ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Libraries benefit from student and alumni gifts

Libraries faced with declining resources are finding creative ways to supplement their operating budgets. The library at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, received $540,000 from the school’s athletic and alumni associations. The money, raised by a charity auction, will be used to purchase at least 15,000 books for the library.

The Associated Students of Oregon State University Senate pledged $500,000 in student fees over a period of years to fund the Kerr Libraiy Expansion Project. “A $500,000 commitment from students, at a time when tuition, including a possible surcharge, is going up 42%, when programs are being cut and enrollments are being downsized and then capped, shouts a loud and clear message: OSU students care,” said university librarian Melvin R. George.

North Carolina State University’s Class of 1991 raised $147,300 in pledges over a four-year period for the NCSU Libraries. The gift will fund the creation of a periodicals reading room. Head basketball coach Les Robinson surprised the students at their senior class dinner by writing a $500 check to the class gift, bringing the total to $147,800.

At the University of Alabama 24 Greek sororities and fraternities donatedatotal of $21,000tothe “Greek Library Support Fund,” which will make possible the purchase of a new American Biographies book collection for the library. Charles Osbum, dean of libraries, commented, “This is a noteworthy gift and a sterling example of students helping other students.”

Criminal Justice Library Network founded

A World Criminal Justice Library Network was founded in April at a conference convened at Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice. The aim of the Network is to share information resources by making them known and available to researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers over the world. The United Nations Criminal Justice Information Network, an electronic network with data sources, bulletin boards, and gateway software to other systems, will be the primary means of communication. The United Nations Dag Hammerskjold Library, University of Toronto Institute of Criminology, State University of New York at Albany, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, United States National Institute of Justice, Australian Institute of Criminology, United Nations Crime Prevention Branch, Radzinowicz Library of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, and the Criminal Justice/NCCD Library at Rutgers University are the founding members. Contact Phyllis Schultz, Rutgers Criminal Justice/NCCD Collection, S.I. Newhouse Center for Law and Justice, 15 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102; fax (201) 648-1275 for additional information.

Western Kentucky University's mascot, Big Red, posed for the “Smile and Say…Read” celebration of National Library Week.

Smithsonian study grants available

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Dibner Library Resident Scholar Program offers two shortterm study grants for 1992 with stipends of $1,500 per month for a term of one to three months to do research in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology and other library collections of the Smithsonian. The award is to encourage study of the history of science and technology. Proposals are due November 1,1991. For application materials contact: Resident Scholar Program, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, NHB 24mz, Washington, DC 20560; (202) 357-3054.

Austin Community College Library reaches 100,000 volumes

Austin Community College’s (ACC) Learning Resource Services Library (directed by W. Lee Hisle) added its 100,000th volume. The book, Conceptualizing 2000, focuses on how community colleges must anticipate a diverse student body, and was edited by ACC’s president Dan Angel and his assistant, Mike DeVault.

ARLIS/NA regional meeting in Mexico

The Art Libraries Society of North America will hold its regional meeting November 24-16,1991, in conjunction with the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. For information contact: Winberta Yao, Hayden Library, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287; (602) 965-8168; fax: (602) 965-9169.

Acquisitions

• The Atlanta Historical Society, Inc., acquired and made available for research the A. T. (Austin Thomas) Walden papers. Walden (1885- 1965) was a prominent black attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, and a major figure in the civil rights movement there. The 27-cubic-foot collection includes papers, speeches, correspondence, andlegal documents relating to his work as an attorney and his involvement with such groups as the Atlanta Urban League, the Atlanta Negro Voters League, the Georgia Democratic Party, and the NAACP.

• Boston University’s Twentieth Century Archives has acquired the papers of Boston novelist James Carroll, a former Catholic priest best known for his novel Mortal Friends, about Boston politics. The university also acquired the papers of Frank Avruch, a local television personality.

• The University of New Brunswick acquired reference books, theses, curriculum guides, and instructional materials on the Holocaust with a $10,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

• The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries’ Special Collections Division acquired 1,200 U.S.-produced commercial and school atlases dating from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The atlases were acquired from Murray Hudson, a rare map and atlas dealer, and Virginia Garrett of Fort Worth, who donated her large collection.

• The University of the Pacific Library in Stockton, California, received the congressional papers of Rep. Norman D. Shumway, who served the northern Central California Fourteenth District in the House of Representatives from 1978-1990. The collection contains issues files on subjects such as U.S. support for the Middle East, gas allocation, and the New Mellones Dam Project. Shumway’s correspondence and files from his work on the House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, and the Select Committee on Aging are also included.

• Victoria University, Toronto, recently added the remainder of the papers of Northrop Frye to its collections. Frye, an international scholar and writer, included among his works Anatomy of Criticism, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, and The Great Code. Victoria University also completed its collection of Hogarth Press items hand printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and acquired the rare Poems (1917) by C. N. Sidney Woolf. Additional materials were added to the Virginia Woolf/Hogarth Press/Bloomsbury Collection, which consists of more than 1,300 items including scarce Omega Workshop publications, Hogarth Press titles, translations, photographs, proofs, correspondence, and other publications relating to the Bloomsbury Group and Bloomsbury artists. The acquisitions were supported by a $25,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by other gifts and donations.

• Wake Forest University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Department of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library acquired the personal papers and manuscripts of Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. The collection documents Hayes’s 17 years of work at Esquire, beginning in 1956 as assistant to publisher Arnold Gingrich. Included are signed correspondence from notables such as Samuel Beckett, William Buckley, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Nikki Giovanni, and Salvador Dali.

• Wellesley College’s Special Collections received over 3,000 books from the personal collection of Isabel and Charles Goodman. Encompassing all aspects of American and European book arts, including artists’s books, limited and first editions, fine press books, and illustrated books, the Goodman Collection complements the library’s existing focus on the book arts and history of printing. The Goodman family also established a book fund to support the purchase of fine press editions and illustrated books. Isabel Goodman graduated in the Wellesley class of ‘33.

Grants

• The Association of Research Libraries received a $195,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its proposal for a study of foreign acquisitions entitled “Scholarship, Research Libraries, and Foreign Publishing in the 1990s.” A major goal of the project is to develop a national strategy for ensuring the continued strength of American research library collections of foreign materials.

• The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library received $46,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to complete work on a computerized catalog of the library’s drawings collection, incorporating images on a videodisc.

• The Christopher Newport College Library, Newport News, Virginia, was awarded a $50,000 Title III LSCA grant from the Virginia State Library and Archives to establish a regional union list of serials. Over 13,000 periodical titles of participating academic, public, and special libraries will be included.

• Redeemer College, Ancaster, Ontario, received a $3,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to acquire philosophy of science materials for its Pascal Center Collection.

• The Harvard Theatre Collection received a bequest valued in excess of $5 million from the estate of Howard D. Rothschild of New York. The bequest includes Rothschild’s collection of materials on the Ballets Russes as well as an endowment to benefit dance in the collection.

• Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis Libraries received two grants totalling $75,000 from the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy on behalf of Lilly Endowment, Inc., and others, to support a two-year project to acquire or microfilm the historical records of important individuals, firms, or professional associations in the fields of philanthropy and fundraising and in partial support of an oral history project examining the career of Harold L. Oram, a leading fundraiser for liberal causes in America from the 1930s-1970s.

• The Johns Hopkins University’s Eisenhower Library was awarded three grants: $97,758 in HEA II-C funds to catalog and preserve the Harold Jantz collection of 16th-, 17th-, and 18th- century German literature; $204,897 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Preservation to develop a program in preservation education with a series of workshops on the treatment of books and flat paper materials; and $24,000 by NEH to plan a program entitled “Colonial Encounters in the Chesapeake: The Natural World of Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians, 1492-1800.”

• Louisiana State University Libraries was awarded a $285,000 equipment grant by the Louisiana Education Quality Support Fund Enhancement Program. The grant will be used to establish an Electronic Imaging Laboratory in the Special Collections Library. The funded project will provide equipment to scan, digitize, index, and make resources accessible by CD-ROM.

• Shenandoah University was awarded $400,000 by the Kresge Foundation toward the construction of a new $3.3 million library.

• The University of Arkansas, F ayetteville, received $45,931 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to process the papers of William Grant Still, a prominent black American composer (1895-1978) and his wife, Verna Arvey (1910— 1987), a concert pianist and journalist.

• The University of Florida, Gainesville, will receive $20 million from former U.S. Senator George A. Smathers to support the libraries which will be renamed in his honor. “I wanted to support a part of the University of Florida that will, like my education, also stand the test of time,’’Smathers said. “The library, of course, is the core resource of a great university.”

• The University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, Library received a grant from the International Council for Canadian Studies and the Canadian Consulate General in Minneapolis as well as a grant from the Ministere des Affaires internationales du Quebec Delegation du Quebec in Chicago, to purchase materials relevant to Canadian and Quebec studies.

• The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Library received $609,381 from the Department of Education’s HEA II-C program (Strengthening Research Library Resources) for retrospective conversion of 100,000 records in the library’s rare book collection.