ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Bowling Green State University’s PopularCulture Library, Ohio, has recently acquired an important new collection of books and manuscript materials in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature from Sheldon R. Jaffery of Cleveland, Ohio. A special strength of the collection is Jaffery’s near complete series of Arkham House books, the oldest and most prestigious publisher of weird and supernatural fiction. Founded in 1939 for the express purpose of perpetuating the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, this specialized press became the foremost showcase for the greatest writers in the genre of macabre fiction. Arkham House was where the works of Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, A.E. Van Vogt, Ramsey Campbell, and Fritz Leiber, for example, were first published in book form. These rarities are included in the Jaffery Collection at the Popular Culture Library. The collection also includes correspondence, manuscripts, research files, and notes that Jaffery used in writing more than eight books, research guides, and anthologies. Of particular value is the correspondence Jaffery conducted with many of the Arkham House authors while compiling his book Horrors and Unpleasantries: A Collectors Price Guide and Bibliography of Arkham House (1982) and the revised edition, The Arkham House Companion (1989). Manuscript materials for Jaffery’s The Corpse-Maker (1988), an anthology of pulp magazine short stories by Hugh B. Cave, and Future and Fantastic Worlds: A Bibliographical (1972-1987) Retrospective of DAW Books (1987) are also included in the collection.

• Kent State University Libraries,Ohio, haverecently received the papers of actor-director Robert Lewis, whose 60-year career has taken him from Broadway to Hollywood to London. The collection includes letters from writers Sean O’Casey, Katherine Anne Porter and Truman Capote, composers Aaron Copeland, Stephen Sondheim and Virgil Thomson, and artists Don Bachardy, Cecil Beaton and Alfred Stieglitz in addition to hundreds of actors with whom he has worked. Lewis’s papers also include annotated scripts of all the plays in which he appeared as well as those he directed. Kent’s Department of Special Collections houses other significant theater research collections as well as the Collection of Motion Picture and Television Performing Arts which features clipping files on hundreds of actors.

• Saginaw Valley State University’sMelvin J.Zahnow Library, University Center, Michigan, has acquired two major gifts. The Nancy Stube Collection consists of over 3,500 volumes in the areas of late 19th Century American history and the philosophy of political science collected over several decades. It was donated to the Library by Mrs. Stube in memory of her parents. The second acquisition is the personal library of Harold Anderson, former Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University and one of the founders of the study of child psychology. This collection represents 40 years worth of periodicals and monographs used by Anderson in his research. Anderson donated this collection to Melvin J. Zahnow after he retired from active research.

• The University at Albany, State Universityof New York, has acquired by gift the papers of Frederick Ungar (1898-1989) the Austrian-born writer and publisher. There is extensive correspondence with authors, including fellow emigre writers such as Fritz Hochwaelder, Joseph Liutpold Stern, Ernst Waldinger, and Marie Weiss, 1940-84; and a complete run of catalogs and other promotional publications of the Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, which he founded in 1941 and directed from its offices in New York City for more than forty years. Ungar’s publishing career began in the 1920s in his native Vienna, where he founded and directed Phaidon Verlag and Saturn Verlag. He had special interests in German literature and the work of the Austrian writer Karl Kraus.

The University at Abany has also acquired the historical records of the M. C. Lawton Civic and Cultural Club, an African American women’s club formed in Albany, New York, during World War I with the goals of community service, educational advancement, improved race relations, and selfdevelopment. Minutes, membership rosters, correspondence, official publications, and other records document the club’s history since 1921. It was named after Maria C. Lawton, president of the Empire State Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1916-26, with which it has aways been affiliated. The Lawton Club records are one of several African American collections being added to the University’s Archives of Public Affairs and Policy.

• The University of British Columbia, Van-couver, recently acquired a collection of over 500 dictionaries most of which were published in the 18th and 19th centuries, though 75 are from the 16th and 17th centuries and two are incunabula (pre-1500). They were donated by H. Rocke Robertson, UCB’s first professor of surgery. The collection, although primarily English dictionaries, also includes ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, bilingual and polyglot dictionaries influential in the complilations of English lexicographers. There are also some early encyclopedias, including a first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in Edinburgh in 1771.

• The University of Illinois Library at Ur- bana-Champaign’sAsian Library has been selected as the recipient of an important collection of current Chinese language publications in Asian studies. These 400 titles in 600 volumes were chosen for a special book exhibition at the 1990 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held in Chicago April 5-8. Thus, they represent the state of the art in the publishing industry of the Republic of China. They are gifts of the Government Information Office and the National Central Library of Taipei, Taiwan. Although the collection covers a wide range of fields, it is especially noteworthy for major monographic works on Chinese art and literature and history, as well as cultural, religious, social developments and other studies in the humanities.

• Washington University School of Medi-cineLibrary, St. Louis, Missouri, has accepted the deposit of the St. Louis Medical Society’s three important rare book collections, the Robert E. Schleuter Paracelsus Collection, the world’s largest of works by or concerning the German Renaissance physician and philosopher; the James Moores Ball Collection, author of the Sack-’Em-Up Men, 1926, containing many rare folio volumes of early works of anatomy, science and medicine; and the general rare book collection of the Society, a large and eclectic collection of items from 1700 to historical reference works of reletively recent date. In addition to the above collections, a transfer agreement between the Washington University School of Dental Medicine and the Medical Library has added the Dental School’s rare books collection to the Special Collections. The Henry J. McKellops Collection consists of approximately one thousand volumes of monographs and journals and is particularly comprehensive, including some very early European works. A copy of the second edition (1532) of Zene Artzney, the first dental book, is included and is, according to the NUC, the only copy of this edition in American libraries.

Grants

• The Annenberg Research Institute, Phila-delphia, Pennsylvania, has been awarded a grant of $3,334,311 by the Annenburg Foundation to pay the mortgage balance on the Annenberg Research Institute’s new building at 420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. The grant is the latest of several major contributions totalling $11,300, which the Institute has received from the Annenberg Foundation and the Annenberg Fund, to meet the cost of constructing, furnishing, equipping and operating ARI’s new facility.

• Columbia University,New York City, hasreceived a grant of $20,000 from the United States Institute of Peace to convert the remaining paper card catalog records of the International Law Collection of the Columbia University Law School Library into computer-usable electronic records that will be added to two national library computer networks.

• The DePaul University Loop Campus Li-brary, Chicago, Illinois, is expanding its direct marketing collection due to funding by a grant from the Educational Foundation of the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing. The Institute of Direct Marketing of the Kellstadt Center for Marketing Analysis and Planning at DePaul received the funding of which $5,000 will be used to purchase monographs and periodical subscriptions. DePaul has also received a matching grant of $2,500 from the Canadian government for the purchase of Canadiana materials in an effort to promote Canadian Studies.

• The Hispanic Society of America, NewYork City, Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books been awarded a grant $20,293 from the 1990/91 New York State Discretionary Grant Program for Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials. This funding is for conservation treatment of twelve manuscript portolan charts, which will be placed in custom-designed cases for storage and display. Each chart will also be reformatted via color transparencies to facilitate the accessibility of this material.

• The Library of Congress has received agrant of $391,526 from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation to continue the Washingtoniana II project in the Prints and Photographs Division. The project will survey, catalog, and preserve approximately 40,000 architectural materials and support the publishing of Washingtoniana II, A Guide to the Architecture, Design and Engineering Collections of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The project, begun last year under the initial funding from The Cafritz Foundation, has already resulted in a preliminary survey of the work of 222 architects or architectural firms whose drawings, blueprints, presentation watercolors, and related materials are in the Library. The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division contains more than 15 million photographs, architectural materials, examples of popular and applied graphic art, posters, and fine prints.

• Pennsylvania State University’sLibraries,University Park, have received a $2.5 million grant from Digital Equipment Corp, for computer equipment that facilitates information sharing. The new VAX 9000 mainframe and other equipment will enable the Libraries to implement a significant upgrade of the Library Information and Access System (LIAS) electronic catalog. With the new computing power, for instance, 800 users will be able to access LIAS simultaneously, compared to the current 320-user capacity. Penn State’s LIAS, made available to the public in 1983, was designed to be used even by people who had minimal computer knowledge. Last November, Digital gave Penn State and the University of California a grant to create a link between LIAS and UC’s online catalog. The goal of this link is seamless computing, whereby users can search the records of either system by using the familiar commands of their home system. LIAS contains records for nearly 1.5 million titles from the Penn State collections, and records are continuously added for books, journals, manuscripts, archives, government publications, microforms, music recordings, audiovisual materials and computer files. On an annual basis, LIAS currently handles over 30 million searches. The Digital grant is part of the Campaign for Penn State, a six-year drive to raise $300 million in private support. The Campaign, which ends June 30, had raised $338 million as of March 31.

• St. John’s University,Jamaica, New York,has received a grant in the amount of $5,700 from the H.W. Wilson Foundation in support of its forthcoming Congress for Librarians with the theme “Cataloging Heresy: Challenging the Standard Bibliographic Product.” The Congress will be held on the Queens Campus of St. John’s University on Presidents’ Day, 1991. Nationally known catalogers, thesaurus designers, and library systems analysts will be invited to examine the validity of the notion of standard cataloging data, i.e., that a single set of descriptive and subject headings is appropriate for all types of libraries and users. The implications of modifying and customizing centrally supplied cataloging data will be explored, both from the economic perspective of library managers as well as from the viewpoint of bibliographic utilities.

• The State Historical Society of Wisconsin,Madison, has been awarded an $11,000 grant by the United States Institute of Peace to survey, catalog, and microfilm unprocessed collections relating to peace currently in the Society’s library.

• The University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library has received a grant of $199,623 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for a joint project with the Sierra Club, “Documenting 100 Years of Conservation: The Sierra Club Records.” These records not only document the Sierra Club, they also are an unparalleled resource for the study of the issues that have concerned its members: the creation of the wilderness preservation system and the wild and scenic rivers systems, the establishment and preservation of national parks, as well as issues which affect the global environment. Since 1970 the Sierra Club has been giving its national historical records to the Bancroft Library including 123 linear feet of historical files, inactive administrative files and subject files on conservation issues, more than 20,000 photographs, 67 films, 82 tape recordings, and Sierra Club publications. Forty-seven individual club members have also sent their personal files to be added to the archives, and they continue to do so. The collection today consists of approximately 1325 linear feet of records and 34,400 photographs and other pictorial items.

• The University of California, Los Angeles’Department of Special Collections in the University Research Library recently received a grant of $50,000 from the Ahmanson Foundation for the retrospective conversion of its Abraham Wolf Spinoza collection on OCLC. The department acquired the collection en bloc in 1950 from the firm of Internationaal Antiquariaat, which served as the agent for the sale of the library of the late Professor Abraham Wolf, Head of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of London. At more than 1300 titles, the library was the largest private collection of works by and about Baruch de Spinoza of its time, and included Spinoza’s works in many editions, important biographical and critical works about his writing, and a partial collection of titles known to be in Spinoza’s own library. Among the more important items in the collection are The Codex Townley, thought to be the earliest manuscript of J.M. Lucas’s La vie de feu Monsieur Spinoza; one of two known copies of the first edition of Lucas’s La vie et l’esprit de Mr. Benoit de Spinoza; and issues A through D of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, not recorded in Linde.

• University of Rochester’sRush Rhees Li-brary, Rochester, New York, has received a grant of $15,000 from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation to establish an endowed Judaica book fund and to preserve Judaica materials already in the collection. The grant will assist the library in making annual acquisitions of literature relevant to its Judaica collection, so that it can provide a balanced collection for students and scholars. The grant is the first the University of Rochester has received from the Littauer Foundation.

• The University of Washington Libraries,Seattle, and the Libraries of the University of Oregon received grants from the Henry Luce Foundation of $280,000 and $45,000 respectively to support library development in the field of Southeast Asian Studies. Initiatives for library development came from the Southeast Asian Studies Programs at the two universities, which, together with the program at the University of British Columbia, comprise the Northwest Regional Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies. As a Canadian institution, the University of British Columbia is not eligible to compete for funds offered by the Luce Foundation. At the University of Washington Libraries the grant is being used in part to support a full-time position for a Southeast Asia specialist. The Southeast Asia Librarian will be working with Southeast Asian Studies Liaison Librarians at the University of Oregon and the University of British Columbia to coordinate collection development emphases, consult on major purchases and facilitate resource sharing activities. The grants, which will be paid over a period of four years, will enable the recipient institutions to strengthen resources in support of rapidly increasing teaching activities in the field of research-level collections.

News notes

• Alfred University,Alfred, New York, hasbroken ground for its $6.2 million Scholes Library, being built on a hillside on the western New York campus. The new facility will provide a free-standing facility for the library collection, now housed in a portion of Harder Hall on the Alfred University campus. The ceramics college persuaded the State University of New York (SUNY) system that construction of a new library was the best alternative. First, the construction estimates were comparable to what it would have cost to renovate Harder Hall for the library’s continued use. Second, a new structure frees up much-needed space in Harder Hall for the School of Art and Design. The project is being managed and financed by the State University of New York; the College of Ceramics is part of the state’s university system. The new building will be a five-and-a-half-story, 50,000-square-foot structure with a brick face, arched windows and the distinctive terra cotta (red tile) roof featured on many Alfred buildings.

• Berea Collegeis currently undertaking a $65million fundraising campaign which includes a $5 million expansion of Hutchins Library. The 30,000 square foot addition will provide a new home for both the Computer Center and the Library’s Special Collections, and expanded stack and study space for the Library’s general collections and patron study space. Other portions of the enhancement effort for Computer and Library services include the addition of $1 million to the endowment for the purchase of library materials and $1.2 million for expansion of computer equipment and implementation of an automated library system. As part of this project a campus computer network will be installed. Of these goals $700,000 has been raised for library acquisitions and more than $350,000 for computer equipment and software.

• Bowling Green State UniversityLibrary,Ohio, had its first ever Read-a-Thon, a 13-hour marathon that was the library’s vision of ALA’s “Night of a Thousand Stars.” The event was attended by over 550 people. Each hour was devoted to a genre of literature (children’s, humor, local history, etc.) and was sponsored by campus organizations and Bowling Green businesses, each of whom sponsored one or more hours of cultural diversity materials. Numerous campus celebrities volunteered as readers, including 2 deans, 1 vicepresident, many professors, and four published creative writers (reading their own work).

• Ohio University, Athens, has been officiallydesignated by the Government of Botswana as the North American depository of Botswana publications. In an April trip to Gabarone, Botswana, Hwa- Wei Lee, director of libraries at Ohio University, formalized arrangements with the Botswana National Library Service for the depository announced last June by Botswana’s President, Quett Masire. Under the depository, the National Library will collect a copy of all reference and current publications on Botswana, government documents available for public distribution, and selected archival and historical records to be sent to Ohio University Library. Some archival records and outof-print publications may be microfilmed. It is estimated that some 400 publications will be sent during 1990 as a beginning of the Botswana depository. Ohio University Library will pay the mailing and microfilming costs as well as be responsible for the cataloging of these publications into the OCLC online union catalog and for making the collection available to American companies, government agencies, researchers, students and others.