ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

• The Brown University Library, Providence, has obtained the archival records of the Gorham Division of Textron, Inc., in accordance with a “milestone agreement” reached between the two organizations. Gorham, founded in Providence by Jabez Gorham in 1831, was the predominant American manufacturer of silver in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it contains in its archives the history of an important area of American art. Measuring over 1,000 linear feet, the collection features many thousands of drawings and photographs of Gorham products. Care was taken by the company to preserve corporate, personnel, costing, sales, and advertising records, as well as blueprints, plaster casts, and copper printing plates. Textron, which acquired Gorham in 1967, is headquartered in Providence.

• George Washington University Library, Washington, D.C., has purchased 500 Yiddish books from the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Funding for the collection came through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The collection includes reference works, fiction, poetry, history, biography, ethnography, holocaust studies, the arts, and social and political theory. Also included is a Yiddish translation of the Hebrew Bible, as well as works by Sholom Aleichem and Sholom Asch. The books were acquired for use by faculty and students in the University’s undergraduate program in Judaic studies.

• The Library of Congress has been given by the National Broadcasting Company a microform copy of one million descriptive cards constituting the NBC Television Program Analysis File. The gift provides a catalog guide to NBC programming from 1939 to 1985, including 18,000 NBC programs previously given to the Library in 1986. The file contains more than 632,000 cards with detailed information on each broadcast, including air date and time, story line, and credits.

• The New York State Library, Albany, has received the papers of Rousseau Flower, an invertebrate paleontologist whose special research into Devonian and Ordovician geology and paleontology at the New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources was nationally recognized. There are 22 boxes of correspondence as well as student notebooks from his years at Cornell University.

• Pennsylvania State University’s Historical Collections and Labor Archives, University Park, has opened two major record groups within their United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Archive. The records of the USWA President’s Office contains 58 cubic feet of correspondence, speeches and negotiation, convention and election files from I.W. Abel’s tenure as President (1965-1977). Material from 1968 to 1977 is restricted. The USWA International Executive Board Proceedings contain 10 cubic feet of verbatim transcripts of meetings from 1942 to 1964. Material from 1953 to 1964 is restricted.

•The University of Alberta Library, Edmonton, has received a collection of books on UFOs and other unexplained phenomena from P.M.H. Edwards of Victoria, British Columbia. The collection consists of about 500 books and 60-80 journals (both extended runs and single issues) covering the period from 1950 to the late 1970s. Besides North American materials, there are imprints from Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, France, Switzerland, Great Britain, Germany, and Sweden. The collection will be of interest to students in the social sciences, popular culture, military history, and the history of science.

• The University of Illinois at Chicago has received the archives of the Chicago Book Clinic, an organization that promotes excellence in the craft of bookmaking and publishing. Established in 1936 by Chicago’s top designers, the Clinic sponsors an annual Midwest exhibit to honor finely produced books; more than 1,000 books have been so honored and the collection contains a copy of each.

The UIC Library also has obtained a collection related to the Chicago-based firm of Monsen Typographers, Inc., from former president Gordon Monsen. The collection contains a wide range of books, serials, reports, correspondence, type specimen books, photographs, manuals, clippings, blueprints, a Varityper, and the Monsen Drop-Out Halftone machine. From 1887 to 1977 the firm was responsible for many graphic arts firsts, including the development of the Trans-Adhesive Map Type Impressions, Kromotype color process and a halftone process for lithography.

•The University of New Brunswick Library, Fredericton, has just completed cataloging the papers of the Bailey family, which was intimately involved in the history of the province. Especially rich in the history of scientists and educators, the collection’s earliest document is a letter from Joseph Head Marshall to Edward Jenner dated January 7, 1801, describing Marshall’s introduction of vaccination to British sailors and civilians in the Mediterranean. Another highlight is the correspondence, dating from 1860 to 1900, between William Whitman Bailey in Providence, Rhode Island, and his brother Loring Woart Bailey in Fredericton, which provides a valuable perspective on the history of both regions. Also in the archive are the personal letters of Jacob Whitman Bailey (1811-1857), who lost both his wife and daughter in one of the worst shipping disasters of the century, the burning of the steamer Henry Clay on the Hudson River. A noted botanist, Jacob Bailey preserved 136 algae specimens that library indexers discovered tightly packed in a box.

• Wayne State University Libraries, Detroit, has received from the General Motors Corporation its System for Automotive Safety Information (SASI) collection. The archive consists of more than 120,000 items, including articles from industry journals, U.S. Department of Transportation reports, statistical studies on highway accidents and design performance, as well as other materials addressing highway safety and vehicular design safety issues.

Grants

•The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, has been awarded a $90,642 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the preservation of newspapers produced by the men in the Civilian Conservation Corps camps from 1934 to 1938. The grant will enable the Center to film these papers, produce service copies on microfiche, and produce a printed bibliographic guide that indexes the titles, companies, and geographic locations of the camps. There are an estimated 3,000 titles in the CCC camp papers collection. The newspapers were issued on highly acidic stock and were usually mimeographed or hectographed.

•The Cleveland State University Libraries have been awarded a $13,370 grant from the Kulas Foundation to catalog and put into OCLC the material in the Herbert Elwell Collection. The collection consists of scores, disks, tapes, letters, manuscripts, and memorabilia that was gathered nationwide from the students and friends of the noted Cleveland composer and music columnist for the Cleveland Press.

• Greenville Technical College, South Carolina, has received a $447,767 HEA Title III grant, part of which will be used for completing library automation and developing a telecommunications system for delivering instructional television and off-campus instruction.

• Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library has received a $25,000 grant from the Lucius N. Lit- tauer Foundation for the endowment of the Louise Littauer Exhibition Fund. Income from the grant will fund exhibitions from the library’s manuscript, book, and periodical collections. The grant follows a $100,000 gift in 1986 to name the Louise Littauer Exhibition Area in Schlesinger’s recently renovated building.

• Indiana University-Purdue University at ĩndi anapolis has received a grant of $12,000,000 from the Lilly Endowment to aid in the construction of a new university library. The grant will be payable once the total cost of the new building is committed from public and other private donations. The library will replace the current building, which was built nearly 20 years ago to support a fledgling IUPUI and the basic offerings of a community college. The university now enrolls more than 23,000 students in 140 programs leading to bachelor’s, master’s, and professional degrees. Construction of the new facility, which will be more than twice the size of the existing library, is expected to begin in the fall of 1989, with completion in 1991.

The Library is planned as a state-of-the-art information center and will serve as the headquarters of the Statewide Library Automation Project. It will be fully networked with IU, Purdue, and other college and university libraries throughout Indiana. Eventually it will be linked electronically with public libraries across the state.

• Iowa State University Library, Ames, has received an NHPRC grant of up to $40,354 to deacidify and encapsulate approximately 1,700 drawings and blueprints in the Warren H. Manning Landscape Architectural Collection. Manning was a student and contemporary of Frederick Law Olmsted.

• OCLC, Inc., has been awarded a three-year $240,000 grant by the Henry Luce Foundation to create, in cooperation with the National Library of China in Beijing, a computerized catalog of Chinese library materials from the Republican period—items published between the fall of the Q’ing Dynasty (1911) and the proclamation of the People’s Republic (1949). Chinese library staff will travel to OCLC for extensive computer training and will enter records from workforms created in the National Library of China by Chinese staff. At the end of the project, the National Library will receive a machine-readable tape of the completed bibliography for unrestricted domestic use.

• The Oregon State Archives, Salem, has received an NHPRC grant of $25,980 to undertake preservation microfilming and description of the pre-statehood records of Oregon government. The records cover the work of the Military Department, the Supreme Court, the Secretary of State, and county governments during the years 1837 through 1859.

• Stanford University Libraries have been awarded two important grants from the System Development Foundation of San Francisco. Both grants relate directly to the Libraries’ “Stanford and the Silicon Valley” project and to ongoing interest in strengthening collections and programs in the history of science. The first, for $30,000, will support the processing and cataloging of the archival records of the Foundation recently given to the Libraries. The second, for $100,000, will underwrite a multi-year effort to document further the areas of interest supported by the Foundation. This program comprises record surveys, publications, oral histories, research stipends, and scholarly conferences.

•The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, has received an NHPRC grant of $68,764 to evaluate the physical condition of and appraise, organize, and provide access to early television newsfilm from 1955 to 1972, from four television stations in Madison.

• Stetson University Library, Deland, Florida, has received a $95,000 grant from the Rinker Materials Company Foundation to create the Rinker Business Collection. The funds will be used to purchase business journals and periodicals, special subscription services, hardback editions, and computer catalog access to the collection.

• The University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, have been given $100,000 by head football coach Vince Dooley for an endowment fund to strengthen the library’s holdings. The fund will be used primarily to acquire new materials, including some that are rare or unique.

• The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, have received a grant of $200,000 from the university’s Men’s Intercollegiate Athletics Program to be distributed over the next three years. The gift will contribute the libraries in their 10-year strategic planning effort.

Iowa has also been awarded a grant of $140,000 from the Mellon Foundation to support a program in conservation education. William Anthony, university libraries conservator, will direct the program. The three-year grant will provide support for apprenticeship training and for a series of advanced workshops designed for experienced conservators.

• The University of Oklahoma Library, Norman, has received an NHPRC grant of $46,098 to prepare a guide to the holdings of the Western History Collections. Guide descriptions will be derived from data entered by the project into RLIN using the MARC Archival and Manuscripts Control format.

• The University of Texas’s Barker Texas History Center, Austin, has received an NHPRC grant of $33,096 to arrange, describe, preserve, and make accessible images from the Robert Runyon Photograph Collection (1912-1947). Among the subjects documented in the collection are the Mexican Revolution’s impact on the border and region, the U.S. military at Fort Brown, and the growth and development of the Rio Grande Valley.

• The University of Waterloo, Ontario, has been awarded a grant of $5,000 from the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation. The grant will be applied to the Kitchener-Waterloo Record collection of photographic negatives to defray the cost of converting those (for the period 1939-1951) produced on nitrate-based film to safety film.