ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Boston Collegelibrary has acquired a copy of the first Catholic Bible printed in America. The Bible, published in 1790 by Matthew Carey of Philadelphia, was printed in a limited run of 500 copies of which less than 30 complete copies can be located.

Another recent Boston College acquisition is the archives of the Eire Society of Boston, which was organized in 1937 for the purpose of spreading awareness of the cultural achievements of the Irish people. The collection includes correspondence, albums, photos, and books owned by the society, as well as memorabilia from the personal possessions of John Boyle O’Reilly, editor from 1880 to 1890 of The Pilot, one of the most important Irish-American newspapers of its time.

•The University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign has received a gift of more than 50 cubic feet of American literary documents collected by William A. Sutton, a long-time member of the English Department at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. The collection includes thousands of items about Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg, as well as smaller collections about Margaret Mitchell and Gertrude Stein. Sutton worked several years as Caldwell’s authorized biographer, and that part of the collection is particularly rich. Sutton’s discovery of important unpublished documents relating to Anderson and Frost make the collection uniquely valuable, and his material on Sandburg’s travels and public appearances strengthen the library’s Carl Sandburg papers, begun in 1956.

•The University of Texas at Austin Library’s Barker Texas History Center has received a collection of materials relating to Mance Lipscomb, a black Texas folksinger whose singular style included blues, ragtime, and popular ballads. The collection was gathered by Lipscomb’s biographer, Glenn Myers of Red Rock, Texas. The materials include 105 tapes and transcripts, photographs, clippings, articles, posters, phonograph records, and a documentary film.

GRANTS

•The Lirrary of Congress has been awarded a grant of $ 11,000 by the Council on Library Resources to evaluate the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) program. Since July, 1971, this cooperative program between the Library of Congress and more than 2,000 publishers has provided prepublication cataloging information for almost 200,000 titles issued in the United States. In anticipation of its 10th anniversary, the CIP program has mailed a questionnaire to approximately 2,200 randomly selected U.S. libraries of all types and sizes. The questionnaire will offer the American library community the opportunity to evaluate the program’s effectiveness. A report of the results will be prepared and the findings will be used to encourage libraries to use the data more effectively and to improve the quality or quantity of publisher participation.

•The University of California, Los Angeles, has been awarded an $80,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to print a selection of 20,000 photographic negatives from the Los Angeles Daily News morgue. Project director is Hilda Bohem, UCLA Department of Special Collections, and the historical consultant is Bruce Henstell of the California Historical Society. The photographs are a valuable historical record of Los Angeles in the period from 1928 to 1954 (when the Daily News was absorbed by the Los Angeles Times). All will be converted into 4x5" contact prints within the next 15 months.

•The University of Michigan School of Library Science, Ann Arbor, will offer starting in the fall of 1981 an expanded and strengthened program for the professional education of academic research librarians. It is in part supported by a grant of up to $275,000 from the Council on Library Resources and was developed to meet some of the objectives of CLR’s Professional Education and Training for Research Librarianship (PETREL) project. The program will include four trimesters of formal coursework, including considerable study in cognate areas; a four-month internship in a research library; and the substantial involvement of practicing research librarians.

•The University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, has been awarded a $36,953 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities for collection development of the Seattle Jewish Archives. The two-year project will support more intense collecting of records of Jews and Jewish organizations in Seattle, in Washington, and in the Puget Sound region, together with oral history interviewing and transcribing. The award enhances a 13-year-old project supported by the university libraries and the Washington State Jewish Historical Society.

NEWS NOTES

• Columbia Universityhas announced the creation of the first university degree-granting programs in the country to train library conservators and preservation administrators. Grants totaling more than half a million dollars have been received to launch the programs this fall at the School of Library Service. The National Endowment for the Humanities has given $375,000, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation $250,000 and the Carnegie Corporation $50,000. An additional $100,000 will be forthcoming from the Mellon Foundation in 1983 upon evidence of satisfactory progress in the programs. The Program for Conservators of Library and Archival Materials, given in cooperation with the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and the Program for Preservation Administrators will award the master of science degree in library service and a certificate. The director of the new programs is Paul N. Banks, an internationally respected authority on preservation of library and archival materials.

• Indiana University’sSchool of Library and Information Science has established a Yuan T’ung-li Memorial Scholarship Fund to be used to assist deserving Chinese students to study for an MLS degree at Indiana. Dr. Yuan, who became director of the National Library of Peking, was one of the first American-trained Chinese librarians, taking his degree from the New York State Library School in Albany in 1923. A Yuan Memorial Scholarship Committee has been appointed by Herbert White, dean of the library school at Indiana.

•The University of Delaware, Newark, is developing a computer-based instruction system to be used in its bibliographic instruction program. Three librarians, Patricia Arnott, Patricia FitzGerald, and Lynne Masters, have designed a lesson using the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) computer-based system. The PLATO lesson will replace general bibliographic instruction given to approximately 3,300 students each year as part of the freshman English program.

DIRECTORY OF EXTENSION LIRRARIANS

ACRL announces the publication of its Directory of Extension Library Services Personnel compiled by the Standards and Accreditation Committee. It was compiled to assist the committee in identifying persons interested in reviewing drafts of a revision of the Guidelines for Library Services to Noncampus/Extension Students (see C&RL News, October 1980, pp.265-72). The directory is available free from ACRL/ALA, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611. All orders should include a self-addressed mailing label and 30¢ in postage.