ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Letters

(C&RL News welcomes your signed, typed comment on recent content in our pages or on matters of general interest to the academic or research library profession. Letters beyond 250 words will not be accepted or may be edited to fit space. Letters should be addressesd to: The Editor, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611;fax (312)280-7663.)

Food not only possible break for readers

To the Editor:

I have two objections to Helen L. Gater’s opinion piece “Food for thought” published in the December 91 C&RL News. She ignored the occupational health hazards associated with exposing library workers, and library users, to repeated application of pesticides when she stated “exterminators can handle vermin and they need to make a living.” Marketing libraries is important, but all the costs need to be considered and pesticide exposure is too risky to justify any marketing gain, at least in mid to large libraries. My second objection is more personal. Eating and reading is pleasurable but not particularly healthful. Gater argues that students “…need all the breaks they can get.” How about a walk around the building, a drink of water, meditation, a nap?—Ann Viera, Agriculture-Veterinary Medicine Library, University of Tennessee

Let ACRL’s Racial & Ethnic Diversity Committee know about your activities

ACRL’s Racial & Ethnic Diversity Committee wants to receive information about library programs, workshops, etc., that have successfully dealt with the following issues: recruitment of minority librarians; cultural awareness/sensi- tivity training; multicultural library school curriculum; and diversity. The committee is planning on evaluating/highlighting this information during its program at the ACRL Conference. Contact: Susana Hinojosa, Moffitt Undergraduate Library, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720; (510) 642-5071; e-mail: shinojos@berkeley. library.edu.

The committee’s Coalition of Academic Librarians from Underrepresented Groups wants to hear from you if you are working on racial and diversity issues within ALA or your library. Contact: Gladys Chaw at (415) 574-6579.

Kudos for Selth

To the Editor:

Would that each of us wrote as well as Jeff Selth (“The objects of his devotion,” C&RL News, December 1991). Our articles might be widely anthologized in literature. Though an anathema to librarians, figures like Mr. Cheshire should be of interest to mystery readers outside our profession. Please entice J. Selth to continue writing on all aspects of the book world for C&RL News first.—M. J. Kreitzburg, Reference and Head, Bibliographic Instruction, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

Kudos and complaints on Dead Sea Scrolls coverage

To the Editor:

Congratulations on an excellent November issue! I pulled it out of my mailbox yesterday evening, walked in my front door, sat down, and read it cover to cover.

You deserve high praise for your exceptionally clear statement on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Huntington Library’s decision to open up their collection of negatives.

All in all, the gradual changes you are making— more upbeat copy and the inclusion of more photographs, to name only two—are greatly improving the readability of the journal.

Keep up the good work.—Patricia Bozeman, Head, Special Collections, University of Houston To the Editor:

To permit a person from the University of Texas, Ransom Center, to write and attempt to discuss the issue of access and restriction is the ultimate insult to any serious scholar who has tried to achieve such access in Austin.

The H.R.H.R.C. has a worldwide reputation as the least accessible, least cooperative institution, that will stop at nothing to preserve what they perceive as their most important function of being a tourist attraction. The audacity of this institution and its employees seems to have no bounds.

I am enclosing papers covering the period from October 1984 to January 1988 detailing my efforts to obtain access while preparing The Letters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, recently published by Oxford University Press.

You will read a Byzantine tale of evasion, lying, and pushing through the Texas Legislature a most obnoxious information control law for the most self- serving, anti-scholarship, anti-research, anti-intellectual purposes.—Herbert D. Schimmel, New York, New York