ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The City University of New York’s Fine Arts Library of its Herbert H. Lehman College has received the personal music collection of the late Irwin Kraus, music and recordings librarian of the Fordham branch of the New York Public Library. Kraus’ brother, Robert M. Frank, donated some 1,040 music books, 50 journal titles, 700 tapes, 440 cassettes, and many concert programs and librettos. Vocal music is very well reflected in the collection, which also includes radio interviews with performers and composers as well as a growing number of out-of-print performances.

• The College of Charleston, South Carolina, has acquired the minutes of the Friendly Moralist Society, 1841-1856, a free Black mutual aid society of Charleston. Included are membership listings, financial data, addresses and proceedings, and the arguments given regarding a number of significant contemporary social issues. The manuscript is the earliest known document of its kind and the only ante-bellum free Black society minutes for Charleston, where a substantial free Black community existed from the late eighteenth century.

• George Washington University’s Gelman Library has received the professional library of Murray Webb Latimer, an expert in labor relations and union benefits. The gift comprises some 240,000 manuscripts and more than 6,000 volumes. Latimer served under Franklin D. Roosevelt and was a leader in developing the Social Security System.

• The Illinois State Historical Society Library, Springfield, has acquired the congressional records of former U.S. Rep. John B. Anderson (R- I11.) and former U.S. Sen. Adlai E. Stevenson (D- I11.). Both collections include documents, photographs, publications, audio and video tapes, and motion picture films. The Anderson collection includes records of his presidential campaign in 1980, while the Stevenson collection covers campaign material, speech files, legislative research, and a wide range of local and national political material. Neither collection will be available for research until the library has examined and cataloged the manuscripts.

• The State University of New York at Buffalo has been selected as the repository for the Jargon Society Archives, which will be housed in its Poetry and Rare Books Collection. The archives are the result of the initiative of author Jonathan Williams, part of the mainstream of the Black Mountain literary movement, who began publishing the works of his innovative contemporaries in 1951. The material includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, postcards, and personal messages, and after it has been processed will be used to construct an accurate literary history of the period.

The Poetry and Rare Books Collection has also received the complete published and unpublished writings of the American anti-war poet, Anthony Ostroff (1923-1978).

• The Roger M. Blough Learning Center at Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, has received a complete set of copies of the personal papers of Vidkun Quisling, the minister president of Norway under German occupation in World War II who was executed for treason in 1945. The papers were donated by Maria Quisling, his widow, in recognition of the publication of an article on Quisling in the Susquehanna University Studies in 1959.

• Texas Tech University Library, Lubbock, now owns the largest collection of Turkish folktales in Turkish on magnetic tape (680 hours of recordings) extant outside Turkey itself. Housed in a library room arranged for this purpose, the Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative also includes English translations, notes, indexes, supporting materials, and all related correspondence for two decades of fieldwork.

• The University of Rochester, New York, has been given a nearly complete collection of works by and about the noted British author John Ruskin (1819-1900). The collection includes first, early, and rare editions and was donated by Sydney Ross of Troy, New York. In addition to 434 volumes, the Ruskin materials include three original letters to Ruskin and 22 written by him.

• The University of Texas at Austin has been given the correspondence received by the family of William Royer, Jr., during the time he was held hostage in Iran. Royer, who donated the material to the Barker Texas History Center, was a 1961 graduate of the University of Texas. Don Carleton, director of the center, said that the letters are valuable as a study of American society at that particular point in time.

GRANTS

• The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, Washington, D C., has been awarded $1,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to evaluate the rare archival material housed in their library. The Volta Bureau Library has a rare book collection containing every major treatise relating to the deaf and education of the deaf up to 1925 and includes Bell’s early books, notebooks, and letters on hearing, deafness, and eugenics.

• Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has ,been awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help local communities develop programs about women. The project, entitled “Women in the Community: Where Were They? Where Are They? Where Are They Going?” will enable the Schlesinger Library to work with public libraries to be selected in seven communities throughout the country to prepare programs about women for local audiences. The programs will be planned by local teams in each of the communities. Each team must include a public librarian, an academic librarian, a member of a community organization, and a women’s studies scholar. Four-member teams sponsored by a public library are invited to apply to a training session to be held at the Schlesinger Library in August, 1981. For further information contact: Barbara Haber, project director, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, 10 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138.

The Schlesinger Library has also received a gift of $50,000 from Roger Clapp of Cambridge to establish the Mary Lizzie Saunders Clapp Fund in memory of his mother. The fund will be used to award grants to scholars to cover the costs of travel and other expenses related to research at Schlesinger. A member of the Class of 1886, Mrs. Clapp was enrolled at Radcliffe when it was known as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women.

• Saint Joseph College’s Pope Pius XII Library, West Hartford, Connecticut, has been awarded an $8,000 grant from the Ensworth Charitable Trust. Funds will be used to purchase elementary and secondary curriculum materials in special education to be added to the library’s Curriculum Materials Center.

• Teachers College Library/Columbia University, New York, has been awarded a $100,000 challenge grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities toward renovation and preservation of the library. The grant will help complete a $7.7 million reconstruction project in 56-year-old Russell Hall. Extensive modernization of facilities, expansion of storage capacity from 450,000 to 624,000 volumes, and architectural preservation work already are underway. Teachers College Library is the largest library of education in the United States.

• The University of Florida, Gainesville, dedicated its 55,000-volume Isserand Rae Price Library of Judaica on March 8 in ceremonies honoring a Jacksonville family who gave the university $400,000 to support and expand the collection. The Prices were instrumental in establishing the Jacksonville Jewish Center in the late 1920s. The Library of Judaica, founded in 1977 and one of the largest in the country, includes the 40,000-volume Mishkin Collection gathered by Rabbi Leonard C. Mishkin of Chicago. The ceremony presented the library with its official name and thanked the donors for their contribution, which will be used to catalog the collection.

NEWS NOTES

• The Chicago Public Library Cultural Center is presenting a historical exhibition of over 130 science fiction books and magazines entitled “Science Fiction and Fantasy: Masterworks from the Lilly Library,” through May 16. The Lilly Library of Indiana University in Bloomington has loaned the exhibit materials. A first edition of Mary Shelley ’s 1818 classic, Frankenstein, is on view, as well as works by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Leguin, and samples of sci-fi pulp magazines.

• The University of California, Riverside, library has added its millionth volume, a rare facsimile edition of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, published in 1955. The volume is one of a series of limited-edition Blake facsimiles published by Trianon Press. Celebrating its three millionth acquisition, the University of Pennsylvania library, Philadelphia, has added the first edition of William Penn’s book. No Cross, No Crown (1669). The book, a plea for equality and morality which Penn wrote while in prison, was donated to the library by Haverford College.

• The University of Maryland’s Music Library, College Park, has begun to process the International Piano Archives at Maryland, one of the world’s largest collection of piano records which includes many releases of early recordings and many rare discs. Supported by a 1979 grant from the Ford Foundation, the library will microfilm and index over 13,500 33 and 78 rpm phonodiscs in a pilot project using techniques designed as the basis of a nationwide union catalog of sound recordings. The completed catalog will permit musicologists to compare records visually by noting each disc’s unique matrix (identification) number, label contents, and configuration of grooves. The microfilm photos of the collection will be placed on cassettes which can be read on a microfilm cassette reader. The bibliographic data will be MARC-tagged and eventually entered directly into the OCLC database. Mi-Kal County-matic, Inc., of Syracuse is producing the microfilm cassettes which will be available in 1982. The Associated Audio Archives, a consortium of the five largest record archives in the United States (Library of Congress, Yale, Syracuse, Stanford, and the New York Public Library) is expected to catalog and make available their collections in the same way as Maryland.