ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• The American Antiquarian Society,Worcester, Massachusetts, has received from the late Paul Fenimore Cooper, Jr., an AAS member, important manuscripts of his great-great-grandfather James Fenimore Cooper. The Cooper bequest includes complete or partial manuscripts of the novels Red Rover, The Bravo, Satanstoe, and Chainbearer, as well as fragments of other novels and essays. Among the papers is extensive correspondence, notably with Cooper’s American publisher Carey and Lea and with members of the Cooper and DeLancey families. Also in the correspondence is a large cache of letters Fenimore Cooper wrote to his lifelong friend, Commodore William B. Shubrick. Legal and business papers make up the bulk of the remaining materials. They will enhance the Society’s distinguished Cooper holdings, which include some 600 editions or printings of his works between 1820 and 1870 and the research papers collected or controlled by the late James F. Beard, Jr., “the dean of Cooper scholarship,” who died in December 1989.

• Boston Universityhas received the papers of actor-playwright James Kirkwood, coauthor of A Chorus Line. “James Kirkwood was a giant in the field, and his papers strengthen our collection of other playwrights, including Frank Marcus (The Killing of Sister George), Norman Corwin (Sandburg), David Rabe (Streamers), and Sam Shepard (Buried Child),” says Howard B. Gotlieb, curator and director of the department of special collections. The Kirkwood papers include drafts and manuscripts for all the playwright’s major works—There Must Be a Pony!, Some Kind of Hero, A Chorus Line, American Grotesque, Legends, and Diary of a Mad Playwright. They are available for use at the Mugar Memorial Library. Boston University has also received for its Twentieth Century Archives the papers of Elliot Norton, who retired in 1982 after 48 years as a theater critic in Boston. During his career Norton was honored with a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award (1963), a Tony Award (1971), and a New England Theatre Conference Award (1974). His papers include correspondence from actors and actresses, critics and writers, lectures from Norton’s college courses, and transcripts from his television show. There are letters from Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Laurence Olivier, Janet Leigh, Dorothy Lamour, and Ralph Bellamy among the correspondence.

• The Ohio UniversityLibraries, Athens, have received a large collection of records from the Columbus & Hocking Coal & Iron Company. The records were donated by the New Straitsville (Ohio) Betterment Association. The collection includes coal shipment records, company store account books, house rental records, letter books, payroll and time books, and mine maps, mostly dating from the period 1880-1920 and documenting the heyday of the Hocking Valley coal field.

• The Franklin D. Schurz Library at Indiana University,South Bend, has received from John Fink of Mishawaka about 6,000 books in American history, including a rare and valuable set of the Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1787. The set comprises not only the first journals of the Continental Congress but also the initial publication of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Few sets were originally printed and even fewer survive. Fink decided to donate the collection, which originally belonged to his father, after touring the Schurz Library.

• The University of Maryland at College ParkLibraries have been given the personal papers of the late James Cabell Bruce, former U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, financier, industrialist, and member of a prominent Maryland family. H. Joanne Harrar, director of libraries, describes the collection as including correspondence from presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, Vice President Alben W. Barkley, Governors J. Millard Tawes of Maryland, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, G. Mennen Williams of Michigan, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and Thomas Dewey of New York; Secretaries of State George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Christian Herter, and Dean Rusk; Francis Cardinal Spellman and President Juan Peron of Argentina and his wife, Eva, as well as other prominent figures. The more personal side of Bruce’s life is represented by early correspondence with members of his family, biographical files, and photographs of the Bruce family and their residences. Harrar adds that the gift from Bruce’s daughter, Louise Este Bruce, is especially timely in light of the new National Archives facility now being constructed on the university campus.

• Washington UniversityArchives, St. Louis, has received the papers of Eugene Feenberg (1906-1977), former Wayman Crow professor of physics, from his widow. Now cataloged and available to researchers, they document his pioneering work in many-body theory, which led to the establishment of an annual award, the Feenberg Medal, given by the International Society for Many-Body Problems. In addition to research and lecture notes, journal offprints, and books, the Feenberg papers include correspondence from figures prominent in the early history of quantum mechanics in Europe, such as Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, Max Born, and John von Neumann.

• Western Carolina University’sHunter Library, Cullowee, has received a collection of manuscripts and related documents from Sue Ellen Bridgers, award-winning author of Home Before Dark. Included in the collection, which is organized and ready for use, are original manuscripts with handwritten notations, revised manuscripts, correspondence with editors and publishers, galley proofs and final hardcover and paperback editions of Bridgers’ five novels as well as the short stories “Life’s a Beach” and “The Beginning of Something.” Everyone of the novels—Home Before Dark, All Together Now, Notes for Another Life, Sara Will, and Permanent Connections—has been selected for the annual ALA list of Best Books for Young Adults. Although Bridgers’ publishers have targeted a young adult audience, many critics say that her books appeal to readers of all ages.

Grants

• The American Library Association hasreceived a $275,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project “Brave New Worlds,” which includes the development of reading and discussion program theme materials related to the Columbus Quincentenary. Under the grant, ALA will develop 2 or 3 theme packages modeled after the “Let’s Talk About It” library reading and discussion program. One theme will be “Seeds of Change,” tying in with the travel exhibition now being developed by ALA, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Materials will be available in the fall of 1991. ALA also will publish under the grant a new issue of the “Whole Person Catalog,” featuring information on library humanities programming materials available from ALA and other groups. The catalog will be mailed in fall 1991. A third component of the project involves demonstration projects using the reading and discussion materials with new audiences. Members of the advisory board are Peggy Barber, ALA; Charles M. Brown, Arlington County Public Library; Robin Kickingbird, ALA; Sylvia Rigge Liroff, the National Council on the Aging, Inc.; Judith Ginsberg, Jewish Education Services of America; Sally Mason, ALA; Margaret Sayers Peden, Columbia, Missouri; Beth Smolcic, Federation of State Humanities Councils; David Tebaldi, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities; Herman J. Viola, Smithsonian Institution; John Alexander Williams, Appalachian State University.

• The California Institute of Technology,

Pasadena, has received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation a $300,000 three-year grant to fund part of Project SEED. The money will be used to develop the Science Library Catalog, an online, interactive catalog of science materials for elementary school students. The project’s principal investigator, James Bower, assistant professor of biology at Caltech, is working with coinvestigators Christine Borgman and Virginia Walter, both on the faculty of UCLA’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science. “Funded research such as the Science Library Catalog is important to our role at GSLIS as leaders in the development of new approaches to library and information science,” said Beverly P. Lynch, dean of GSLIS. “This project also creates opportunities for our graduate students to work with faculty researchers at the cutting edge of the field.” The Science Library Catalog project will investigate the information-seeking behavior of children and design appropriate software that children can easily use and understand. In addition to providing basic information such as title and author, the computer program will allow children to “browse the bookshelves” through graphic displays. The program will also include a computer adventure game in which children can explore a model world about which they can ask for more specific information and receive an encyclopedia-like explanation and a picture.

• Augusta CollegeFoundation, Georgia, has received a $500,000 gift from Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Pamplin of Portland, Oregon to establish the Katherine Reese Pamplin Endowment for the Reese Library. The Pamplins have been the strongest supporters of the Reese Library, according to librarian Ray Rowland, who notes that it was their gift of $250,000 in 1972 that served as the catalyst for the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to approve funds for a new library building at Augusta College. Their continued funding over the years has made it possible for the A.C. Reese Library to go from being one of the smallest academic libraries in Georgia to having one of the largest collections. Overall, the Pamplin’s gifts and commitments to Augusta College have approximated $1 million.

• Augustana Collegein Rock Island, Illinois, has been given $125,000 by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation to purchase equipment and furnishings for a new library.

• Berea Collegehas received $750,000 from the Kresge Foundation for renovation of the Hutchins Library.

• George Washington University,Washington, D.C., has been given $34,886 by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to organize, describe, and make available two collections: the records of Friendship House, a settlement house located in the District of Columbia, and the personal papers and institutional records pertaining to planning and constructing transportation facilities in the greater Washington, D.C. area.

• Gonzaga University,Spokane, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, and Whitworth College Libraries, Spokane, will participate in a one-year cooperative collection development project funded by the Library Services and Construction Act, Title III. A total of $75,000will be spent by the three libraries during 1990 to purchase and process both monographs and backruns of periodicals, with subscriptions to the periodicals to be continued beyond the period of the grant. An important part of the project will be a comparison by computer of the holdings of the three libraries with the titles in Books for College Libraries, 3rd ed., published by ACRL and available in MARC tape format. The LSCA grant will pay for WLN (now Western Library Network) to do the necessary programming and run the comparison, which will become the basis for collection assessments at the cooperating institutions.

• Harvard University'sHarvard-Yenching Library has received a grant of $70,000 from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taipei, Taiwan, for the acquisition of a large fulltext database of the Twenty-Five Dynastic Histories of China. The database, containing some 60 million Chinese characters, comprises the entire text of the Twenty- Five Dynastic Histories compiled over a period of more than 2,000 years from about 100 B.C. to the end of China’s imperial period in 1911. This series of historical writings is the single most important collection of primary sources in Chinese studies. According to librarian Eugene W. Wu, “The availability of this database will not only save enormous research time, but also revolutionize the approaches to the study of Chinese history, as interdisciplinary and cross-dynastic themes can now be more easily and fruitfully explored, and in the process, the study of Chinese history will have gone through a permanent and fundamental qualitative change.”

• The Library Company of Philadelphia hasreceived a U.S. Department of Education grant of $85,571 to begin cataloging its Afro-Americana collection into the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN). The award represents 74% of the anticipated costs for the first year. The project, being supported under the Title II-C Strengthening Research Library Resources Program, is expected to take three years to complete. The Library Company’s Afro-Americana collection of 12,000 imprints spans 400 years from the 16th century to the early years of the 20th century and includes 2,000 titles owned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania which are housed in the Library Company’s stacks and provided to researchers in the Library Company’s reading room. One of the most comprehensive collections of Afro-Americana, it includes material on the early exploration of Africa, the Atlantic slave trade, pro-slavery arguments, the politics of slavery in antebellum America, colonization, reconstruction, and the culture of free blacks up to about 1900. Cataloging the collection in the RLIN database will make the records fully accessible for the first time in the Library Company and equally accessible online in hundreds of other libraries throughout the country. The records will also be tapeloaded into OCLC, making the collection accessible in hundreds of public and college libraries not served by RLIN.

• Mother Irene Gill Memorial Library of the College of New Rochelle,New York, the Thomas Paine National Historical Society, and the New Rochelle Public Library have been awarded $32,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to celebrate Thomas Paine and his contribution to the American Revolution and American political thought. The celebration includes a series of book discussions led by faculty members from the College of New Rochelle and three lectures by noted Paine scholars, all at the New Rochelle Public Library; an exhibition of original and rare editions of Paine’s w orks and memorabilia scheduled for next March at the Thomas Paine Museum, and a full-day international symposium to be held at the College of New Rochelle in April 1991.

• National Book Week will expand significantlyin 1991, thanks to a grant of $60,000 from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. Support from the Fund, which is particularly interested in the relationship between artists and audiences, will be used for programs around the country featuring appearances By finalists for the National Book Awards. According to John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book, the involvement of the award winners and finalists will dramatically increase public awareness of books and their writers. Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation, adds that another goal of National Book Week is “to foster the development of new partnerships among organizations that support literary nd literacy activities nationwide, so that all of us can combine forces and reach even larger audiences for books.” National Book Week 1991 will be observed January 20-26. It is cosponsored by the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards, and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

• Newberry Library, Chicago, will receive up to $85,000 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to establish an archives program for the library’s records.

• Penn State University Libraries, University ark, have received $150,000 from Johnson and Johnson, manufacturer of health care products, to create a health care information retrieval system. The Librries will use the grant in 2 ways. The search capabilities of the computerized library information access system will be enhanced in several aspects, including the addition of a key-word search capability, and several medical databases will be acquired.

• San Francisco State University has received $51,348 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to survey historical records and papers held by labor organizations and private individuals involved in labor issues in the San Francisco Bay area.

News notes

• Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library is staging a major exhibition of autograph materials through June 1991. The exhibit features hundreds of documents including letters from such literary and political figures as King Henry VII and King Henry VIII, Horace Walpole, David Livingston, Nehru, Carlyle, Hardy, Coleridge, Yeats, Tennyson, D.H. Lawrence, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Also on display are manuscripts by Dickens, Kipling, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde and Charles Lamb as well as American writers Longfellow, Whittier, Steinbeck, Alcott, Poe, Hemingway and Thoreau. The materials are drawn from a collection consisting of 4,000 manuscripts, 1,500 etchings and engravings, and hundreds of signed photographs and documents donated to Boston University by Paul C. Richards, a 1960 graduate.

• Bowling Green State University Libraries, Ohio, are offering a new service to all graduate students working on theses and dissertations at the university, according to a report received from Bonnie Gratch. PERCS, or PErsonalized Research Consultation Service, aims to pair graduate students with subject-specialist library faculty who will assist students with their literature searches, topic formulation, and proposal development, as well as other library research-related needs. Data obtained from a comprehensive graduate student study and a pilot program last year confirmed the need for such an individual consultation service. Information about PERCS is being mailed to graduate advisers and graduate students known to be working on theses and dissertations. For more details, contact Janet Welch, coordinator of library user education and PERCS at BGSU.

Bowling Green State University Libraries’ Multicultural Affairs Committee invited all students to participate in an essay contest addressing “The Role of the Libraries in Confronting Cultural Conflicts at BGSU.” Three LLR staff members judged entries on both content and style and selected three winners who were honored at a reception held in the Library. The first, second, and third place winners received award certificates from the committee and gift certificates for $100, $50, and $25 from the University Bookstore. The committee has planned a number of other events for the 1990- 1991 academic year under the rubric “Issues in Cultural Diversity: Dispelling the Myths.”

• The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Li- brary of Columbia University recently began a year-long celebration of its centennial with an exhibition of 37 of the rarest items in its collection, including the first book printed in Europe on the subject of architecture (De Re Aedificatoria by Leone Battista Alberti, in 1485) and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in Venice in 1499, which contains a famous woodcut that was the first cross section of a building (the round temple of Venus) ever printed in Europe—a milestone in the history of architectural representation. The October display of the rarest of the rare was curated by Herbert Mitchell, librarian and bibliographer at Avery, and Adolf Placzek, Avery librarian emeritus. A companion book with the title of the exhibit—Avery’s Choice: 500 Years of Architectural Books-will be published later this year. Edited by Placzek, it will contain annotations for some 450 significant architectural books, prepared by distinguished faculty and alumni of Columbia University. Other centennial events will be an exhibition in April 1991 of contemporary architectural drawings newly donated by more than 100 prominent architects in honor of Avery’s anniversary, and publication of Architectural Drawings, A Book of Postcards from the Avery Library and a 1991 calendar entitled “Walter Burley Griffin, Architect, a Year in India,” which reproduces 12 drawings from the Griffin collection in Avery.

• “Developing Library Collections for Califor- nia’s Emerging Majority” drew nearly 500 people to San Francisco in September to address the need librarians have for ethnic collection development information in a state where ethnic populations will soon account for over 50% of inhabitants. All attendees received the manual Developing Library Collections for Californias Emerging Majority, which contains several articles about ethnic collection development issues, as well as extensive lists of resources—publishers, distributors, bookstores, resource specialists, and print sources—to use in obtaining African American, American Indian, Asian/Southeast Asian, and Chicano/Latino materials. The manual is being sold by the Bay Area Library and Information System, which can be reached at (415) 839-6001. Tapes of all the sessions are available from Conference Recording Service, 1308 Gilman St., Berkeley, CA 94706; (415) 527- 3600.

• Radcliffe College’s Arthur and ElizabethSchlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of American Archivists. The citation accompanying the award read in part: “The decision of Radcliffe in 1943 to begin collecting women’s history materials was extraordinary, because the subject was of little interest to academic historians, and because no one outside the women’s movement understood there was a continuing evolution of women’s experience worthy or capable of documentation. Now, after almost 50 years the Library is a model of systematic, sustained collecting and has created a truly national research resource.” The library was also cited for its timely and effective use of current professional methods to provide excellent access to its holdings and for being a focal point of campus community life, with numerous public events held at the library or in conjunction with it.

• Stanford University’sMeyer Library is currently hosting an exhibition called War Bonnets, Tin Lizzies and Patent Leather Pumps. Subtitled “Kiowa Culture in Transition, 1925-1955,” the show features the photographs of Horace Poolaw, a Kiowa Indian. Included are 72 photographs selected from the large archive being cataloged by the Horace Poolaw Photography Project, the work of Stanford students and faculty under the direction of the photographer’s daughter, Linda Poolaw. The exhibit also includes a video documentary of Poolaw’s life. The Stanford University Libraries are highlighting their James A. Healy collection of Irish literature with an exhibition on W.B. Yeats and the Irish Renaissance. The centerpiece of the show is a set of 58 titles published by the Cuala Press, a publishing house run by Yeats’ sister, Elizabeth. Each of these volumes is inscribed by Yeats, and the inscriptions include Yeats’ observations about his own writing and the work of his contemporaries. The inscriptions are being published for the first time in an exhibit catalog that will be available at the exhibit, which will run through January 11 in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion.

• University of ArizonaHealth Sciences Center Library, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Eastern Washington University, Hamilton College, U.S. Naval War College, and Oregon State Library have completely switched their cataloging operations from OCLC’s first online system to the new PRISM service.

• The University of California, Santa Cruz,is displaying for the first time the archive of the Trianon Press, Paris, a small publisher of exceptional art and fine-press books from the mid 1940s through the 1980s. The Trianon is probably best known for its production of facsimilies of the works of William Blake, about which the Times Literary Supplement predicted that “Nothing like these books is ever likely to appear again, and they will, in the future, be the treasures of libraries…. Books as Blake conceived them, poetry, painting, and craftsmanship combined in a way unattempted since the Middle Ages …. A degree of skill, knowledge and devotion has been brought to bear on the production of this series that it would be idle to look for again.” Ownership of the Trianon archive will make UCSC a major center for the study of Blake, according to university librarian Allan Dyson, who notes also that the archive represents aspects of the printing arts that have all but disappeared. The show continues through December 14.

• World Book, Inc,has joined ALA and the Library of Congress Center for the Book to sponsor the “Year of the Lifetime Reader” photo contest. A grand prize of $2,000 will go to the photograph judged the best overall in depicting the pleasures of lifelong reading. Other prizes include $1,000 for first place, $500 for 2nd place and $250 for 3rd place entries in four divisions: youth/color, youth/ black and white, adult/color, and adult/black and white. U.S. libraries of all types are encouraged to hold contests to announce local winners during National Book Week, January 20-26, 1991. First place winners in adult and youth divisions at each participating library will then be eligible for national judging. Winning entries must be submitted to ALA for consideration for national awards by February 15. National prizes will be announced during National Library Week, April 14-20. The winning photos will be displayed at the Library of Congress and the grand prize winner will receive a trip to Washington, D.C., and a tour of the Library of Congress. Librarians are responsible for publicizing local contests and awarding prizes in keeping with the national contest. Entries are to be judged on the basis of photographic quality, artistic merit, and depiction of the “lifetime reader” theme. Tips on how to organize the contest, a sample press release, and ready-to-print entry forms are available from the ALA public information office. ■■