ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

•Alfred University’s Herrick Memorial Library, Alfred, New York, has acquired an important archive of letters by 28 British authors including T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and Rebecca West. All of the letters were written to Ursula Roberts, a British poet who used the pen name Susan Miles, and many of them are concerned with the British peace movement of the 1930s.

•The New York State Archives, Albany, has received 3,500 cubic feet of records created by colonial and state courts. They will be administered by the State Archives of the State Education Department under an agreement with the New York State Court of Appeals. The list of well-known New Yorkers whose legal careers can be traced in these records includes Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, John Jay, George Clinton, DeWitt Clinton, Millard Fillmore, and many others. State archivist Larry J. Hackman said that many of the records of the highest historical interest are in such poor physical condition that the Archives cannot make them available for research until they have received conservation treatment or have been microfilmed. The records had been previously stored at Queens College in Flushing.

•The University of California, San Diego, has acquired the papers of Harold Clayton Urey (1893-1981), winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of deuterium. The papers include material dated 1934 to 1981, although the bulk of the collection concerns Urey’s work after 1945. It includes files concerning the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, 1946-1949, a small amount of material on the Rosenberg and Sobell cases, and several inches of correspondence documenting Urey’s work as science advisor to president-elect John F. Kennedy.

GRANTS

•The Boston Theological Institute has been awarded grants totaling $78,431 from the Booth Ferris Foundation and the Council on Library Resources for the completion of its CONSER serials cataloging project, launched in 1979. Over 85% of the serials have now been cataloged and the records are available online through OCLC.

•The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, has received $35,845 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to improve bibliographic access to United States newspapers held by the Center. On November 1 the Center began to convert its catalog records for approximately 1,100 U.S. newspapers to machine-readable form using the CONSER database. The Center’s project is part of a nationwide program supported by NEH funds to promote resource sharing and cooperation in bibliographic control among major U.S. libraries, particularly for newspapers that are not at present widely available to researchers.

Another participating institution, the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, has received $201,978 from NEH to catalog their holdings of more than 14,000 newspaper titles through 1876. Other repositories selected for grants are the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Kansas State Historical Society, the New York Historical Society, and the Western Reserve Historical Society.

• The New York Public Library has received a surprise $375,000 challenge grant from the Chase Manhattan Bank to enable its Central Research Library at Fifth Avenue and 42d Street to reopen its doors on Thursdays, effective January 6. The building has been closed Thursdays since 1975.

•The University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded an HEA Title II-C grant of $157,297 to strengthen the library’s Slavic and East European collections. The monies will be used to review the collections on the shelf, conserve them on archival quality microfilm, enrich them by filling in major lacunae, and fully describe them in the UC- Berkeley catalog and RLIN.

• The University of Manitoba Libraries, Winnipeg, have received a grant of $25,000 from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for acquisitions relating to social gerontology.

• York University Libraries, Downsview, Ontario, recently received a grant of $38,655 from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council which will enable processing of 10,000 Canadian pamphlets. The pamphlets provide a continuum of information about political and cultural events in Canada, especially Quebec and Ontario, between 1880 and 1950.

NEWS NOTES

• The Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, has completed a two-year project cataloging the records of the United States Customs House, Providence. The thousands of documents date between 1789 and 1900 and were given to the Society in 1902 by Act of Congress. They were largely unavailable to researchers until a $48,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled the Society to arrange and safely store the papers and compile a detailed inventory of contents.

•The University of Houston Library has recently completed an inventory of all monographs in its collections. Very few research libraries have undertaken such a comprehensive project in recent years. The library’s plan to conduct an inventory grew out of findings gathered through their Public Services Review Project conducted in the Spring of 1981. Because of the project’s user orientation, the library was able to gather much information about patron use and user success rates. The study revealed that many titles listed in the card catalog could not be found in the stacks by either patrons or staff. The monographs inventory was begun in the Fall of 1981 and completed in 37 weeks. A total number of 474,806 shelf list cards were checked, and 35,578 volumes could not be accounted for (about 4% of all volumes held). One side effect of the project has been the identification of some 3,800 missing or incorrect records, including transposed call numbers, mis-numbered copies, missing shelf list cards, and outdated location symbols. To reduce user frustration until such time as many of the volumes are replaced, all missing books have been labeled as “lost” in the library’s CLSI circulation system. A serials inventory has been planned for the Fall. A limited number of copies of the written procedures for the Inventory Project are available from Dana Rooks, Personnel Coordinator, University Libraries, University of Houston Central Campus, Houston, TX 77004.

•The University of Illinois has purchased its 6 millionth acquisition, John Flamsteed’s Celestial History (1712). When Flamsteed discovered that Edmund Halley (of Hailey’s Comet) had added observations of his own while editing the manuscript, he ordered all copies of the book burned. Only 61 are known to have escaped the flames. The University of Rochester acquired its 2 millionth volume, a rare 1557 folio edition of The Workes of Sir Thomas More. The book was presented to the library by alumna Marie Ostendorf Wells. ■ ■

MUDGE CITATION

The Isadore Gilbert Mudge Citation Committee is seeking nominations of outstanding reference librarians for the annual award given by ALA’s Reference and Adult Services Division. The Mudge Citation recognizes a person who has made a distinguished contribution to reference librarianship in the form of an imaginative and constructive program in a particular library; the writing of a significant book or articles in the reference field; creative and inspirational teaching or reference

N. Frederick Nash (left), rare books librarian, and Robert A. Watts (right), president of the Friends of the U. of I. Library‚ inspect the Celestial History.

services; active participation in professional associations devoted to reference services; or in other noteworthv activities which stimulate reference librarians to more distinguished performance.

Send letters of nomination by December 15 to Joyce Duncan Falk, Library-Reference, University of California, Irvine, Box 19557, Irvine, CA 92713. ■■