ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Boston College’s John J. Bums Library of Rare Books and Special Collections has acquired an extensive archive of books, manuscripts, and articles by the late Samuel Beckett. The collection, which belonged to Beckett’s friends Calvin and Joann Israel, covers Beckett’s entire career and includes photographs of, and reference works about, Beckett, as well as playbills, notes, and one uncashed check. Nearly all the material is inscribed by Beckett.

• The Library at California State University- Sacramento recently acquired over two million feet of film shot by camera crews from Channel 13, KOVR in the northern California area with an emphasis on Sacramento and Stockton. The donation from Harry Sweet includes 16mm news, sports, and documentary film from the late 1950s through the early 1980s.

• Harvard Law School Library has received the papers of Philip Elman, a Harvard alumnus who clerked for Felix Frankfurter and remained his friend thereafter. The collection consists of correspondence from Frankfurter to Elman, including many handwritten notes Frankfurter wrote while listening to oral arguments of cases before the Supreme Court. They often reveal Frankfurter’s private thoughts about substantive law being discussed and about the argumentative abilities of particular counsel. The collection is open to the public without restriction.

• Kent State University Libraries, Ohio, have received a collection of Canadian poetry assembled by the late A. Robert Rogers, a published poet who was dean of Kent’s School of Library Science. Included in the gift are the scarce Iroquois Falls pamphlets published in 1955 by Gael Turnbull.

• McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario, has acquired the files of Canadian authors from the archives of American publisher Dodd, Mead and Co. Exclusively Canadian in character and content, they contain letters written by important Canadian authors, contracts sent to these authors for their signature and revision, correspondence with other publishers, internal memos, sales figures, printing information, and publicity material. The acquisition was made possible by a grant of $18,400 from the Ministry of Supply and Services- Communications, Canada.

• Penn State, University Park, has received for its Labor Archives the historical records of Local 14830 of the Communications Workers of America. The documents trace the development of International Typographical Union (ITU) Local 86 (Reading, Pennsylvania) from its origin in 1885 to 1953. The ITU and its local unions recently merged with the Communications Workers.

• University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has received from Barbara Cooney illustrations for 33 of her children’s books to add to those already in the university’s Kerlan Collection. Cooney has won the Caldecott Award twice. The collection also received, from Tumbledown Editions, manuscripts and illustrations for 35 books written or illustrated by N. M. Bodecker, a Danish immigrant who translated and illustrated Danish nursery rhymes in It’s Raining Said John Twaining, named an ALA Notable Children’s Book.

• The Edward G. Miner Library of the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York has been given materials that belonged to the late John Dardess, M.D., including 16 folio-size patient ledgers which provide an unbroken daily record of Dr. Dardess’ practice over 58 years, 1932-1990, and a rich illustration of medical practice in rural 20th century New York. The Miner also received the minutes of the Lazear Club, an informal association of nine Rochester physicians who met between 1913 and 1918.

Grants

• ALA has received $50,000 from Beneficial Corporation, a consumer financial services company based in Delaware, for its project “Seeds of Change: A Traveling Exhibition,” and the grant has been matched by NEH. Based on the Smithsonian’s major exhibition “Seeds of Change,” which explores the global changes set in motion by Columbus’ voyages in 1492, the 30-panel freestanding traveling exhibition will tour 60 libraries—at least one in every state—in 1992 and 1993.

• The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, New York City, has received $109,897 from the U.S. Department of Education to help improve and extend bibliographic access to 5,825 rare titles in its collection. The funds will also be used to preserve 655 books now in fragile condition. The two-year project will cost more than $375,000.

• Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, has received $231,296 in HEA funds, to complete conversion of the monographic holdings of the John Hay Library to machine-readable form. Access to the 250,000 titles will be available through both OCLC and RLIN.

• Columbia University, Harvard University, Research Triangle Universities (University of North Carolina, Duke University, and North Carolina State University), and State University of New York Center Libraries (Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, and Stony Brook) have all won $100,000 grants from the Council on Library Resources. The awards are to support policy studies and planning related to future library resources and services.

• Davidson County Community College Learning Resource Center (Lexington, North Carolina) and Triton College Library Learning Resource Center (River Grove, Illinois) were among the 12 winners in the PALS-in-Libraries grant program. The program, cosponsored by IBM’s Academic Information Systems (ACIS) and LITA, a division of ALA, is designed to help public libraries and community college libraries with their literacy programs by incorporating IBM’s Principle of the Alphabet Literacy System (PALS). PALS teaches adults and adolescents basic reading and writing skills using multimedia computer technology which integrates voice, music, still images, video, graphics, touch, and text.

• Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, has been awarded $192,260 in HEA II-C funds to create online cataloging for all titles in the Harold Jantz Collection of 16th-, 17th-, and earlier 18th- centuries of German literature and enter them into OCLC and RLIN. This is a joint project with Johns Hopkins University.

• The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., has been awarded $94,321 in HEA II-C funds to catalog and preserve Shakespeare’s collected dramas in the original 17th-century first, second, third, and fourth editions; the records will be input into RLIN.

• Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., has been awarded $67,051 in HEA II-C funds to complete full cataloging of its Jesuit and Jesuit- related holdings by producing a single, cumulative computerized index to these disparate collections. Records will be entered into OCLC using the AMC format.

• The International Book Bank (IBB) in Baltimore, Maryland, has received $48,000 from the United States Information Agency to meet the book needs of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. The IBB will ship 120,000 books in a wide variety of categories to the four countries during 1991.

• David D. Palmer Health Sciences Library of Palmer College of Chiropractic, Davenport, Iowa, has been awarded a $14,975 grant from the Historic Preservation Program of the State Historical Society of Iowa for cataloging and entry into OCLC of the B.J. Palmer Papers, considered the most comprehensive historical collection of chiropractic materials.

• The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries has been awarded $2.77 million by the Pew Charitable Trusts for a collaborative project to improve access to rare books, manuscripts, archives, films, photographs, and drawings in 16 Philadelphia-area research libraries. Planned as a five-year project, the “Initiative for the 1990s” will result in the addition of 250,000 computerized descriptions of holdings to OCLC and RLIN. The Pew grant, which is being matched by $1.38 million from other private, public, and institutional sources, will underwrite expenses of staff and automation equipment in the first three years of the project. The Consortium, founded in 1985, includes the Academy of Natural Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Annen- berg Research Institute, Athenaeum of Philadelphia, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, Presbyterian Historical Association, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Ryan Memorial Library of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, and the Rare Books and Special Collections Departments of Bryn Mawr College Library, Free Library of Philadelphia, Haverford College Library, Swarthmore College Libraries, Temple University Libraries, and University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

• The University of Chicago Library has received a $1.4 million grant from NEH to preserve brittle volumes in the Crerar History of Technol- ogy Collection. The funds will support a three-year effort to microfilm more than 10,000 documents, which will be listed in OCLC.

• The University of Maryland, in cooperation with the University of Delaware, the New York State Library, and Texas A & M, will complete the cataloging of Segment 1 of the microfilm collection Goldsmith-Kress Library of Economic Literature in full MARC format and input the records into OCLC, supported by a grant of $499,334 in HEA II-C firnds.

• The University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library has been awarded $100,000 by the Gladys Brooks Foundation to install a local area network with multi-user access to CD-ROM-based information. The grant will be used to network the library’s public microcomputers, allowing access to as many as 28 CD-ROM disks.

• The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, has been awarded $220,136 in HEA II-C funds for retrospective conversion of the holdings of the Rare Book Division consisting of 20th-century American literature, including items from the Clifton Waller Barrett Library and from the William Faulkner Collection. Records will be entered into OCLC.

• The University of Washington, Seattle, has an HEA II-C grant of $145,969 to catalog and recatalog 3,000 rare Ch’ing Dynasty essays and local gazetteers in the East Asia Library. Appropriate conservation treatment will be given.

• Western Washington University, Bellingham, has been awarded $55,105 in HEA II-C funds to catalog material from the Mongolian People’s Republic, the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, and materials from the broader region inhabited by ethnic Mongols. A new edition of Mongolian Publications at Western Washington will be prepared.

News notes

• The Friends of Arizona State University

Library, Tempe, have departed from their tradition of helping to fund acquisition of fine and rare books by pledging $25,000 to create two new CD-ROM workstations and purchase equipment to monitor temperature and humidity throughout the library.

• At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dewey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a voicemail information tree has been installed on the reference desk phone. Callers with touchtone phones have a menu of choices that includes library hours, directions, a transfer line to circulation, information on services available to outside users, dialup instructions, and help from a reference librarian . Rotary dialers need only stay on the line for assistance.

• Reeves Library, Moravian College and Theological Seminary, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has received $4 million for building expansion from foundations and private donors. Architects for the project are Diseroad and Wolff, Inc., and the firm’s library consultant is Nolan Lushington.

• At North Carolina State University, Raleigh, the senior class phonathon in February raised more than $127,000 in pledges for the 1991 class gift, which will help fund a new periodicals reading room. The NCSU Libraries also received $60,000 from the Alumni Association, made up of undesignated gifts from university alumni; the funds will be used to buy books.

• The Falconer Biology Library at Stanford University, California, has received funds to improve access to electronic databases as part of a million-dollar grant awarded to the Department of Biological Sciences by the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. The library is using two approaches to facilitate end-user searching. With matching funds from the university, an IBM public workstation was established where databases available on CD-ROM can be searched. Auto-Menu is used as a front-end to identify the user’s status and choice of database. This data, along with the length of time the workstation is used, is automatically logged by the machine to provide management information. Grant monies were also used to purchase a Mac Ilex public workstation for online searching by end users. Using a SuperCard front- end and MacSamson, the Mac leads users through a series of menus where they identify themselves and select the database they wish to search. This information is automatically saved. All online sessions are automatically downloaded to disk, and once offline the user is presented with search results for editing, printing, or saving to floppy. This machine may also be used by patrons who need to transfer files between IBM and Mac disks.

• At the University of California, Berkeley, a “phenomenal” response to a call for barcoding volunteers allowed the Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Design, Forestry, and Music Libraries to apply a record number of barcodes during winter break. Over 150,000 barcodes were applied, most of them within the first eight work days of January.

• The Reference Services Forum and the Library Administrative Office at the University of California, Los Angeles sponsored a skill-building workshop called “The Spotlight’s on You!” Bill Anton, actor and teacher at UC San Diego, came to UCLA December 13-14 to demonstrate presentation techniques. At each workshop, 30 library' participants were transformed under Bill’s guidance into spontaneous storytellers. Bill addressed pub- lic-spealdng anxiety and explored the use of inner motivation to enhance body and vocal gestures.

• At the Music Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, students can now get a thorough grounding in the classics with a new kind of easy-to-use textual and visual encyclopedia. On a computer screen, the student reads a detailed, written explanation of everything happening in the music while listening to the composition on headphones. The listener can also elect to read information about the composer’s life and times or an explanation of the art of listening. The new encyclopedias are packaged on interactive multimedia compact discs that employ HyperCard programming to shift from one section of the text to another.

• At the University of Illinois, Champaign, a Hypertext-based tour of the library is now available. HYPERTOUR was developed by Tania Gottschalk to provide an introduction to the library and its services.

• Staff from the University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, and the university’s Carlson School of Management and Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs have won the 1990 Special Research Award given by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). An interdisciplinary team supported by a grant from the Council on Library Resources studied issues involved in integrating administrative and scholarly information services in an academic setting. The team developed a model Integrated Information Center for the university and has recently received a three-year HEA Title II-D grant to implement the model. The research papers describing the team’s efforts and findings was scheduled to be published by the Journal of the American Society for Information Science in March 1991.

• Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, has received its 19th endowment for the Libraries, bringing the total dollar amount of library endowments to over one-half million. Funds from the new endowment, donated by an alumna, will be used to help purchase materials for the general collections.