ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Columbia University Libraries has been awarded $58,000 from the Department of Education to catalog the contents of approximately 50 electronic text sets of the libraries’ Electronic Text Service (ETS). ETS was established in 1987 as the first facility in an American library to be devoted exclusively to collecting and providing acccess to electronic primary-source texts and research tools in the humanities. The grant will provide national and local online bibliographic access to approximately 50 databases, research tools, and text-analysis software programs, and hundreds of analytical records for the individual texts contained in selected databases.

Iowa State University’s Parks Library hasreceived a $45,000 Title IIC grant from the Department of Education for its Special Collections. The grant will be used to preserve and catalog a collection of 25,000 business, industrial, and training films. Dating back to 1911, the collection of 16-millimeter films is the only one of its kind in the country, with titles as varied as Coping With Life and Steam for Power. All of the films were donated by the companies or government agencies that produced them, or from the American Archives of the Factual Film, a collection created by Ott Coelln, founder of Business Screen magazine in 1938.

Lenoir-Rhyne College, Warren Wilson College,and Mars Hill College, part of a consortium of seven western North Carolina colleges, will be online in 1994 as the Mountain College Library Network, Inc. The consortium has received a $300,000 grant from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation for the purchase and installation of an integrated automated system to serve all network members.

Ohio University’s Alden Library has received a $500,000 grant to establish a first-of-its-kind center for the study of Chinese emigrants worldwide, particularly Southeast Asia. Hong Kong businessman You-Bao Shao has given the grant to establish the You-bao Shao Overseas Chinese Documentation and Research Center. Alden’s Southeast Asia Collection has been working under a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to identify and acquire materials on the overseas Chinese. The Shao gift will aid this activity and serve as a foundation for an endowment goal of $2 million necessary for the identification, preservation, and cataloging of the materials.

Princeton University’s Firestone Libraryhas been awarded a $600,000 grant from the King Fahd National Library of Saudi Arabia to support the library’s pathbreaking Arabic book preservation project. The grant is part of a longterm project to microfilm and preserve Princeton’s 100,000-volume collection of Arab and Islamic materials, considered one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. The preservation project has been headed by Sorbonne-educated Hedi BenAicha, Princeton’s Arabic bibliographer.

The Research Libraries Group (RLG) hasbeen awarded $404,536 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support the fourth phase of its cooperative project to establish an international union catalog of Chinese rare books on RLIN. Contributions by the NEH to this project now total $683,000. By the end of phase four in 1995, 13 North American libraries with Chinese rare book holdings will have contributed records to RLIN, in addition to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, and Liaoning Provincial Library.

The University of Manitoba Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections received an $18,000 grant from the university’s Research and Development Fund to aid in development of the Archives of Agricultural Experience. The grant recognizes the importance of agriculture to the history of Manitoba and will support the libraries’ archives in its strategy of identifying and acquiring records of privately held farms and agri-businesses in the Red River Valley. These agricultural records provide a glimpse into the personal triumphs and tragedies that characterized life on the farm and influenced prairie economics.

The University of Michigan’s School of Information and Library Studies will receive four annual grants of $25,000 from University Microfilms International (UMI) for the creation of the UMI Information Management Fellowship. UMI is a division of Chicago-based Bell & Howell. The endowment edges the school closer to its capital campaign goal of $1 million over the next five years.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) atChapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science has received an initial endowment of $30,000 from Eleanor and Frederick Kilgour for the establishment of the Eleanor and Frederick Kilgour Faculty Research Fund. The fund will support faculty needs through acquisition of innovative teaching materials and equipment, promotion of research in new fields, development of new courses, and provision of funding for professional travel. Fred Kilgour is the founder of OCLC, Inc., and has been a distinguished research professor at UNC since 1990. The gift will count toward the unversity’s $320 million Bicentennial Campaign for Carolina, of which $281 million has been given or pledged.