from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, Inc. A grant of $83,500 will create electronic access through URSUS to these two collections of governmental materials. Plans for building on this project call for adding the holdings of the Bangor Public Library and the Portland Public Library, thereby creating an online union catalog of the principal publicly founded resources in Maine.

• At the University of Texas at Austin “one of the greatest lovers in the history of literature” is the subject of an exhibition that will continue through August. “Henri-Pierre Roche: An Introduction” is drawn from the university’s collection of manuscripts, journals, letters, and photographs that belonged to the Bohemian writer whose novels Jules and Jim and Two English Girls and the Continent were used by Francois Truffaut for his films. The exhibit will display for the first time Roche’s journal, which provided material for his novels and fills 346 notebooks, partly because his love life was so extensive and varied. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT has begun a project, in collaboration with a French publisher, to publish the journal in a series of volumes.

News notes

• The Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association’s Annual Conference will feature W. David Penniman, president of the Council on Library Resources; Jordan M. Scepansld, director, University Library and Learning Resources, California State University; and Vinod Chachra, president of VTLS, Inc. The conference, “The Changing Dimensions: Managing Library and Information Services for the 1990’s: A Global Perspective,” will be held on Monday, July 1,1991, at the Atlanta Fulton Public Library. For information contact: R. N. Sharma, University of Evansville Libraries, 1800 Lincoln Avenue, Evansville, IN 47722; (812) 479-2485; or A. J. Miah, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College Library, 700 East Jackson Street, Richmond, VA 23261; (804) 786-5638.

• The Council of State Library Agencies in the Northeast (COSLINE), OCLC, and five OCLC-affiliated networks—CAPCON, NELI- NET, PALINET, PRLC, and SUNY—sponsored a conference in May on “The Role of Information in the Economy of the Northeast.” Participants from the 11 states that belong to COSLINE were selected by the state library agency of each participating state to represent equally government, the business sector, and the library community. The conference objectives were to understand better the role of information in business and economic development, determine how business and economic interests obtain information, explore the part libraries play in that process, and examine how the information needs of businesses can be better met.

• At Drexel University, three graduate students in the College of Information Studies are recipients of scholarships from the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Minority Scholarship Program. The students—Frances Aulston, Wendy Tann, and Miguel Valcourt—are all residents of Philadelphia. The Free Library announced the Minority Scholarship Program last summer after receiving a $67,000 Libraiy Services and Construction Act Title I grant to be used for minority recruiting. To be eligible for the scholarship a student must be a member of a minority group (African-American, Hispanic, or Asian) and must agree to work for two years in a Pennsylvania public library after receiving a master’s degree. Preference is given to Pennsylvania residents, and the student must complete all coursework within five terms.

• Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, has been given stock valued at $58,882 for an endowment in memory of Henry C. Reitz, who was head of the department of physical sciences from 1963-76. The gift from Reitz’s widow will be used to provide improved College of Arts and Sciences library facilities. Library dean Lawrence J. McCrank said he welcomed the gift “both for its generosity in support of a quality academic library for Ferris, and as a historic first in the University’s fundraising efforts to expand and enhance the Timme Library.” Although this is the library’s first endowment, FSU students were able to win $159,000 for the library last fall by persuading the Michigan State Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education to restore funding from the governor’s veto of FSU’s proposed Research Excellence funding. The monies had been withheld when Ferris raised tuition in its 1990-91 fiscal year budget above 6.5%. Originally, each student would have received a $4.86 tuition-assistance check each term from the state, but lawmakers approved the suggestion presented by officers of the Associated Student Government that the refund be used for library improvements. FSU’s student government earlier conducted a survey among students and found that 98% considered library improvements the University’s top funding priority.

• Kent State University Libraries (Ohio) has established an award in honor of Robert Lewis to be presented annually to a scholar in theater history. The first recipient of the Robert Lewis Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Theater Research will be announced this summer and will receive the award during a black-tie dinner at Kent in November. Lewis, one of Broadway’s most successful directors and the co-founder of the Actors Studio, willed his papers to Kent’s Department of Special Collections last year.

• The Academic Section of the Kentucky Library Association and the College and University Section of the Tennessee Library Association examined personnel, technology, and learning styles during their 1991 joint spring conference on April 11-12. ACRL vice-president/president-elect Anne Beaubien urged the recruitment of more students with science and social science majors to librarianship. F. W. Lancaster, professor at the University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, expressed concern that costly automation projects are taking funds away from collection development and that automation has not improved subject access to books. Randall Hensley, department head, Reference Services, University of Washington Undergraduate Library, reviewed the four basic learning styles—feeler, in- tuitor, thinker, and sensor—and suggested that librarians adapt their teaching styles to accommodate the varied learning styles of their patrons.

• LIBRAS, Inc., a consortium of 16 northeastern Illinois private, liberal arts college libraries, celebrated its 25th anniversary during ceremonies at Concordia University, River Forest, in December. Bridget Lamont, director of the Illinois State Library, and Melvin R. George, Oregon State University librarian and founding member of LIBRAS, addressed the audience. LIBRAS’ goals are to facilitate resource sharing and cooperative collection development and to promote continuing education and use of technology among its members. Aurora, Concordia, and Lewis Universities and Barat, Columbia, Illinois Benedictine, Judson, Kendall, Lake Forest, North Central, North Park, Rosary, St. Xavier, Trinity, and Wheaton Colleges are members of the consortia.

• At Southern Illinois University, three new named endowments—the Piper-Robeson Fund for Illinois History and Culture, the Eugene T. Simonds Memorial Fund for U.S. Military History, and the Charles D. and Maude B. Tenney Fund for Liberal Arts—have brought the number of named funds to 13 and the total amount of library endowments to approximately $365,000.

• University of California at San Diego is involved in a two-year archival project that will result in the first comprehensive record anywhere of the works of Chicano artists. Spearheaded by ACRL member Sal Guerena, the project will involve production of a research collection consisting of 18,000 slides of the paintings, serigraphs, posters, murals, and sculpture of Chicano artists and dissemination of information about the collection throughout the state. When complete, Proyecto CARIDAD (Chicano Art Resources Information Development and Dissemination) will establish UCSB as a center for Chicano visual arts. The project is supported with an LSCA grant administered by the California State Library.

• University of Southern California will provide full text of The Chronicle of Higher Education on its online campus information system during an 18-month pilot project with the Chronicle beginning in fall 1991. Campus users will have free, online access to more than a year’s worth of information from the Chronicle using the familiar screens and menus of USCInfo, the university’s proprietary software. Peter Lyman, executive director of USC’s Center for Scholarly Technology, says that “the online Chronicle project is an ideal way for us to explore the demand for line publications here at USC. We want to explore the demand for, and use of, full-text data as a resource for faculty members, administrators, and students.”

With support from the Chronicle, university researchers will monitor use of the online newspaper. USC will incorporate its research into a larger project, already underway at the university, that focuses on the way people on college campuses make use of online information resources. The Chronicle hopes to determine whether an electronic version is feasible and useful with a view toward offering a commercial product.