ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

The University of South Carolina’s (USC)Film Library has received a film preservation grant of $251,268 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant will be used to preserve 200,000 feet of early sound Movietone Newsfilm from nitrocellulose film to 35mm safety film. The project, which is part of the NEH “History of Talking Pictures,” will preserve approximately 225 edited newsreel stories and associated outtakes, together with supplemental paper documents from the first two years of sound- on-film newsreel production. In addition to the NEH funds, the film library will contribute $101,269 in salaries, supplies, and indirect costs, and USC’s office of research will provide an additional $150,000.

Johns Hopkins University has received agrant of $150,500 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve a collection of more than 300 educational television shows produced by Johns Hopkins between 1948 and I960. The collection includes four series: The Johns Hopkins Science Review, Tomorrow, Tomorrow’s Careers, and johns Hopkins File 7. All were recorded on kinescopes, 16 mm films that recorded the show, as it was broadcast, directly from a cathode-ray monitor. Distinguished scientists featured in the films include George Gamow, a leading advocate of the big-bang theory of the universe; John Mauchly, one of the principal inventors of ENIAC, the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer; and renowned rocket and missile engineer Wernher Von Braun. Other noteworthy guests were folk singer Mike Seeger and future actor John Astin, then a student in the Johns Hopkins class of 1952 and now a visiting faculty member at johns Hopkins.

The University of Pittsburgh School ofInformation Sciences (SIS) has received a $ 100,000 grant equally funded by the Pittsburgh Foundation and Buhl Foundation to develop the Center for Advancement of Libraries for Learning (CALL) under the direction of SIS Dean Ronald Larsen. CALL is an education and information laboratory that will link with libraries and other educational institutions in the Pittsburgh region, across Pennsylvania, and beyond.

California State University-Northridgehas received a $21,500 grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation to preserve and make accessible a portion of the historical records from the United Way of Los Angeles Collection. The United Way Collection documents the period from 1920 to 1962 and details the rich history of charitable giving and shifting social priorities in Los Angeles during this time. The funds will enable the library to begin preservation work, write a descriptive finding guide, and create catalog records and Web links for the collection. Initial processing will focus on post-World War II documents.

The Simmons College Graduate Schoolof Library and Information Science (GSLIS) in Boston, along with its western Massachusetts location on the Mt. Holyoke College campus, has received $66,240 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will aid four fulltime students committed to earning master’s degrees in library science and pursuing careers in public librarianship. The scholarships will be available in fall 2003 and may be awarded through spring 2005.

Acquisitions

The Pauline Kael Collection and the Barbara Mettler dance archive have been acquired by the Hampshire College Library. The Kael Collection is the working library of longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael (1919- 2001). Kael was noted for her provocative, passionate, and tough-minded criticism; her library includes books that range from the theoretical, historical, and social issues to explanations of technical aspects of mov- ies to celebrity gossip. The collection of more than 3,000 books, film scripts, and academic and popular journals includes some titles inscribed as gifts to Kael by their authors or their subjects, including D. W. Griffith. The collection is currently being processed and will be available for public browsing in the fall. The Barbara Mettler dance archive is an extensive col- lection documenting her career of more than 60 years in creative dance. Mettler’s hallmark was creative improvisation, and her conviction that all people could par- ticipate in this creative act led her to work primarily with laypeople rather than professional dancers. She wrote extensively and produced a number of films and videos that document her teaching. The collection includes films and videotapes, correspondence and other paper records, scrapbooks, and photographs. Mettler died in March 2002, and the collection was a bequest from her estate.

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St, Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e- mail: agalloway@ala.org.

A collection of historic manuscripts chroniicling the lives of one of the families that founded Knox College and Galesburg, Illinois, in the 1830s has been acquired by Knox College. The collection of more than 3,000 letters and other documents—the family papers of Jerusha and Eli Farnham—was purchased from Clare Van Norman Jr., a Galesburg native who operates a rare book dealership in New York state. Van Norman inherited the collection from his father, Clare Van Norman, a 1926 Knox graduate and longtime book collector in Galesburg. “My guess is that my father acquired the documents from the estate of Martha Farnham Webster,” possibly in the 1940s, Van Norman said. Webster, who died in 1933, was the daughter of Eli Farnham and his wife Jerusha, who were among the founding party that followed George Washington Gale to Illinois from upstate New York in 1836. The collection includes documents, letters, calling cards, and other items from the 1800s through the 1920s.

The archive of photojoumalist Eve Arnoldhas been acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. With little formal training, Arnold embarked on a career in photography that took her to China, the USSR, South Africa, and the Middle East, as well as the heartland of America. She documented the lives of ordinary people around the world, but also photographed celebrities from Marilyn Monroe to Margaret Thatcher and from Malcolm X to Mikhail Baryshnikov. The acquisition of the first of two parts of Arnold’s archive includes correspondence with professional and personal friends, diaries, notes, manuscripts, posters from exhibitions, television films about her and her work, and several hundred vintage photographs.

Rare book dealer Clare Van Norman and Knox College Librarian Jeffrey Douglas inspect materials in the Farnham Papers collection.

Noted scholar Harold Bloom has pledgedhis entire literary collection to Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. The donation consists of his lifelong accumulation of books that encompass the entire range of British and American poetry, criticism and literary history, Western religious tradition, and world literature, many containing Bloom’s marginalia. Also included are his personal papers and archives, notebooks, manuscripts, and letters. The letters are from poets, critics, and novelists, with large numbers from Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Burke, A. R. Ammons, and Jay Wright. English Professor Emeritus John Reiss, who retired last May after teaching at Saint Michael’s for 34 years, engaged in an intellectual dialogue with Bloom for almost three decades. Saint Michael’s has received a commitment of $5 million from an anonymous donor, a graduate of the college, to fund construction of a new library with special collection space for the Harold Bloom Collection. ■