ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

The Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village,Dearborn, Michigan, has received a $75,000 general operating support grant from the Skillman Foundation, a private grant-making organization founded by Rose P. Skillman in 1960. The grant supports the museum’s formal and experiential learning programs, which include an award-winning partnership with Detroit’s Woodward Elementary School (in cooperation with the University of Michigan-Dearbom) and mentorships for at-risk students in western Wayne County.

Memorial University of Newfoundland,Canada, has received grants totalling $34,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in support of its maritime history and Irish studies collections. The funds will be used to purchase 19th-century Irish newspapers and manuscript census material for parts of New England.

Northwestern University Library, Evanston,Illinois, has received grants totaling over $6,000 from the Illinois Cooperative Collection Management Coordinating Committee to fund purchases of materials within Illinois in cooperation with eight other Illinois university libraries. Acquisitions will include expensive polymer titles not held by Illinois lending libraries, preservation photocopies of important 19th- and early 20th-century mathematics books, a 35-reel microfilm set entitled “American Indian Correspondence: The Presbyterian Historical Society Collection of Missionaries’ Letter, 1833–1893 “ The grant will also support production of a preservation microfilm of the Illinois Brief,a newspaper published by the Illinois Chapter of the ACLU.

Norwich University received a $28,000grant from Digital Equipment Corporation to acquire a computer system for the new Kreitzberg Library. The system will significantly improve the services to the library’s users and will support the growing needs for computing in library research and administration. Norwich is a charter member of the Vermont Automated Library Network, which connects the university with Middle-bury College, the University of Vermont, the four Vermont State colleges, and the Vermont State Library system.

The Center for ElectronicTexts in the Humanities, headquartered at the Alexander Library at Rutgers University, New Jersey, has received a $300,000, three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to identify, disseminate, and preserve texts in electronic, or computer-readable, form. The funding will allow the phased development of a consortium of member institutions that will mark the beginning of a global electronic library. The center, a joint project of Rutgers and Princeton universities, was established in 1991 to provide a national focus for the creation and use of electronic texts in the humanities.

The University of Alberta, Edmonton, hasreceived three grants for specialized collections from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The awards include $20,000 for acquisitions in native studies, $8,000 for Chinese studies, and $6,400 for Japanese studies.

The University of Missouri-Columbia hasreceived a new $97,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Strengthening Library Resources Program of the Higher Education Act to continue cataloging a special collection of rare books about the social, religious, economic, and political history of 19th-century Great Britain. About one-fourth of the collection relates to critical and economic issues and conditions in Ireland. About 75 percent of the materials are not listed in the catalogs of any other American libraries. The project was inititated with a $101,975 grant last fall.

The School of Information and LibraryScience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been awarded a total of $168,400 for student fellowships by the Department of Education under the Library Career Training Program. The awards will support a year of full-time study for seven doctoral students and six master’s degree students. Recruiting for the master’s fellowships will emphasize three specialty areas—cataloging, systems analysis, and children’s services. The professional school currently offers two master’s degrees, a post-master’s certificate of advanced study, and a doctoral degree in information and library science.

The University of West Florida Library,Pensacola, has received a $9,976 grant from the Florida State Historical Records Advisory Board to compile and publish a new comprehensive guide to Special Collections and West Florida Archives.

Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, Richmond, have been awarded a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to process the manuscript collection of a prominent Virginia suffragist. The $30,720 grant will fund a full-time, one-year position to process the Adele Goodman Clark papers. Items in need of preservation treatment will be identified and a guide to the collection will be produced.

The Wayne State University Library System, Detroit, has been awarded a $90,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to add records of manuscript collections and oral history holdings of the Walter P. Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs into the OCLC database. The archives contain one of the most important archival collections in the United States on the history of the North American labor movement. The Reuther Archives and Wayne State University Library System are partners in this venture and will share staffing and expertise to complete the project.