ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University, Atlanta, has acquired Professor Richard Ellmann’s personal collection of the writings of W. B. Yeats. Ellmann is Goldsmiths professor of English Literature, New College, Oxford University. The collection includes first editions of Yeats’ works, rare copies of periodicals edited by Yeats, books for which he wrote prefaces and introductions, and publications in which his earliest poems were printed.

• The William S. Middleton Health Sciences Library, University of Wisconsin, has purchased a collection of 380 titles in the history of immunology from Dr. Julius M. Cruse, Jr. Since the purchase, Cruse has given the library about 500 additional titles.

• The Manuscript Collection of the John Hay Library of Brown University has acquired since July 1, 1977: the George Corliss, 1817-88, Papers (ca. 700 items); the Solomon Drowne, 1753-1834, Family Papers (a 3,000-item addition to an existing collection); the Larry Eigner, 1927- (a 150-item addition to an existing collection); the Harvey O’Connor Papers, ca. 1960-70 (5 linear feet); the Clark Ashton Smith, 1893-1961, Papers (9,000 items); and the John B. Watson Papers, 1905-46 (ca. 30 linear feet).

The Library has now processed and made available: the Eli H. Canfield Papers, 1844-1898 (1,100 items); the Samuel Sullivan Cox Papers, 1852-1902 (950 items, reprocessed); the (Usher) Parsons Family Papers, 1611–c. 1900 (950 items); the Charles Philbrick, II, Papers, 1945-1972 (1800 items); the Eli Thayer Papers, 1843-1903 (1,500 items: reprocessed); the Clark Ashton Smith Papers, 1893-1961 (9,000 items); the Oscar Wegelin Papers, 1899-1966 (500 items); and the John B. Wheelwright Papers, 1910-1940 (15,000 items).

GRANTS

Editors Note: Annette Fern assisted in the preparation of this article.

• The United States Office of Education has awarded grants totaling $5.8 million to twenty- five university and research libraries for 1979-80. The grants were awarded under the Title II-C program of the Higher Education Act for strengthening library resources. Fifteen of the twenty-five awards were new this year.

The largest single category of grants was for special collections. Nine libraries received awards totaling nearly $2 million for programs to preserve, catalog, and provide access to special collections. The University of Southern California, Los Angeles, was awarded $200,000 for the preparation of an index to the Universal Pictures Collection; the Henry E. Huntington Lirrary and Art Gallery in San Marino, California, received a grant of $225,000 for preservation and conservation; Yale University will use $160,000 to preserve rare manuscripts in history, political science, and related fields and to prepare and disseminate subject guides; the University of Kansas, Lawrence, was awarded $115,000 to prepare a catalog of 14,000 rare titles in the history of economics; Harvard University has a grant of $300,000 to make master negatives and positives of rare or fragile research materials; the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, together with the New York City Botanical Garden Library, will receive $200,000 to recatalog and reclassify their unique botanical/horticultural collections; Columria University was awarded $250,000 for the preservation and bibliographic control of rare books; the New York Purlic Lirrary has $300,000 to preserve microrecordings, documentaries, pamphlets, and unique items and to make them more accessible; and the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, will use its grant of $242,165 to strengthen and make more readily available its collections in the sciences.

Four awards totaling more than $1.5 million went to university libraries for improving access to serials and government documents. The University of California, Berkeley, jointly with the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University, will receive $750,000 to enable the three libraries to convert serial titles to machine-readable form and improve resource- sharing activities; Indiana University, Bloomington, was awarded $200,000 to provide access to its serial collections; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, jointly with Michigan State and Wayne State universities, will use $350,000 to make the three institutions’ serial bibliographic records more widely available; and Colorado State University, Fort Collins, has a grant of $215,000 to bring 10,000 U.S. government documents under bibliographic control.

Five grants went to libraries to assist in the development of area studies programs: the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, received $150,000 to strengthen its collection of materials dealing with the polar regions; the University of Chicago was awarded $68,749 to support and prepare a catalog of its South Asian collection; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, received $250,000 to strengthen the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, will use $194,897 to develop Asian resources, including the beginning of exchange arrangements with China; and the University of Texas at Austin will get $150,000 to strengthen its Latin American collection and develop cataloging records.

Grants for the development and expansion of networks at both the local and national level went to the New York State Education Department in Albany, which received $250,000 to incorporate the monographic holdings of the state network into a national data base; to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which will use $220,500 to improve mutual access to its own collections and to those of North Carolina State University and Duke University through the planning of a local bibliographic network; and to the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, which, jointly with Vanderrilt University, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Alabama, received $300,000 to extend regional and national data bases for rare research materials and to increase the availability of the materials at participating libraries.

The University of Illinois at Urbana will receive $125,000 to acquire mathematics and geology publications, strengthen its Slavic reference service, and add to the Cavagna collection of Italian research materials. Rutgers University will use $200,000 for the Ginsburg collection of Soviet legal materials, for the conversion of alcohol literature to machine-readable form, and for making accessible 15 million records of the American imprint file. Princeton University received $250,000 to index and catalog unique collections and to microfilm Arabic manuscripts, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the recipient of a $182,000 grant to strengthen holdings and make them more widely available.

• The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, has raised more than the $855,000 needed to match a May 1977 National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant of $285,000. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the George I. Alden Trust, the Fred Harris Daniels Foundation, Inc., the George F. and Sybil H. Fuller Foundation, the Stoddard Charitable Trust, and the Surdna Foundation, Inc., contributed gifts of more than $50,000 each to help meet the challenge grant goal. The Surdna Foundation has also recently contributed $35,000 to the Manuscript Endowment Fund of the society.

• Radcliffe College has received an additional grant of $33,850 from the Rockefeller Foundation to expand the work of the Black Women Oral History Project. The project was originally funded in 1976 with a grant of $98,700 from the foundation. Sponsored by the Schlesinger Library, the project has already taped interviews with fifty-nine American black women, seventy years of age or older—autobiographical interviews that will provide documentation for historians and social scientists studying the contributions of black women in American society.

Copies of the transcripts are being deposited in oral history collections at Atlanta University, Columbia University, Fisk University, Howard University, Jackson State University, the New York Public Library, Tuskegee Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley. The Schlesinger Library will house the original tapes, transcripts, and supplementary material.

• The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has received an award of $83,000 from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to begin the conversion of acquisitions data into a form that can be processed by computers.

• The library at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has received a grant of $26,642 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the augmentation and organization of a contemporary poetry collection. The grant will be used to acquire copies of all commercially produced audio tapes and videotapes of poetry readings available in the United States. These tapes will be cataloged and entered into the OCLC national bibliographic data base.

• The Cleveland Museum of Art has received a $5,000 grant from the Japan Foundation to strengthen its library resources on Japanese art. The museum library currently contains 4,000 volumes on Japanese art in both Japanese and English and subscribes to about twenty-five periodicals on Japanese art.

• Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, has been awarded a challenge grant of $300,000 from the Charles A. Dana Foundation to help defray the cost of constructing a new $ 13-million central research library. To qualify for the full amount from the Connecticut-based foundation, the university must secure an additional $900,000 by next April 30. The college has also received a grant of $10,000 from the George I. Alden Trust of Worcester, Massachusetts, for the new library.

MEETINGS

Octorer 19: PALINET and the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Association of College and Research Lirraries will hold a joint meeting on trends in national bibliographic network services from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. in Drexel University’s Matheson Hall, Patten Auditorium. Speakers will be: Sue Martin, director, Johns Hopkins University Library; Philipp Heer, assistant head, User Service Division, OCLC, Inc.; and Susan Kallenbach, head, Cataloging Department, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

The registration fee is $3.00, and a parking permit for the Drexel University garage is an additional $1.30. Checks should be made payable to Delaware Valley Chapter, ACRL and mailed to: Larry Taylor, Drexel University Libraries, 32d and Chestnut Sts., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Octorer 29: The ACRL New England Chapter’s Fall Conference will be held at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The conference title is “AACR 2: Everybody’s Problem. The Impact of the Revised Cataloging Rules on Academic Library Operations.” Program participants will include Linda Arret of the Library of Congress; James Thompson, Johns Hopkins University; David Ferriero, MIT; Barbara Gates, Brown University; and a NELINET Member Services Librarian. Contact: Fay Zipkowitz, Worcester Area Cooperating Libraries, Worcester State College, Worcester, MA 01602; (617) 754-3964.

Octorer 29-31: Approval Plans/Collection Development, the Fourth International Conference, cosponsored by ACRL/ALA, will be held in the Pfister Hotel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conference will present refereed papers written by distinguished collection development librarians. Exhibits and consultations will be offered by major domestic and foreign dealers. Contact: Peter Spyers-Duran, California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840; (213) 498- 4047.

Novemrer 5-6: The Rhode Island Lirrary Association will hold its Annual Conference at the Sheraton-Islander, Newport, Rhode Island. Contact: Sam Streit, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.

Novemrer 7-9: The ONLINE ’79 conference will be held at the Atlanta Hilton, Atlanta, Georgia. The program will include presentations on on-line services, bibliographic data base usage, nonbibliographic data base usage, data base preparation, search proficiency, on-line management, on-line careers, and new technologies and trends. To obtain the advance program, write: ONLINE ’79, 11 Tannery Lane, Weston, CT 06883. ■■