ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

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News from the field

Acquisitions

•The Library of Congress’s Music Division, Washington, D.C., has acquired a major collection of nearly 400 music manuscripts and papers of American bandmaster and composer John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), the gift of Sousa’s grandsons. The materials have been on deposit in the Library for many years, and have been indexed and microfilmed. Titles in the collection include some of Sousa’s best-known compositions: Corcoran Cadets; The High School Cadets; King Cotton; The Liberty Bell; Manhattan Beach; Nobles of the Mystic Shrine; Our Flirtations; and Solid Men to the Front. Also included are the manuscripts of El Capitan and The Bride Elect, two works representing the composer’s contribution to operetta; Sheridan’s Ride; and the suites, The Last Days of Pompeii and Dwellers of the Western World. The collection also contains sketchbooks and literary items including Sousa’s autobiography and a semi- autobiographical novel.

•New York University’s Tamiment Institute Library, New York City, has acquired the archival materials of Greenwich House, an important center of social welfare and betterment of the Greenwich Village community since the early years of the century. The material includes photographs, minutes from Roard of Directors meetings, files and correspondence. Incorporated in 1901 as the Cooperative Social Settlement Society of the City of New York by Mary Kingsbury Simkovitch with Felix Adler, R. Fulton Cutting, Eugene A. Philbin, Henry C. Potter, Jacob Riis and Carl Schurz, Greenwich House was originally located on Jones Street in one of the most crowded areas of the lower west side. It played a vital role in the improvement of the neighborhood, working for better sanitation, paved streets, child labor laws, increased recreational and cultural opportunities for adults and children, slum clearance and improved housing, and a more responsive city government. Following the move in 1917 to its present location on Rarrow Street, Greenwich House established the first child care facilities for working mothers. Through its research studies of living conditions in the Village, many conducted by John Dewey’s Social Research Committee, it made contributions to social action, examining wage levels and the standard of living, old age and poverty, and housing problems of longshoremen and dock workers. Now a historic landmark, Greenwich House continues to sponsor special programs and a range of community activities.

•Rutgers University’s Art Library, New Brunswick, New Jersey, recently acquired 850 volumes on art history from art historian, author and teacher Howard Hibbard, of Columbia University. The collection consists primarily of works dealing with the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art, with some material on the Northern Renaissance. Hibbard, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, is the author of books on Bernini, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and Carlo Moderno. He is a former director of the Society of Architectural Historians and from 1974-78 was chief editor of Art Bulletin.

•Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Archives, California, has acquired the papers of Sir Karl Popper, internationally acclaimed philosopher of natural and social science. Born in Vienna in 1902, Popper is the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism, and is regarded as one of the greatest living philosophers. The collection contains extensive correspondence with philosophers, historians, physicists, biologists, mathematical logicians and classicists, including Erwin Schroedinger, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Kurt Goedel, Fritz Machlup, and Gottfried von Haberler. One of the largest files is a nearly 50-year exchange of letters between Popper and Nobel laureate F.A. von Hayek on the limits of rationality, the methodology of the social sciences and economics, and other topics. It is expected that the Popper collection will be of interest to researchers in several disciplines, especially students of British social and intellectual life investigating the flight of European intellectuals from the Nazi threat.

Grants

•The Boston Library Consortium has been awarded a grant of $99,519 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners for a collection analysis project. Machine-readable records for recent acquisitions by member libraries will be merged, sorted by subject and analyzed for overlap using the collection analysis services offered by the AMIGOS Bibliographic Council. Data from the project will be used to develop a public access tool, to plan cooperative and local collection development and management and to serve as a model for other consortia. The Boston Public Library will serve as fiscal agent for the project.

•The Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, Philadelphia, has received a $50,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation in support of the Center’s long-range planning and marketing activities and general operating expenses.

•The Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, has received a $300,000 challenge grant in the form of a permanently restricted endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant, which is to be matched 2:1 by the Society, will be used to promote access to the Society’s collections, use of the collections through research and publications activities, and fellowships.

•Moravian College and Theological Seminary, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has received a $200,000 anonymous gift and $10,000 from the Pennsylvania State Library for its retrospective conversion project.

•Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, has received a $5 million anonymous donation, $4.75 million of which will be used in support of the Deering Library, which houses the University’s fine arts and special collections. The remaining $250,000 was designated for use by the Medical School in honor of former president and chancellor, the late J. Roscoe Miller. The majority of the money given to the Deering Library will be used in support of the Library Endowment for Collection Development, with income from the endowment used to purchase new books. A preservation fund will enable the library to strengthen its program through the purchase of specialized equipment, binding and conservation supplies, and the addition of professional staff. $1 million will also be used to establish a distinguished chair of library science for the University Librarian.

•The Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, has been awarded a $169,349 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to begin the bibliographic phase of the Ohio Newspaper Project, part of the United States Newspaper Program. Begun in January, the bibliographic phase is scheduled to continue through June of 1989, and will involve the inventorying and cataloging of some 3,400 newspaper titles held by the Society.

•The University of California, Santa Barbara, has been awarded a $136,000 grant by the Ford Foundation to process the papers of director and playwright Luis Valdez and the archives of the theater he founded, El Teatro Campesino, acquired in 1986. The “theater of the farm workers,” founded in 1965 as an activist ensemble to gather support for the union-organizing effort of the United Farm Workers, is considered the largest and most influential bilingual Chicano theater in the United States. Its archives include unpublished and ongoing scripts, original artwork, photographs, video and film footage, costume renderings, historical masks, set and prop designs, posters, doctoral dissertations, books, articles, reviews and correspondence. Once processed over a three-year period, the material is expected to be of interest to researchers in labor history, political science, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and comparative ethnic studies. The archives will be housed as part of the University’s Colleccion Tloque Na- huaque, focusing on Chicano studies, and as the repository of a working dramatist and theater company will be augmented over time.

•The University of Houston Libraries, Texas, have received a $20,000 grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., to develop a Chemistry Research Information Service designed to streamline the information gathering process critical to chemistry researchers. A joint project of the Libraries and the UH Chemistry Department, the Service will enable chemists to search the chemical literature on a microcomputer and request delivery of journal articles from the library on the same microcomputer. Matching funds from the University will be used to complete the project, which will also see use as an educational tool for students in chemical literature and computers in chemistry classes.

•The University of Wisconsin’s Charles H. Mills Music Library, Madison, has been awarded a U.S. Department of Education Title II–C grant to bring a major collection of musical stage material under bibliographic control and to allow it proper archival storage. The Tams–Witmark/Wisconsin Collection, consisting of 37,000 items, represents some 1,600 opera, operetta and musical comedy titles published since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The collection comprises full scores, piano-vocal scores, orchestral parts, and choral parts, as well as extensive script material. Among the many composers represented are Offenbach, Lecocq, Johann Strauss, Arthur Sullivan, Suppé, Reginald DeKoven, and Victor Herbert. A repertory of items from the popular stage of the 1880s to the 1920s is of particular interest. Rare or early imprints from the grand opera tradition, including those of works by Mozart, Verdi, Rossini, Weber, Puccini, and Meyerbeer, are also featured. Project catalogers will be adding records of the collection to OCLC and RLIN.

•The Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, in conjunction with the other four Pacific Northwest Land Grant University Libraries, Montana State University, Oregon State University, the University of Idaho, and the University of Alaska- Fairbanks, have been awarded a three-year, $177,000 grant by the Fred Meyer Charitable Trust. The purpose of the grant is to set up a network among the five universities for the cooperative selection and deselection of science serials in an effort to augment the research potential of the area by increasing the number of journals available. Part of the money will be used for optical scanning and express mail delivery of materials. The grant was one of seventeen grants, totalling $1,610,000, awarded by the Meyer Trust for building library resources in the Pacific Northwest in fields such as business, education, music and the sciences.

News notes

•Stanford University, California, has completed its Early American Imprints: Second Series cataloging project. This collection of microcards is based on the Shaw and Shoemaker checklist of American imprints from 1801 to 1819 and contains over 50,000 items. The titles exist in a variety of formats, including broadsides and “wanted” posters, and cover a wide range of topics. The Stanford project was funded by an HE A Title II-C grant and ran for five years from October 1981 to December 1986. It succeeded in providing bibliographic description and multiple access points in full compliance with national cataloging standards. These cataloged records were keyed into the RLIN system with full MARC coding. Tapes for these records will be made available by the Research Libraries Group to OCLC.

•Texas A&M University at Galveston dedicated its new Jack Kenny Williams Library on November 1, 1986. The new building’s space is 27,000 square feet with shelving for up to 100,000 volumes and seating for 200. The library collection, which totals about 45,000 volumes, was moved to the new facility in one day by 200 faculty, staff, and student volunteers—despite rain and logistics problems. The architects for the building are the Rapp Partners of Galveston and Houston. ■ ■