ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• One of the world’s largest Methodist research collections, housed in the Drew University Library, has received a major addition in the form of fifty-seven hymnbooks, including a rare tune book published by John Wesley.

The gift of Charles M. Hogate, Jr., of Upper Montclair—a Drew alumnus who directs economic planning for S. B. Penick & Co. of Lyndhurst—the collection was assembled by his father, a pastor in the Southern New Jersey Conference of the United Methodist Church for thirty-six years, including twenty-one years with the congregation in Manasquan.

Kenneth E. Rowe, Drew’s Methodist librarian and editor of the international Methodist Union Catalog‚ describes the Hogate collection as “ranging from two rare Wesley hymnals, including the tune book, through several camp meeting and antebellum revival hymnbooks and a rare little Civil War soldier’s hymnbook, down to 20th century revisions.”

The Rev. Charles M. Hogate, Sr., who died in 1950, was a lover of hymn music. A native of Camden, he was crippled from youth by infantile paralysis; nevertheless he earned a law degree from Temple University and remained physically active through his life, frequently refereeing high school athletic contests.

• The arrival of the first microfilm of the Spanish colonial Louisiana documents, called the Papeles de Cuba, is announced by Bobs M. Tusa, assistant director of Loyola University’s Spanish Documents Project.

The project’s current phase of microfilming manuscripts concerning Spanish colonial Louisiana and west Florida, located in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, is under the direction of the Rev. Charles E. O’Neill, S.J., former professor of history at Loyola and presently director of the Jesuit History Institute in Rome.

The project’s efforts are being funded by a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Also serving as consultant to the microfilming project is Paul Hoffinan, professor of history at Louisiana State University, where a second set of the microfilm will be housed.

The recently arrived microfilm covers legajos (bundles of manuscripts) numbered 488-560, which consist of economic reports, public acts, and books of accounts written during the Spanish rule of Louisiana and covering the period 1762 to 1819. At the end of the three-year project, some 500,000 pages in 500 legajos will have been placed in order, enumerated, and microfilmed.

The Papeles de Cuba, so named because the documents were stored in Havana from 1810 to 1888 before being transferred permanently to Spain, include reports to the Spanish crown from governors and captains-general, correspondence between diplomats, governmental reports, and accumulations of data. They cover a geographical area that extends from west Florida to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico throughout the Mississippi Valley.

The period of time covered by the Papeles de Cuba, 1762-1827, includes the exciting three weeks during November and December of 1803, when Spain transferred its authority over Louisiana to France’s Napoleon, who twenty days later sold the Louisiana Territory to President Thomas Jefferson.

The microfilmed Papeles de Cuba will be housed at the Loyola University Library, in the Spanish Documents Project’s special collection, which already contains the previously microfilmed 140,000 pages of Santo Domingo Papers—Spanish colonial Louisiana manuscripts from 1762 to 1810—in addition to French colonial Louisiana documents. These archival materials may be consulted weekdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The location of these microfilm copies in New Orleans will facilitate enormously the research of those interested in the history of Spanish Louisiana and her relations with other countries, including the young United States.

• The Wichita State University Library Associates have presented the Department of Special Collections of the university library with a collection of rare books and maps related to the early history of Kansas. The latest in a series of such gifts from the Library Associates, the collection includes material on the exploration and organization of the Kansas Territory, Kansas railroads, the Cherokee Neutral Lands, Osage Indian troubles in Barber County, and the slave vs. free state controversy.

Three of the titles are particularly scarce. The Pro-Slavery Party of the Kansas Territory’s appeal and defense, To the Citizens of the United States and of the Territory of Kansas. … (Leavenworth: Kansas Herald print, 1855), which was issued following the “Law and Order” convention of 1855 and openly calls for the establishment of slavery in that territory, is one of only three known copies (Check List of Kansas Imprints 1854-1876, item 68): Equally rare is the Circular … and Estimates for the Extension of Surveys. …. (Leavenworth: Conservative print, 1861) written by Mark Delahay, the surveyor general for Kansas and Nebraska, in which he argues that more Kansas land must be wrested from Indian control and surveyed in order to facilitate the expected influx of white settlers (Check List, item 309). Howes’ U.S.lana (S427) also locates only three copies of R. M. Shoemaker’s Reports of Preliminary Surveys for the Union Pacific Railway from Fort Riley to Denver City. … (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1866). Two interesting and important maps accompany the Reports.

• San Diego State University Library acquired the personal library of deceased Los Angeles bibliophile and recluse, Max Amelang. A German immigrant, Amelang in a lifetime of collecting gathered more than 12,000 volumes and 2,000 ephemera items on all subjects, but with strong emphasis on German books, especially illustrated books.

This, the largest single collection of books the library has ever acquired, contains, besides German-language books, many in English, French, and other languages. There are books on German and English literature, history, military history, voyages and travel, costumes, customs and mores, erotica, art, art history, architecture, genealogy, heraldry, history of science, natural science, music, religion, philosophy, children’s literature, and other subjects.

Perhaps as many as 3,000 volumes in the Amelang Collection have been published within the last thirty years. There are many new American, British, and German books on such diverse subjects as railroads, California, World War II, the Korean War, postwar novels, the American presidency, the USSR, politics and government, crime and punishment, the Pennsylvania Dutch, secret services, economics, international affairs, social developments, natural science, and the environment.

Overall collection contains more than 100 sixteenth-century imprints, perhaps 400 seventeenth-century works, 2,000 eighteenth-century books, about 3,500 nineteenth- and about 6,000 twentieth-century books.

• The Wayne State University Libraries have received, through the generosity of his family, the private library of the late B. B. Ashcom, who, until his retirement a few years ago, had been a professor of the university’s Spanish Department.

Ashcom’s special field of interest was the Golden Age, and his library is that of a productive scholar in the literature, language, and culture of that important era. The collection is distinguished by a significant number of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century imprints in the broad area of his scholarly interests.

During his long tenure at Wayne, Ashcom had a close and continuing interest in developing the library’s collection while he augmented his own, so the books presented now by his family form a natural complement to those already part of the library.

Ashcom had a particular interest in the Spanish Comedia and especially in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reprint publication in the form known as sueltas. In 1965 he compiled and Wayne State University Libraries published A Descriptive Catalogue of the Spanish Comedias Sueltas in the Wayne State University Library and the Private Library of Professor B. B. Ashcom. Of the 805 entries in this catalog, more than 30 percent were owned by the compiler. These are included in the gift and will be integrated into the library’s own collection, so that all the titles recorded in the bibliography will at last stand together in fulfillment of Ashcom’s intention as expressed in the preface to his Catalogue.

GRANTS

• During the ALA 102d annual meeting, in Chicago, the first meeting of the project GAASP (Getting and Abetting Small Press) met, under the auspices of the USOE Library Research and Demonstration Program. The USOE project officer for this grant, #G007801814, is Henry Drennan. Co-principal investigators for the grant are Jackie Eubanks (assistant professor, Brooklyn College Library) and Elliott Shore (Temple University Library); the grant is being administered through Temple University (Philadelphia), and Shore is also serving as project director there and contact person at the Contemporary Culture Collection, Temple University Library, Philadelphia, PA 19122 (Telephone: [215] 787-8667). This project is an outgrowth of work of the ALA/SRRT Task Force on Alternatives in Print (est. 1969) and of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, est. 1968). Continuing support for the work has been offered by Professor Mimi Penchansky (Queens College Library, for the Task Force on Alternatives in Print) and by Richard Morris, COSMEP Coordinator since its inception.

The project, GAASP, is to introduce the publications of small presses to college libraries by experimenting and developing “nontraditional acquisition models” for four-year colleges selected especially for this purpose. The project, funded to the tune of $58,387, is also to benefit both libraries and the participating independent presses.

In the planning are poetry readings, freebies for cooperating libraries, and personal visits from among the twelve hundred or more members of COSMEP; additionally, an important element will be coordination and cataloging of materials added to the OCLC system with some alternative processing through Temple University. These services will be arranged through project staff (two to three), through the co-principal investigators, or from among the highly qualified panel consulting with the project. The consultants meeting in Chicago June 24-25 included Sanford Berman (Hennepin County Library, Minnesota), James Danky (State Historical Society of Wisconsin), Judy Hogan (poet, and editor of Carolina Wren Press, Carrboro, North Carolina), Jawanza Kunjufu (Third World Press, Chicago), Noel Peattie (Shields Library, Univ. of California- Davis, editor of SIPAPU/KONOCTI BOOKS and president of Western Independent Publishers), Louis Reyes Rivera (Shamal Books, Inc., New York City, and coordinator, 1978 New York Book Fair) and Patricia Glass Schuman (president, Neal-Schuman Publishers).

• The Medical Center Library, University of South Florida Medical Center, has been awarded a three-year grant by the National Library of Medicine (No. 1 G08 LM03041-01) in the amount of $118,000 for the Tampa Bay Medical Library Network development. The network has been organized for three years but under grant provisions will now have a central office in the Medical Center Library staffed by two persons—a librarian and a support person. Some of the services offered will be document delivery, reference, continuing education, on-site supervision in basic unit libraries as needed. Cataloging and preparation of catalog cards will be provided beginning in the second grant year. Thirteen institutions are in the network, including two community college libraries and a mental health institute. The other members are hospitals. Fred D. Bryant, director, Medical Center Library, is the principal investigator.

• The P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, a special collection of the University of Florida Library, has received a $127,011 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a calendar of its Second Florida Spanish Period document holdings. The calendar, begun in 1974 with funds from several private Florida foundations and scheduled for completion in 1980, initiates the first phase of a project through which the U.S. Borderlands holdings of this special collection will be made accessible to scholars. Three major collections, containing nearly 700,000 pages in microfilm or photostatic copies, will be calendared: The East Florida Papers, the John B. Stetson Collection, and the Papeles de Cuba collection. The documents record the social, cultural, political, economic, military, and religious involvement of Spain in the Florida Borderlands primarily during the years 1783- 1824.

The P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History staff has systematically collected copies of Florida Borderlands material for the past thirty years. At present, its U.S. Borderlands holdings are the largest for any specific area in the U.S., and the calendar’s availability should stimulate a reappraisal of scholarship already accomplished in the field.