ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Hugh Thompson

Augustana College inSioux Falls, South Dakota, has received a grant of $150,000 for the Mikkelsen Library from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. The funds will be used to enhance the library’s tech- nological resources and to upgrade the student com- puter lab.

The Concord Free Pub-lic Library’s Special Collec- tions Department has re- ceived a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners for preserva- tion of specific high-demand items of particu- lar historical or literary significance in the Vault Collection of archival and manuscript materi- als. Items slated for treatment include a 1774 covenant of Concord residents agreeing to sus- pend commercial dealings with England, a 1776 Salem-printed Declaration of Independence, and manuscripts by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The Episcopal Divinity School/WestonJesuit School of Theology Library has received a grant of $125,000 from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation to purchase hardware and software and install an online catalog and circulation system. The funds will also support improved network communications between the library and the two seminaries it serves.

Harvard University's College Library hasreceived a $500,000 grant from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation of New York to endow student assistantships in the Judaica Division. The positions will be called the Littauer Judaica Student Assistantships.

The Library of Congress (LC) has received a $2 million gift from the Ameritech Foundation in support of its National Digital Library (NDL) Program. The goal of the LC’s digital program is to make freely available over the Internet approximately five million historical items by the year 2000, in collaboration with other institutions throughout the country. Ameritech’s gift will support that goal by allowing selected libraries across the United States to digitize their unique American historical collec- tions for incorporation into the NDL program.

The University of Penn-sylvania Library has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog its col- lection of Marian Anderson papers, which were donated over a 14-year period begin- ning in 1977. The grant pro- vides outright funds of $18,370 and matching funds of $50,000 to cre- ate RLIN catalog records for the collection, which includes clippings, programs, photo- graphs, correspondence, printed and manu- script scores, and sound recordings that docu- ment Anderson’s life and career from her birth in 1897 to the year before her death in 1992.

California Polytechnic State University’sRobert E. Kennedy Library has been awarded a grant of $15,000 from the CSU Council of Library Directors for the further development of the California Cultural Studies Digital Library. The Digital Library is designed to link special collections related to California architecture, history, politics, ethnography, and journalism under one site for easy access by students, faculty, and researchers. Access will be accomplished through creation of finding aids, hyperlinks, and digital images of selected items from each collection.

The University of British Columbia's Library Endowment for Collections has received more than $50,000 from the university’s Parent Appeal campaign. One out of four parent donors in the spring ‘96 campaign requested that their contributions go to library collections.

Acquisitions

The professional and personal papersand memorabilia of the late Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger have been given to the Earl Gregg Swem Library at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, where Burger served as chancellor from 1986 to 1993. The collection of more than two million items includes, in addition to the paper archive, some 150 ceremonial robes, pictures, awards, books written or edited by Burger, and a porcelain sculpture of an eagle with an American flag in its talons presented to Burger in 1991 by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Items in the collection reflect Burger’s childhood and early years through law school to the Department of Justice and the Court of Appeals. All the decisions from the Supreme Court are included, as well as Burger’s work as chairman of the Bicentennial Commission.

A major collection of Africana materials has been acquired by New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library to support the university’s Africana studies program. The 80,000 books, periodicals, and pamphlets cover a wide range of subjects related to the African diaspora, with material on Sub-Saharan African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean cultures. The collection’s wealth of out-of-print materials includes a first edition by Philadelphia abolitionist William Stills containing interviews with runaway slaves who came through the Underground Railroad. The collection came from the University Place Bookshop, a store in a ninth-floor Union Square apartment that opened its doors in 1932, offering material such as old copies of Ebony‚ first editions of poetry by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and an in-depth selection of books in original African languages.

Original drawings from the comic stripseries For Better or For Worse have been donated by the creator, cartoonist Lynn Johnston, to the cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University. The donation also includes letters received after the death of the beloved dog in the comic strip, Farley, after his rescue of little April from drowning. More than 650 letters reflect diverse opinions among readers, some of whom were offended by the dog’s death, while others were reconciled that the animal’s time had come and went on to share their own personal experiences with the loss of a pet.

A collection of more than 2,000 chemistry volumes housed in Harding University’s Brackett Library in Searcy, Arkansas, has been designated as an historical chemical landmark by the American Chemical Society as part of its effort to increase awareness of these resources on the part of science educators, researchers, and historians. Included in the collection, which documents the progression of chemical history, are eight books that date to the l600s, the oldest of which is a 1609 edition of Basilica Chymica by Oswald Croll. Among the unique items in the collection are a 42-volume set of chemistry courses offered by mail from 1900 to 1940 by the International Correspondence School of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a 1945 book on radioactivity titled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, which served as the United States Army’s official history of the development of the atomic bomb.

A collection of 1,500 French books andmanuscripts dating from the late 1400s to the middle of the 19th century have been acquired by the Stanford University Libraries. The acquisition will be known as the Gustave Gimon Collection of French Political Economy, in memory of Gustave Gimon (1907-91), a philanthropist and leader of the French Resistance. The collection includes volumes on religious theory, trade with the Americas, colonial policy, and transmission of economic systems to non- European settings. With works on a variety of themes in French and European religious, political, social, cultural, and economic history, the collection demonstrates the interlacing of economics and political theory in the years before and after the French Revolution.

A collection of Renaissαnce-erα bookshas been acquired by the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The books are primarily Italian scholarly texts printed in the 16th century by many of the best-known Italian, French, and German scholar-printers of the Renaissance. Included are Greek and Latin texts of such scholars as Cicero, Erasmus, Plutarch, Aristotle, and Horace, as well as texts in Italian of Renaissance authors.

A collection of broadsides and pamphlets, to be known as the Fuchs/Auspitz Collection of Broadsides and Pamphlets from the Vienna Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1848-1850, has been acquired by the Special Collections Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. Donated by Josiah Lee Auspitz, the collection augments the library’s holdings of German-language Viennese Revolution materials that document the rapidly unfolding events of the full length of the revolutionary period up to the aftermath of the capitulation of the revolutionary forces.

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; e-mail: hthompson@ala.org.

The papers of the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary Victor Serge (1890-1947) have been acquired from his son, the painter Vlady Kibalchich, by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Serge was a Russian Bolshevik whose life and activities spanned some of the most tumultuous years of the century in Russian and European politics. He was an organizer of the Communist International, setting up the Comintern publishing house and print shop and editing Imprekorr, the Comintern press service in Berlin and Vienna. He was later expelled from the Party, imprisoned in Central Asia, and then ex- iled, first to Europe and finally to Mexico. The acquisition includes Serge’s research files and drafts of articles, largely from periods of his life spent in Marseilles and Mexico (1940-47), as well as manuscripts from some of his many books. The archive also includes unpublished drafts, photographs, clippings, and correspondence with such figures as Leon Trotsky, André Gide, George Orwell, and Dwight MacDonald.

The Rhombus Media film archive, certified as nationally significant by the Cultural Property Review Board, has been acquired by the York University Archives and Special Collections in Toronto. Rhombus Media was formed in 1979 by three York University film students and produced more than 50 critically acclaimed films. The collection comprises 40 titles, 34 hours of finished film, plus 720 hours of raw film and videotape, as well as all production materials for the recent world-renowned production Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. ■