ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

•The LaGuardia Archives at the LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York has acquired the records of the New York City Housing Authority for the years 1934-1974. The Authority is the largest municipal housing authority in the nation. The records include minutes, reports, chairman’s files, secretary’s files, statistical tenant data, project files, clippings and photographs.

•The Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge, have acquired the papers of the Romanian emigre poet Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu, now on the faculty of the university’s English Department, is a poet, editor, translator, and commentator for National Public Radio. The collection includes correspondence, rough drafts, and proofs of literary works, and documentation concerning emigre life, including correspondence with Romanian dissidents residing in Paris during the 1960s and 1970s. Codrescu was born in Romania in 1946 and emigrated to the United States in 1966. He gained U.S. citizenship in 1981. Codrescu has published six volumes of poetry and is the founder and editor of the review journal Exquisite Corpse.

•Millersville University of Pennsylvania’s Ganser Library has acquired the Carl Van Vechten Memorial Collection of Afro-American Arts and Letters from Bruce Kellner, a Van Vechten scholar and member of the university’s English faculty. The collection consists of first editions of books, rare pamphlets, letters, documentary photographs and illustrations of the Harlem Renaissance, in addition to numerous original Van Vechten photographs, including postcard photos. Authors represented include Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Van Vechten himself. The postcards depict many of the most notable Afro-American performers, artists, and athletes of the 1930s, many of whom are shown before they became known.

•The New York Public Library has purchased the manuscript of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. The manuscript, which was thought to have been lost, was acquired by the library’s music from the firm of C.F. Peters, the original publisher of the work. The manuscript is in the hand of Mahler’s wife Alma, with extensive corrections in the orchestration of the work by the composer, therefore lending credence to her assertions that she provided practical contributions to her husband’s works. The manuscript reveals that the orchestration of the symphony marked a change in the composer’s style, and that it gave him considerable difficulty; at least seven different stages of the work can be discerned. The funds for the purchase were made available by the Otto Kinkeldey Fund.

•The University of California, Santa Barbara, has acquired the papers of director and playwright Luis Valdez and the archives of El Teatro Campesino, the theater he founded. Valdez, best known as the author of the 1978 play “Zoot Suit,” is regarded as the preeminent Chicano dramatist in the nation. He founded the theater in 1965 as an activist ensemble to gather support for the unionorganizing effort of the United Farm Workers. Before shifting its focus to Chicano culture, the theater company won an “Obie” award in 1968 for “creating a workers’ theater to demonstrate the politics of survival.” Unlike archives that are developed after the life of an organization or individual, the collections will be the repository of a working playwright and theater group. The collections will include unpublished and ongoing scripts, correspondence, lectures, original artwork, video and film footage, costume renderings, articles and reviews, set and prop designs, extensive photograph and poster collections, and dissertations and books written about the theater ensemble.

•The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has received a collection of rare books relating to the discovery, exploration, conquest, and colonization of the New World. Most of the 77 books in the collection are 16th, 17th, and 18thcentury editions of the works of the Spanish chroniclers, or cronistas. The collection was purchased from Bernard J. Flatow, a 1941 graduate of the university. The collection includes a second edition of Novissime hystoriarum omnium repercussiones (Venice, 1503) by the Augustinian monk Jacopo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo. In this edition is one the first known published accounts of Columbus’s discoveries. The collection also includes the 1507 Paesi Novamente retrovati by Fracastano da Montalboddo, discussing voyages of Columbus and Vespucci, and the very rare 1516 edition of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s De orbe novo decades, among other notable cronista works.

•The University of Texas at Austin has obtained a papyrus collection of approximately 150 items dating from the period between the 3rd and 1st centuries B.C. The collection, which was purchased by the university’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center from a Dutch collector, includes a mixture of documentary, historical, and literary papyri, among them marriage contracts, land documents, and receipts of financial transactions. The material in the collection dates from the Ptolemaic period, while the bulk of other papyrus collections date from the Roman era, between the 1st and 4th centuries A.D. The papyri in the UT collection were retrieved from mummy wrappings. Among other items in the collection are petitions to some of the earliest Ptolemaic rulers, the earliest dating to 282 B. C.; various documents concerning parcels of land (size, nature, acquisitions, sales) and the regulations of land irrigation; and administrative documents, one which contains the name of a royal official who is also mentioned by the Greek historian Polybius.

•The Archives of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, have acquired the papers of the evangelist and missionary Oswald J. Smith. Smith, who died January 25 at 97, contributed to North American understanding of and support for foreign missions through his world travel and the activities of his People’s Church of Toronto. He supported the missions of hundreds of missionaries from 35 faith missionary societies, and was the author of 34 books. The collection includes correspondence, sermon notes, photographs, audio tapes, clippings, and hymns.

Grants

•The Lower Columbia College Library,

Longview, Washington, has received an LSCA Title II grant of $112,042 to create a cooperative network with the Longview Public Library. The college will install the public library’s Dynix computerized system to provide users of both facilities with access to a joint online catalog.

♦The Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded a grant of $250,000 by the MacArthur Foundation International Security Program. The MIT Libraries have been allocated $15,000 for the first year of the grant, with the possibility of renewal for an additional two years. The funds are designated for the purchase of materials in the field of arms control and international security. Special emphasis is being given to acquiring government documents and other primary source materials essential for research.

•The New York Psychoanalytic Institute’s Brill

Library has been awarded $18,964 from the New-Land Foundation to support the preservation and editing of unique film footage of Sigmund Freud and other early psychoanalysts. The footage was shot in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris in 1927 and 1928.

•Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey, have received an OCLC Retrospective Conversion Grant of $13,750 from the New Jersey Department of Education. Fifty thousand records are to be converted.

•The University of Waterloo, Ontario, has received a $1,526 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The funds will be used to purchase a collection of more than 400 items relating to Dr. Marie Stopes and her pioneering work in birth control education in England beginning in 1918. The grant was made under the “Fleeting Opportunities” provision of the Council’s “Support to Specialized Collections in University Libraries Program.” Such grants must be matched by library funds. A portion of the matching funds ($1,000) was provided by Kaufman Footwear of Kitchener, Ontario. A. R. Kaufman donated collections in 1974 and 1983 relating to the history of family planning in Canada. The 1974 donation consisted of the papers and records of the 1936 trial of a nurse, a field worker from Kaufman’s Parents’ Information Bureau, who was tried for and acquitted of distribution of birth control information. The second donation consisted of the files and archives of the bureau, a program established by Kaufman for low income women which served 25,000 clients during its operation. The newly acquired collection, ranging from 1906 to the 1980s, contains about 130 items that relate directly to Stopes’s work. The collection also contains a large body of supporting materials on the topics of contraception and family planning.

•The University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Studies, Madison, has been awarded a $148,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study the role of secondary school, community college, academic, public, state, and state institutional libraries in literacy education. A nation-wide survey and nine case studies form the basis of the study.

News Notes

•Indiana University and the University of Vir- giniahave arranged a librarian exchange between two of the universities’ librarians. Gail Oltmanns, assistant head in the undergraduate library at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Elizabeth Margutti, a librarian at Virginia’s Clemons Library, exchanged jobs January 1 and will remain at one another’s post until June 15. Their assignments have been made based upon the needs of the libraries in which they are working and taking into consideration their particular interests and abilities. Each librarian is paid by her home institution but enjoys official staff membership in the library which she is visiting. ■ ■