ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Hugh Thompson

Cal Poly's Kennedy Li-brary has received a $1,250 matching grant from the Canadian government to add to the library’s collection of materials about Canada and from Canada. Canada’s grant program is designed to promote teaching and research in Canadian studies in the United States.

Columbia University Li-braries have been awarded a three-year $700,000 grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to evaluate the potential for electronic books to supplement or replace traditional printed works in research libraries. The goal of the study is to assess the economic impact on libraries and publishers and the usefulness to students and scholars of providing access from workstations across the campus and around the world to reference works now available only in libraries or commercially in print form.

Ohio State University librarians EleanorS. Block and James K. Bracken received two grants totaling $112,586 from the U.S. Department of Education for their project, “Competing in the Global Telecommunication Marketplace.” The grants will fund the identification, acquisition, cataloging, and content page translation of current and total back runs of hundreds of telecommunication/communication serials and related monographs from around the world.

A University of California (UC) collaboration, which includes the University Press, the libraries at the Berkeley, Irvine, and Los Angeles campuses, and the Division of Automation in UC’s Office of the President, has been awarded $750,000 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support its SCAN project (Scholarship from CAlifornia on the Net). Now in its pilot phase, SCAN aims to develop an economically feasible model for publishing scholarship in the humanities by integrating electronic formats, library access, and scholarly use.

The University of Texasat Austin’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has received a grant of $260,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to provide five years of funding in support of the center’s research fellowship program. The award supports short-term residencies for scholars engaged in post-doctoral research based on the center’s collections, which include approximately 1 million books, 30 million manuscripts, 5 million photographs, and over 100,000 works of art.

Acquisitions

The library of architectural historian

Alson Clark, who passed away in 1993, has been left to the Huntington Library. Clark collected architectural books to support his own studies and his wide-ranging architectural interests. The 280-volume collection reflects his inquisitiveness and serious study of Southern California architecture. The collection includes such extreme rarities as The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra’s Amerika, and Alfred Hopkins’s Moderne Amerikanische Landhauser. There are also a number of important books from influential regional architects, including three from Wallace Neffs library, which illustrate that 20th-century architects relied frequently on historic models.

Two typescripts of Albert Camus's play Caligula,with pages of notes and amendments in the author’s handwriting, were given to the University of Florida Libraries by Germaine Brée, Kenan Professor Emerita at Wake Forest University. Both copies of the manuscript are hard bound. One contains the 1938 version of the play with only a small number of handwritten corrections. The second volume is dated Féυrier 1941 and represents what is now called the 1941 version of the play. It is heavily annotated in Camus’s own handwriting and includes several pages of added or modified passages or entire scenes. Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957 at the age of 44, the second-youngest person ever to do so. Three years later he was killed in a car crash in France.

Ed. note: Entries in this column are taken from library newsletters, press releases, and other sources. To ensure that your news is considered for publication, write to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; e-mail: hugh.thompson@ala.org. Photos related to your news will be considered.

The library of Edith Porada, honorarycurator of Ancient Near Eastern Seals and Tablets at the Pierpont Morgan Library (PML), has been bequeathed to PML. The gift consists of over 1,300 monographs, numerous runs of periodicals, and several thousand offprints. The bequest also includes a collection of seal impressions, study photographs of seals, and scholarly papers. Catalog records for the books and offprints are being entered into RLIN with the support of the Joseph Rosen Foundation.

A book and manuscript collection belonging to Walter R. Henson of the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Manitoba (UM), has been acquired by the UM Libraries. The collection is comprised primarily of natural history materials, but also includes classics in literature, history, and religion. Volumes in the collection date primarily from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. Items of particular note include a beautifully illustrated 40- volume set of The Naturalist’s Library, published from 1835 to 1845, and a bound set of the Penny Cyclopedia, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in the mid-19th century and sold in segments at a penny apiece to further public education.

A major collection of materials relatingto Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald has been acquired by the University of South Carolina Libraries from noted Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli. The collection includes original manuscripts, autographed first editions, and memorabilia, and represents a collecting effort of 40 years by Bruccoli and his wife Arlyn. Bruccoli was assisted in his efforts by Fitzgerald’s daughter, Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald, with whom he collaborated in writing Romantic Egoists, a pictorial biography of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. ■