ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•The Library of Congress has acquired a collectionof more than 20,000 early NBC television programs. On the occasion of its 60th anniversary, the network donated to the library its entire collection of television programs covering the period from 1948 to 1977. The programs were preserved on Kinescope and film, and the library will transfer them to videotape. Together with the NBC Badio Collection, consisting of 80,000 hours of programs from the years 1926 to 1970 which the network donated in 1978, the Library of Congress now owns the largest archive of broadcasting available to scholars and researchers in the nation. The collection, nearly half of which represents the years of live TV, 1948-1960, preserves the televised work of great comedians of that era, including Jack Benny, Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn, Ernie Kovacs, Fred Allen, Bert Lahr, Groucho Marx, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, and Eddie Cantor, as well as such newer comedians as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Flip Wilson, and Richard Pryor. Among the concert artists are Arturo Toscanini, Jascha Heifetz, Ezio Pinza, Richard Tucker, and Joan Sutherland. Popular musical stars represented include Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, Gene Kelly, Mary Martin, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Harry Belafonte, and others. The collection, starting with the presidency of Harry Truman, covers the eras of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Korean War, Joseph McCarthy, Nikita Krushchev, Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, and the first space shots. There is full coverage of the administrations of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy (including all of the Kennedy press conferences), Johnson, and Nixon, as well as the national conventions and elections of the period. The NBC gift will be in the custody of LC’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division to be preserved, cataloged and made accessible for research and scholarship, and will become part of a collection which totals more than 2 million items dating from 1879. The collection is being prepared for shipment to the Library of Congress. Delivery will begin in July.

•Sarah Lawrence College’s Esther RaushenbushLibrary, Bronxville, New York, has received the Benjamin and Celia Cloth Collection of proletarian literature. The set of 54 volumes of “social fiction” was given to the college by Barry D. Maurer, West Orange, New Jersey. The collection was assembled along the lines set out in Walter Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States 1900-1954, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956) and concentrates on “the urban, immigrant scene.” Almost all the books are first editions, many with dust jackets in fine condition. Upton Sinclair, Vida Scudder, Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo and Albert Halper are among the authors included. The collection is on display in the library during June and then will be housed with the library Special Collections.

•The Southwestern University Library,Georgetown, Texas, has acquired the papers of Bertha McKee Dobie, wife of Texas writer J. Frank Dobie. The collection contains letters and personal papers, including correspondence with former U.S. President Lyndon B. and Lady Bird Johnson, and with El Paso writer-artist Tom Lea. Dobie and her husband were both 1910 graduates of Southwestern.

•The State University of New York at Buffalo’sHistory of Medicine Collection has received a collection on gout and rheumatism, donated by L. Maxwell Lockie, M.D., class of 1929, who retired in 1985 after 52 years of practice. Lockie, an internationally known specialist in arthritis, has authored more than 150 papers on the subject, and his private library on gout and rheumatism is the result of years of collecting original source material. The donation consists of 14 titles published in the 18th century, including works by William Ca- dogan, George Cheyne, and Thomas Sydenham, who described the acute gouty attack. These works are augmented by more than 100 titles from the 19th and 20th centuries, and by journals.

•The Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia,have acquired the historical records of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC). Founded in 1964, OIC is the largest non-profit network of employment training centers in the United States. Included in its collection are minutes from staff and board meetings, correspondence, films, tapes, publications, position papers, and conference proceedings. The collection provides information on grassroots leadership, race relations, human resource development, and management and employee training. OIC has received a grant from the Pew Memorial Trust to begin the transferral of the materials to Temple. The collection is scheduled to be in place by December.

•Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts,has been given a collection of materials focusing on prominent figures in music, theatre, cinema, opera, and politics. Featured are some 15,000 photographs, prints, and engravings, some framed and many inscribed or autographed, of various personalities of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Also included are signed photographs or prints of statesmen as early as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and over 500 biographies and reference books, numerous scrapbooks of obituaries, theatre and opera programs, operatic costumes, and miscellaneous artifacts. Of special interest is a French Empire clock under glass that apparently was given to Jenny Lind by P.T. Barnum. The collection was bequeathed to Tufts from the estate of Henry Y. Porter, who had been an accountant for the University.

Grants

•Baruch College, the City University of NewYork, has received a two-year $119,647 NEH grant to produce a machine-readable database that will enable musicians and musical scholars to find pieces of music contained in the standard editions of music commonly known as Denkmäler and Gesamtausgaben. A group of senior editors will supervise the collection of data from the editions on microcomputers in a number of research libraries. The work has been divided into two parts: production of a bibliography (eventually to replace Anna Harriet Heyer’s Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music), and a database that can be searched on various parameters of interest to scholars and musicians (including composers and/ or titles, performing media, durations, genres, and false or conflicting attributions). Initially the bibliography will be published in book form and the indexes will be available on microform, but it is hoped that the database will eventually be made available for computer searching.

•Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, has beenawarded a $1 million endowment grant from the Gardner and Florence Call Cowles Foundation, Des Moines. The grant is the largest gift in the history of the college. The college has four years in which to match the award. Luther began a drive in 1983 to raise $10.5 million in endowment funds. The Cowles award pushes the total received so far in cash, pledges and deferred gifts to $9 million. The college’s total endowment now stands at $11 million, compared to $2 million in 1978.

•The New York University Libraries have receiveda $1 million grant from the Pew Memorial Trust to develop a prototype interconnected information system for libraries. The grant will be used to test a new application of standard telecommunications protocols using the Open Systems Interconnection reference model formulated by the International Standards Organization (ISO/OSI). The model, which allows dissimilar computer systems to communicate and exchange information, will be used to link NYU's local computerized library system with the Research Library Information Network (RLIN)—the bibliographic utility of the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The ISO/OSI model is currently being used by the Linked Systems Project (LSP) to exchange authority records between RLG and the Library of Congress.

•The Northeast Document Conservation Center(NEDCC), Andover, Massachusetts, has received a $370,000 NEH grant to continue the activities of its field service program and to increase the capacity of its preservation microfilming service. The grant must be matched in part from other sources. NEDCC is a non-profit, regional conservation center, specializing in the treatment of library and archival materials in the collections of libraries, historical organizations and museums. The funds will also be used to purchase microfilming equipment in order to expand the output of the Center’s preservation microfilming service.

•The University of California Library Systemhas received a three-year, $521,000 grant from the National Library of Medicine. The university’s Medical Library Resource Grant Project will add the national library’s MEDLINE database to UC’s MELVYL online library catalog. MEDLINE is a primary source of information in the life and health sciences for research, teaching, and patient care. The MELVYL/MEDLINE Project will be accomplished as a joint effort of the Division of Library Automation at the Office of the President and UC health sciences libraries.

•The University of Texas at Austin Librarieshave received a $98,200 NEH grant to catalog more than 4,000 newspapers, including both Texas and other U.S. papers. The cataloging effort is part of the Texas Newspaper Project, which is part of the larger U.S. National Newspaper Project. UTA’s efforts will be centered in the university’s Barker Texas History Center. The earliest paper held by the center is the Texas Gazette, published in 1829 in Brazoria. ■ ■