ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Two motion picture studios recently placed in the William Faulkner collections at the UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA Libraries copies of film scripts on which Faulkner worked during his years in Hollywood and scripts prepared from his writings. Twentieth Century Fox presented the scripts (in most cases, several versions) for Road to Glory, Banjo on My Knee, Slave Ship, Splinter Fleet, and Drums Along the Mohawk as well as several scripts adapted by other screenwriters from Faulkner’s fiction. On loan from Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer are outlines and scripts for The College Widow, Absolution, Flying the Mail, Turn About, War Birds, and “Mythical Latin- American Kingdom Story,” dating from 1932-33. Through the interest, cooperation, and generosity of these studios, the Faulkner collections have come closer to representing every phase of William Faulkner’s writing career.

Another welcome addition to the Faulkner collections is the papers of American actress Ruth Ford, which concern the stage adaptations of Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. Because Ford recognized the theatrical potential for this work, Faulkner gave her the English rights to the play. Due to her persistence, it was produced in both London and New York in the late 1950s. This collection includes the original scripts for the play (ca. 1951), with corrections and additions by Faulkner, Ford, and others in preparation for a stage production, together with later scripts reworked by Ford and director Tony Richardson for the London and New York performances. Correspondence, photographs, and clippings relating to the play and Ford s friendship with Faulkner are im important segment of this fine collection.

• The Library of the UNIVERSITY OF Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has recently acquired an important collection of books and materials by or relating to the American writer Ben Hecht (Í894-1964). The collection includes all of Hecht’s first editions but one, the first British and paperback editions in most cases, a selection of important reprints, several sets of variant editions, several dozen items (books, magazines, anthologies) with Hecht contributions, mimeograph copies of five Hecht screenplays, a small packet of letters, and a few miscellaneous items such as typescripts, playbills, pressbooks, and the like.

The five unpublished screenplays are of special interest. Hecht was the foremost American screenwriter of his era. This acquisition brings the Illinois collection to fifteen unpublished Hecht screenplays, including several rare unproduced items—perhaps the largest such collection in American research libraries.

The University of Illinois Library has also received through an anonymous gift the original typescript of the legendary Marilyn Monroe biography written by Hecht but published twice under mysterious circumstances and without his name.

• The Library of the UNIVERSITY OF California, Santa Barbara, recently acquired seventy-six Ezra Pound letters, all dating from the St. Elizabeth period.

Thirty-three of these were purchased by the Friends of the UCSB Library and donated in July 1977 to enhance an existing library strength in Pound and in twentieth-century American literature in general. This particular segment or correspondence is a unified entity, since it contains all the letters that passed between Pound and John Theobald, a scholarly correspondant in California, providing the continuity of both thrust and riposte. Two faculty members of the UCSB English Department, Professors Donald Pearce and Herbert Schneidau, will collaborate in editing and publishing the correspondence.

The initial purchase of the Pound-Theobald letters attracted two more donations from scholars who had been in correspondence with Pound during the same hospital period. Fourteen Pound letters were given by Elisabeth Schneider, professor emeritus of UCSB, and twenty-nine by Donald Pearce. All of the seventy-six letters are in the Department of Special Collections and available for research.

To supplement this material, the library purchased a special edition of Pound’s Sixteen Cantos, on Watman paper with illuminated capitals, a rare and exquisitely beautiful book that is important to the Library’s Printers Collection as well as to the Pound Collection.

• The New Jersey Historical Society had accessioned and inventoried three manuscript collections that chiefly concern the architectural history of New Jersey and other states: (1) Essex County, New Jersey, building contracts, 1852- 1916, including specifications and architectural drawings; (2) William E. Lehman, Architect, an indexed series of architectural drawings, 1896- 1940, for more than 1,000 public and private structures in New Jersey and beyond, designed by this Newark firm; and (3) George W. Kramer s Domestic, Civil and Ecclesiastical Architecture, a scrapbook documenting his fifty-year career in Ohio, New York, and New Jersey between 1873 and 1920.

• The University of Texas at Dallas recently announced the establishment of a major aeronautical history collection incorporating two of the largest and finest collections on the subject. One collection, the History of Aviation Collection, was created in 1963 by George Haddaway of Dallas and was housed initially on the Austin campus. This collection of thousands of items contains many rare books, journals, manuals, and technical reports as well as a variety of artifacts. Haddaway was editor and publisher of Flight magazine for forty-three years.

The other collection was the personal collection of Admiral Charles E. Rosendahl, who was the major proponent of lighter-than-air flight in the United States for more than fifty years until his death in 1977. This collection contains an estimated one million pieces, including correspondence, photographs, books, technical manuals and reports, memorabilia, and one-of-a-kind dirigible hardware. One of the most significant aspects of the collection is Rosendahl’s voluminous correspondence with all the major and minor figures in the development of lighter-than-air flight in the United States and Germany.

These collections will be organized by a fulltime curator and housed in a newly remodeled special collections area providing extensive display and storage space.

• In 1971 when the UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT Knoxville located and acquired nine journals printed between 1794 and 1796 by George Roulstone, Tennessee’s first printer, it was considered in bookmen’s circles to be an event of major significance. Until discovery of that group of imprints, the Southwest Territory and early Tennessee journals were so elusive that some of them were thought not to exist in original printed form. To emphasize the importance of the find, the library issued in its Occasional Publication series a bibliographical catalog called The Lost Roulstone Imprints.

Now, six years later, the library has had the incredible good fortune to obtain nine more imprints from George Roulstone’s Knoxville press. This time the find includes the Acts of the Southwest Territory for 1794 and 1795, the Acts of the State of Tennessee for 1796 through 1801, and The Constitution of the United States of America to which is prefixed the Constitution of the State of Tennessee, printed in 1799. For most of the acts, only a few copies have been reported in other libraries; and in the case of the 1796 acts and the 1799 constitution, only single copies have previously been recorded. Like the earlier nine items, these are bound together in one volume.

The new pieces bring the Special Collections holdings of Roulstone imprints to twenty-two, and this perhaps comprises the most complete Roulstone collection to be found.

The highly esteemed examples from Tennessee’s pioneer press were presented to Special Collections by an east Tennessee attorney and his wife who wish to remain unidentified. Although the givers’ desire for anonymity must be respected, the library’s profound gratitude need not be concealed.

• Purdue University announces the acquisition of a typewritten, critical edition by Professor Werner Stark of Jeremy Bentham’s manuscript on Private Deontology. Stark, an honorary professor of sociology at the University of Salzburg and a former visiting professor at Purdue, bequeathed his critical edition of the original text and an accompanying microfilm copy of it to the Special Collections. Department in the Krannert Library, Purdue University.

The 216-leaf typewritten manuscript with extensive holograph notes is Stark’s edition of Bentham’s Private Deontology (Ethics), which remained unpublished during his lifetime (1748- 1832). Although unfinished, the manuscript is essentially what Bentham would have entrusted to some editor, who then would have organized the format more tightly, removed repetitions, filled gaps, and smoothed the transitions. In this manuscript Bentham addresses the complex issues of the relation of duty and interest from the vantage point of his already established utilitarian principles. Although Bentham had already raised these issues in an oblique manner in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), it is only in his manuscript on deontology that he confronts them head on.

In 1834, Sir John Bowring (1792-1872) published a two-volume version of the deontology entitled Deontology or The science of morality: in which the harmony and co-incidence of duty and self-interest, virtue and felicity, prudence and benevolence, are explained and examplified. This edition was, however, immediately repudiated by Bentham’s colleagues, John Stuart Mill and Francis Place, as being biased and inaccurate. Stark’s edition, based upon research from the original Bentham papers at University College, London, corrects the deficiencies of the Bowring edition and for the first time presents a systematic arrangement of authentic Bentham materials on private deontology.

• Rose Memorial Library at DREW UNIVERSITY, Madison, New Jersey, is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Maser Collection of Wesleyana. Given by Frederick E. Maser of Philadelphia in honor of his wife, Mary Louise Jarden Maser, the collection substantially augments Drew’s already extensive holdings of items related to John Wesley, his family, and the beginnings and history of Methodism.

At a dedication ceremony held at the library on October 31, 1977, Maser shared with the audience some of his and his wife’s experiences in forty years on the trail of elusive items of Wesleyana. He attributed his decision to give the collection to Drew to the interest and enthusiasm of Drew’s Methodist librarian, Kenneth E. Rowe. The collection was accepted for the university and the library by Arthur E. Jones, Jr., director of the Rose Memorial Library.

The Maser Collection consists of 362 items, of which 145 are first editions. Several volumes are unique, having been associated with members of the Wesley family or early colleagues in the revival. Besides printed books and pamphlets by the Wesleys, the collection contains forty-seven manuscript items. Drew’s holdings of Wesley s letters, already the largest outside England, were increased to 120 by the addition of 15 in the Maser Collection. A small group of companion pieces, in the form of books and pamphlets about Wesley and Methodism by both adherents and detractors, is also included. Thirty-five early prints of Wesley round out this exceptional collection.

• The California State University, NORTHRIDGE (CSUN), libraries have collected 2,000 titles of the Little Blue Books, with topics ranging from the Ten Commandments to socialism. Many Haldeman-Julius books were classics, with selections from the works of Zola, Whitman, Longfellow, and Shakespeare included among the titles in the CSUN collection.

In a time of strict censorship, Haldeman-Julius published pioneering works on sex and sex education. The price of the Little Blue Books, which averaged ten cents, made them enormously popular. Because of their small size, they were easily transportable, and it is known that 1,500 Little Blue Books accompanied Admiral Byrd on his 1929 journey to Little America.

Little Blue Books are now collector’s items, but in the 1920s they could be purchased at a special Haldeman-Julius bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. The store, a “mecca of writters, students, educators,” opened in May 1924 in the Mercantile Arcade Building. In one day more than 1,964 individual sales of Little Blue Books were made. The Little Blue Books brought good reading to millions for the price of a few pennies.

• In these days of austere budgets and talk of “holding operations,” it is heartening to announce the acquisition of a major collection by a university library, in this case the UNIVERSITY OF California, Los Angeles. More than twenty hiterto unpublished—and for the greater part unknown—letters from Ezra Pound to Raymonde Collignon, for whom he composed his first songs, together with the complete memorabilia of Mile. Collignon, have been obtained from her son, Alain Gaspard-Michel, heir of the later Alexandre Gaspard-Michel, marquis d’Aubignosc.

John Espey, emeritus professor of English, says that “this is the most important gathering of Pound and Pound-related material to become available in years, and it is appropriate that it be housed here at UCLA, where it increases our already considerable holdings, both printed and manuscript. It adds strength to the Pound-Munro correspondence acquired through the acumen of Charles Gullans, and it increases our specialized material related to the Departments of Music and Theater Arts. Raymonde Collignon provided Pound with his singing model for the closing ‘Medallion’ of his summary sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and in one of the printed works in this collection she identifies herself thus in her own hand. It is all tremendously exciting.”

Espey may be said to speak not only with excitement but with a measure of authority. His monograph, Ezra Pounds “Mauberley”: A Study in Composition, was published by the University of California Press in America and Faber & Faber in London (1955). He is obviously eager to start work on this new material, which will enlarge the serious consideration of Pound as composer, reviver of past modes, and theorist of melodic tradition. This aspect of Pound remains largely unexplored. Even historians of music are often surprised to learn that we owe the survival of much of Vivaldi’s work to Pound’s early insistence on its transcription from manuscripts later destroyed during World War II.

Through the good offices of the chancellor, the university librarian, the head of Special Collections, and the Friends of the UCLA Library, the first payment has been secured. An individual fund has been set up by the Friends to cover the remainder. Contributions should be made out to The Friends of the UCLA Library and marked Pound/Collignon Collection.

• Capital University Library, Columbus, Ohio, has received an additional 239 books to be added to its Lois Lenski Collection. Donated by Stephen Covey, son of the late Lois Lenski, the recent gift brings the total collection to 556 items. The collection contains Lenski’s personal library of first copy, first edition books that she wrote and illustrated, as well as foreign language editions of her books. Also among the collection are manuscripts, original illustrations, taped readings and interviews with the author, and personal memorabilia, letters, and diaries.

Lenski’s generous gifts to Capital Library date back to 1965 when her neice was a student in children’s literature classes at Capital. The collection is now the largest depository of Lois Lenski material and serves as a valuable resource for students and teachers of children’s literature. Capital’s collection also contains several original illustrations and manuscripts of Hardie Gramatky and Marion Renick.

• The Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection, one of the most distinguished libraries of rare books and manuscripts in private hands, has been given to THE PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY. Of the approximately 1,000 books and 1,500 manuscripts and letters, nearly all are of literary, musical, historical, or scientific importance. Many would be national treasures in the countries of their origins. These include groups of letters and manuscripts by Goethe, Heine, Flaubert, Lamartine, de Maupassant, Rousseau, Napoleon, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, and Einstein.

The musical manuscripts include two piano concertos in Mozart’s autograph (K. 467 and K. 537), Schubert’s Erlkönig, and important pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Wagner. There are eight illuminated manuscripts, one of which is the Great Hours of Henry the Eighth made in France about 1520 by Jean Bourdichon or his school. The printed books include first editions, often inscribed, by leading French writers such as Balzac, Anatole France, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Mérimée, Renan, Verlaine, and Zola. Goethe, Heine, and Schiller are well represented among the German authors.

The Heineman Collection is a superb addition to the Morgan Library and strengthens its holdings in many areas. It had been on deposit at the library since 1962, and a descriptive catalog of the collection was published in 1963.

GRANTS

• Grant assistance of $204,000 for the support of operating and development costs recently awarded to the MIDWEST REGION LIBRARY NETWORK (MIDLNET) by the Bush Foundation of St. Paul, Minnesota, will enable MIDLNET to reach a point where income from services and other ongoing sources of income will sustain the organization on a permanent basis. The period of the grant extends through 1980.

A portion of this grant, to be added to an earlier grant awarded by the Council on Library Resources, will support the position of MIDLNET technical adviser. This position is held by O. W. Cairns, recently assigned to MIDLNET by HEW for a two-year period. Cairns is now exploring alternatives that will permit rapid development of a range of services designed to meet those needs of Midwest libraries that can be addressed most cost-effectively on a regional scale.

Details of the above and other MIDLNET activities will be reported on a continuing basis in the MIDLNET Newsletter, available free of charge from MIDLNET, UWGB, 2420 Nicolet Rd., Green Bay, WI 54302.

MEETINGS & WORKSHOPS

APRIL 27-28: An INSTITUTE ON FEDERAL Document and Information accessibility will be held on the campus of American University, Washington, D.C.

Joseph Becker, member of the National Commission on Library and Information Science, will discuss issues and priorities of federal document and information accessibility. Peter Urbach, deputy director of the National Technical Information Service, will speak on the role of NTIS.

James O’Neill, deputy archivist of the United States, will discuss the present and future federal policies concerning government-wide declassification of documents. Institute participants will have an opportunity to join an open forum on federal policy that will feature James B. Rhoads, archivist of the United States, and William T. Knox, director, NTIS, Department of Commerce.

For information, write or call Lowell Hattery or Melinda Beard, College of Public Affairs, The American University, Washington, DC 20016; (202) 686-2513.

May 19-20: A Conference on LC Classification and Call Numbers will be held on the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill campus. It is intended to give participants some framework for interpreting LC classification schedules, applying them, and constructing LC call numbers complete with cutter numbers. It should serve as an introduction or refresher for those with little experience in application but also will benefit those experienced LC users who still have difficulty in interpreting parts of the scheme. Speakers will include Annette Phinazee, dean, School of Library Science, North Carolina Central University; Arlene T. Dowell, author of Cataloging with Copy; and a representative from the Subject Cataloging Division, Library of Congress. For further information contact the Office of Continuing Education, UNC Extension Division, 204 Abemethy Hall 002A, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.

May 25-26: Economic Information in Government Publications will be the central theme of the Fifth Annual Workshop of the New York State Government Document Task Force in the Community Center at Nazareth College, Rochester, New York. Speakers will include producers and users of economic information generated from various governmental agencies. For details contact Christine Ryan, Librarian/ Research Analyst, Center for Governmental Research, 37 S. Washington St., Rochester, NY 14608; (716) 325-6360.

May 30-JUNE 2: Caldwell College, Caldwell, New Jersey, will be the site of a Library- COLLEGE WORKSHOP that will enable teachers, administrators, and media specialists at all levels of the educational system to study the Library- College concept in depth. Two hours of graduate credit are available. For further information contact Library-College Associates, Inc., Box 956, Norman, OK 73070.

JUNE 5—16: For the sixth year, the Catholic University of America Graduate Department of Library and Information Science is offering a two-week workshop on LIBRARIES AND THE Political Process in Washington, D.C. The first week deals with the federal government, and the leader for the sixth consecutive year is Robert W. Frase. The second week deals with state and local governments and their interaction with both government agencies and nongovernmental organizations at the national level. The leader for the third consecutive year is Alphonse F. Trezza.

The first week is almost entirely “in the field” and includes attendance at hearings on legislation of interest to libraries and discussions with members of Congress, committee staff, executive agencies concerned with libraries, and representatives of educational and business groups with a shared interest in federal programs affecting libraries.

The workshop must be limited to approximately twenty participants because the offices of many of the congressional, governmental, and other officials involved will not accommodate large groups.

For further information contact John J. Gilheany, Director of Continuing Education, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20054.

June 12-13: A Workshop on Cataloging Audio-Visual Materials will be offered by the University of Washington School of Librarianship. It will cover the development of AV cataloging rules and future trends, with emphasis on the changes in the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules. Included will be a presentation on Project Media Base by Gerald Brong, senior author of the project report, and a demonstration of AV cataloging in the Washington Library Network on-line system. The workshop leader is Vivian Schrader, head, Audio-Visual Section, Descriptive Cataloging, Library of Congress. For further information contact: Short Courses Registration, University of Washington, DW-50, Seattle, WA 98195.

JUNE 19-30: The University of Maryland, College Park, will sponsor a PRECIS TRAINING COURSE. It is intended for persons who wish to become proficient in PRECIS indexing and will be based on the lectures, materials, and exercises used in the training of PRECIS indexers at the British Library in London. The number of participants will be limited to thirty; the fee is $200. For further information contact Hans H. Wellisch, Director, PRECIS Training Course, College of Library and Information Services, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20740; (301) 454-5441.

June 30-July 2: Women Library Workers, formed in July 1975 to combat sex discrimination in the library field, announces a national conference. It will be held at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee. For those going to the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, please note that the WLW conference is immediately after and transportation information (two hours) will be available. Room (Friday and Saturday nights) and board will be provided at Carroll College. Cost, including registration and room and board, will be approximately $50.

The conference focus will be an intensive skills workshop, in six sessions, on organizing strategies: assessing power, using politics, defining issues, and using strategy in taking action. Any of these skills may be used as a process in individual action (with co-workers, family, or friends) or group action (as in monitoring hiring processes or doing comparable pay surveys). In addition, there will be reports from WLW chapters and sharing of information and ideas from around the country.

Although space is limited (150) and preference will be given to WLW members, the conference is open to all who wish to participate. For further details and registration information write: WLW Conference, Judy Turner, 1969 N. Farwell Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53202. Registration closes May 15.

JULY 23-28: Harvard University’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis has announced a five-day INTERNATIONAL User’s Conference on Computer Mapping Software and Data Bases: Application and Dissemination.

The conference will review the work of Harvard, other organizations, and federal, state, and local governmental agencies using computer mapping programs. Particular emphasis will be placed on user application, software and data base availability, research results on the principles of thematic map design, and more effective procedures for computer software and data base distribution, as well as case studies of user applications and user costs.

Participants may attend the complete five-day program or selected workshops. For further information, contact Pegge Kilburn, Center for Management Research, 850 Boylston St., Chestnut Hill, MA 02167; (617) 738-5021.

August 7-18: The Washington Summer Institute on Federal Library Resources sponsored by the Catholic University of America. The institute, directed by Frank Kurt Cylke, has a carefully planned curriculum of study that has as its objectives to: identify the role of the federal libraries, information centers, and data banks in the federal community; discuss the implication of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science’s posture as related to federal libraries; identify resources, publications, and specialized services provided by federal libraries; identify resources available through major government clearinghouses, such as NTIS and ERIC; compare the in-operation or the in-process development of the major federal library and information services; discuss the implications for libraries of the existing satellite technology; and to identify and articulate the functions performed by the Federal Library Committee.

For further information contact: John J. Gilheany, Director of Summer Sessions and Continuing Education, the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064.

MISCELLANY

• MARCUS A. McCORISON, director and librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, was elected president of the Independent Research Libraries Association (IRLA) at a meeting January 31 in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Joseph D. Duffey, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was principal speaker at the meeting.

IRLA is a group of fifteen privately endowed, independent libraries whose primary purposes are to collect, preserve, and promote research in the records of the past. Members of the association are: American Antiquarian Society, American Philosophical Society, the John Crerar Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Linda Hall Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Huntington Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Massachusetts Historical Society, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Newberry Library, the New York Academy of Medicine, the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations), and the Virginia Historical Society.

McCorison has been director and librarian of AAS since 1967. He succeeds Lawrence W. Towner, president and librarian of the Newberry Library as president of IRLA.

• Formal presentation of the one millionth volume acquired by the library of WESTERN Michigan University—a rare book, William Beaumont’s Physiology of Digestion, with Experiments on the Gastric Juice‚ valued at $500 but purchased for 10 cents at a Jackson junk shop by a Kalamazoo bookstore owner—was made January 5 in a campus ceremony.

The book, a second edition, 1847, was presented officially to Carl Sachtleben, director of WMU libraries, by Harold R. Reames, Kalamazoo physician and president, Kalamazoo Academy of Medicine (KAM), at the WMU Waldo Library ceremony. It was discovered in a Jackson junk shop last year by Arlene and Vaughan Baber, owners of the Bicentennial Bookshop, Kalamazoo.

Recently, Marshall McDonald, Kalamazoo physician and collector of old medical books, obtained it at well below its market value, thanks to the generosity of the Babers and through arrangements with Wayne Mann, university archivist, for the presentation by KAM to Western.

The book will be housed in a Special Collection Room of Waldo Library. Western’s 500,000th volume was a facsimile of the famed Gutenberg Bible, acquired ten years ago.

• The Pittsburgh Regional Library Center is pleased to announce that WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY, Morgantown, has joined the regional library consortium. On February 6 the center’s executive board welcomed the university to full membership. Robert F. Munn is dean of library services at the university.

The Pittsburgh Regional Library Center is a nonprofit consortium of libraries that seeks to improve the effectiveness of its members through coordinated joint efforts. Academic, public, and specialized libraries in central and western Pennsylvania and West Virginia have joined together in the center’s programs. These programs include a computerized cataloging service, a clearinghouse for interlibrary loan locations and expensive purchases, reciprocal borrowing among members, and resource sharing publications. With the addition of the West Virginia University libraries, the center’s forty members can boast of combined holdings of more than twelve million volumes.