COLLEGE & RESEARCH LIBRARIES NEWS

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

•CBN University,Virginia Beach, has acquired the hymnology collection of Keith C. Clark. The materials cover a variety of subjects in a wide range of formats, including hymnals, psalters, oblong tune-books, as well as books on hymnody, church music, composers, early sermons on church music, and journals. An overview of the collection may be gained through examination of Clark’s Selective Bibliography for the Study of Hymns (1980).

•The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, have received a collection of correspondence, manuscripts, and other materials from the estate of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), author of The Man with the Golden Arm. This acquisition, together with a large body of Algren manuscripts obtained directly from the author in the 1960s, brings together a nearly comprehensive archive for the study of his work. A major part of the correspondence is a file of about 340 letters from Simone de Beauvoir written from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. There is also a joint diary of their much publicized Mexican trip in 1948. Also included are multiple states of Algren’s last unpublished novel, The Devils Stocking, a fictionalized account of the career of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, leading contender for the middleweight boxing crown who was convicted of triple murder in a very controversial trial during the late 1960s.

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection has received and prepared for research use the papers of Walker Percy, novelist, essayist, and North Carolina alumnus. The collection consists primarily of manuscripts from work on his published novels and on a few of his essays. For each novel there are notes, partial or preliminary drafts, and as many as five complete drafts.

•The University of Utah’s Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, has received the papers of prominent Utah historian Fawn M. Brodie. Brodie died in 1981, shortly after completing her biography, Richard M. Nixon: The Child and the Man. Her children recently gave the library drafts and manuscripts from that book and from her biography of Thomas Jefferson. Also donated were taped interviews with Richard Nixon as well as notes, newspaper clipppings, reviews, articles, and approximately 400 books used to supplement both her research on Nixon and Jefferson and her biography of Sir Richard Burton.

Utah’s Special Collections Department has also acquired the correspondence and manuscripts of Sonia Johnson, an excommunicated Mormon feminist. Johnson recently donated the manuscript from her autobiography, From Housewife to Heretic, along with newspaper clippings, speeches, letters from supporters, and correspondence with her family that predates her Equal Rights Amendment involvement. Part of the collection is closed to the public until Johnson releases it,

GRANTS

•The Association of Research Libraries’ Office of Management Studies has received a grant of $250,000 from the General Electric Foundation for a “Public Services in Research Libraries Project.” Over a two-year period OMS will develop a series of aids that libraries can use to analyze, improve, and adapt their public services programs to changing economic, technological, and user needs. The results of the project will provide an assisted selfstudy manual and process for evaluating and improving public services operations, a series of datagathering and analysis instruments and forms that can be used to analyze public services activities, and published reports on the sponsored research projects. OMS hopes to have all the materials and the self-study ready for use by late 1984.

•Drexel University’sSchool of Library and Information Science has been awarded a contract of $140,000 to evaluate the National Library of Medicine’s program in the medical behavioral sciences. The research team will focus on a comparative evaluation of the efficiency of NLM’s online bibliographic search services.

• The Harvard University Library’s Judaica Department has received a grant of $50,000 from the S.H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation of New York to help develop its Jewish children’s literature collection. This grant will support the library’s long-range program to encourage research in literature for and about Jewish children.

Harvard’s Fine Arts Library was granted $13,000 from the Commemorative Association for the World Japan Exposition (1970) to add over 100 volumes on Far Eastern art to its Rubel Asiatic Research Collection. Among the works purchased with the aid of the fund are a five-volume study of the paintings of the Rimpa school, a thirteenvolume illustrated compendium of registered Japanese national treasures, several sets of books on the history of Japanese architecture, and sets dealing with Japanese textiles and papermaking.

•The Research Libraries Group, Stanford, California, has received a grant of $143,354 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the development of an RLG automated union list of microform master negatives. Following retrospective conversion guidelines, ten RLG members will enter records for their microform master negatives collections into the RLIN database. The New York Public Library is also entering records for its retrospective collection of master negatives into RLIN as part of a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The RLG project will help guard against expensive duplicate filming among members and will lay the groundwork for a cooperative preservation microfilming program now in the planning stages.

NEWS NOTES

•The Library of Congress and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have completed the Library’s first large-scale mass deacidification experiment. The experiment was designed to test whether as many as 5,000 books could be treated successfully at one time. Using a large NASA vacuum chamber originally designed to test satellites for outer space, LC staff used a patented process developed by the Library’s preservation scientists. The week-long process involved the use of a chemical vapor, diethyl zinc (DEZ), to permeate the books and neutralize harmful acids destructive to paper, at the same time leaving an alkaline reserve to combat the return of an acid condition. Analysis of the books used in the test will now begin and complete results are expected in early 1983.

•The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, has joined the Research Libraries Group as the thirteenth special member of RLG’s Art and Architecture Program. The Institute’s library is particularly strong in European and American art from the Renaissance to the present.

•The University of Chicago began construction of the new John Crerar Library building on October 4. The university’s scientific, medical, and technical collections will be merged with the Crerar collections in science and technology. From the outset of discussions about the merger, it is understood that Chicago’s mathemetics collection will remain in a separate facility but will also be available to users of the Crerar Library, which has always been accessible to the public. The Crerar Library is leasing space from the Illinois Institute of Technology until the autumn of 1984, when the building is scheduled for completion. ■ ■