ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• The University of Virginia’s AldermanLibrary, Charlottesville, recently acquired an original 1805 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his friend Philip Mazzei, an Italian wine merchant, requesting that he send two bottles of wine from Europe to the White House. Currently, Alderman Library owns approximately 2,500 original Jefferson letters. The Mazzei letter, the most recent edition to the collection, was purchased this summer from the Daniel F. Kelleher Co. Inc., auction house in Boston. The purchase was funded by the Monticello Memorial Foundation, which has financed the buying of original Jefferson writings for Alderman Library for the past 22 years. Currently housed in a climate-controlled vault on the second floor of Alderman Library, the letter is one sheet of paper, handwritten.

• Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania,has received from the University of Würzburg a machine-readable concordance to the critical Latin editions of the works of St. Augustine. The concordance was developed through the efforts of Professor Cornelius Mayer, O.S.A. Villanova is the only U.S. site for this resource.

Grants

• The Brandeis University Libraries. Waltham, Massachusetts, in conjunction with the Lemberg Program in International Economics and Finance, has received a $24,000 gift from the Consulate General of Japan, Boston. The gift will be used to purchase books and serials on Japanese economics, as well as fine arts, literature, and Japanese culture and history. Areas of particular interest to Brandeis’s Department of.Economics are Japanese labor markets, U.S.-Japan trade, and U.S.-Japan economic relations. These materials will be used as a foundation to promote better understanding of Japanese life and strengthen interest on campus in Japanese studies.

• The Center for Research Libraries, Chi-cago, has received a bibliographic access grant of $236,331 from the U.S. Department of Education under the Higher Education Act Title II-C Strengthening Library Resources Program. This award will enable retrospective conversion of 56,000 Roman-alphabet records for monographs in the center s card catalog. The Department of Education approved a three-year project period for the retrospective conversion project and funded a one-year period beginning October 1, 1989. The federal funds are financing all of the project costs. In the current, final phase of retrospective conversion, the center is treating 240,000 monographic records. This represents approximately 160,00 records in Roman alphabet for materials in original format, 35,000 records in cyrillic alphabet, 40,000 records for microforms, and 5,000 records with main entry, collation, etc., problems that must be solved by consulting the materials. This grant will move the center significantly forward toward a completely machine-readable catalog and will improve researchers’ online access to its infrequently-held resources.

• Emporia State University, Kansas, has recieveda $28,145 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support lectures, dramatizations, a traveling exhibition, videotapes, and ancillary literature about the myths and realities of the cattle culture in Kansas during the late 19 th century.

• The Newberry Library, Chicago, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in the amount of $20,517 to support planning for an exhibition of books, manuscripts and maps that offer a means for understanding American civilization on the eve of the voyages of Columbus.

• The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), Andover, Massachusetts, has received a grant of $250,000 from the Pew Charitable Trusts to support its newly expanded training program in preservation microfilming. NEDCC’s program will train professionals who are responsible for managing microfilming projects through intensive workshops held in NEDCC’s microfilming laboratory in Andover, and in other locations across the country. Participants will learn skills for planning microfilming projects, developing specifications, writing contracts with vendors, and obtain hands on experience in operating a camera and inspecting completed film. The purpose of NEDCC’s training program is to accelerate the national preservation effort to microfilm brittle books in the nation’s major research libraries and to bring about improvement in both the quantity and quality of the film produced.

• Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois, has received a $275,00 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a three-year plan to microfilm brittle library materials. The funds will enable the library to continue to microfilm suitable materials from the Melville J. Herskovits Library of Africana. That project was initiated by a grant from Lloyd A. Fry Foundation and continued by a Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) filming project which was funded by the NEH and the Mellon Foundation. The internationally recognized collection contains more than 161,900 volumes on every aspect of Africa. This NEH grant is part of a $2 million preservation microfilming proposal submitted to the NEHby the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The Northwestern University Library is one of nine libraries participating in the project.

• The Ohio University Libraries, Athens, have recently received approval from the Ohio University Foundation Board of Trustees on an endowment of $450,000 to support the acquisition of library materials on contemporary history. The gift was an initial distribution from the estate of Edna Parker Jacobsen, with additional funding possible. The university’s interdisciplinary Contemporary History Institute offers the only graduate program on contemporary history (the period since World War II) in the United States. The institute analyzes recent historical experience as a guide to current policy issues. Earnings from the endowment will permit the acquisition of recent research resources for Institute scholars, students, and others concerned with national and international policy study.

• The Research Libraries Group has received a $2 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the second phase of the Great Collections Microfilming Project. The grant is the largest single award ever made to RLG by NEH’s Office of Preservation in its continuing effort to save disintegrating materials in the nation’s libraries. The grant will expand the original Great Collections Microfilming Project, begun in October 1988, to support the filming of 27,000 volumes at seven RLG member libraries, to include the following institutions: Brown University, Columbia Teacher’s College, Dartmouth College, Emory University, the New York Historical Society, New York University, Northwestern University, the Universityof Florida, and the University of Iowa. It will enable these institutions to establish successful preservation microfilming operations and to increase the number of qualified managers and technicians through a focused training program.

• The University of Vermont, Burlington, has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the amount of $187,000, for lectures, panel discussions, exhibitions, a field trip, publication of a book of essays, and ancillary literature about Vermont history.

• The University of Waterloo Library, On- tario, has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant of $15,000 to purchase additional library materials in the field of family planning, sexuality, and birth control. The library materials to be acquired with this grant include a microfilm copy of the papers of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger; about fifty theses on microfiche which address historical aspects of these topics; and antiquarian and out-of-print books on family planning, birth control, and sexuality. This is one of the major subject areas for the University Library’s special collection, the Lady Aberdeen Library on the History of Women.

• The Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, has been awarded a $37,812 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the planning of an exhibition with an interpretive guide, a traveling exhibition, and a lecture series about the social and economic impact of World War II on the Commonwealth of Virginia.

News notes

• The Western New England College School of Law Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, has recently received the Law Library Publication Award for 1989 from the American Association of Law Libraries. The Law Library Publication Award honors achievement in creating in-house, user-oriented, library materials of outstanding quality and significance. Western New England College received the award for the Pathfinder series, and otherpublications. The Pathfinder series is aseries of bibliographies or “how-to” guides that highlight legal items of interest or help library patrons do legal research. Some current Pathfinder guides are: AIDS—The Legal Dimension, Major Sources in Securities Regulation and Corporate Finance, Congressional Terms and Sessions, and Massachusetts Judicial System. ■ ■