ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•The Auburn University Archives, Alabama, recently acquired the photographs and measured drawings of the Alabama collection of the Historic American Building Survey (HABS). Nicholas H. Holmes III, Mobile architect, was instrumental in obtaining the HABS for Auburn University. The Historic American Building Survey originated in 1933 under federal relief programs and became permanent in 1934 through an agreement between the Library of Congress and the American Institute of Architects. Included in the collection are hundreds of black and white photographs taken between 1930 and 1960 representing structures in 27 Alabama counties. Some of the structures represented in the holdings have since been demolished, making this collection an important documentation of the outstanding historic buildings of Alabama.

•Boston University has received a gift of papers representing over a quarter of a century of Congressional banking history from Fernand St. Germain of Rhode Island, former chairman of the House of Representatives Banking Committee.

The collection contains a large store of materials from St. Germain’s 28 years in Congress including legislative histories of bills he sponsored as chair of the House Committee on Banking Affairs (1980-1988) and as chair of the House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions (from 1972) and 28 years of congressional correspondence, constituent mail, and casework. It contains a wealth of information related to the history and development of government regulation and oversight of financial institutions.

•California State Polytechnic University’s W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library, Pomona, has acquired the research library of noted Arabian horse authority Gladys Brown Edwards. The approximately 2,500-volume collection was presented by an anonymous donor after the death of Edwards. The material includes many rare editions, such as an 1881 printing of Gleanings from the Desert of Arabia. Receipt of the gift was made possible by the donation of $ 1,100 for relocation expenses by Mrs. Joseph Paul of Claremont, California.

•Indiana State University, Terre Haute, has received a donation of over 600 volumes on Latin American history from John Hoyt Williams, ISU professor of history. Many of these books are in Spanish or Portuguese and emphasize the history of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the Rio de la Plata region of South America. Other books cover the history of Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and Spain.

•The Kansas State University Libraries, Manhattan, have received the D. C. Keyse Collection, donated by G. A. and Donna Keyse Rudolph in October 1988. The collection honors the late D. C. Keyse, a Scott County (Kansas) farmer and the father of Mrs. Rudolph. It contains about 500 volumes dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries embracing philosophy, literature, history, and medicine. Included are such landmark works as a first edition of Beaumont’s classic Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice (1833) and a fine example on parchment of an English real estate document from the reign of Henry VII.

•Seton Hall University’s McLaughlin Library, South Orange, New Jersey, recently received the Basil W. Steciuk Collection. Steciuk was a professor and chairman of the university’s Department of Classical Studies from 1959 to 1975. Along with the donation of the book was a $5,000 gift from Steciuk’s son, George L. Steciuk, Seton Hall ’64, and his wife. The money will be put toward the purchase of additional books in the fields represented by the collection. The collection of some 7,800 volumes focuses on classical studies, but is rich in the fields of history, literature, cultural studies, mythology, and philosophy. The publication dates of these books span four centuries. Most of the collection is housed on open shelves. The rare books will be shelved in the Falk Rare Book Room. The rare books of the collection include Apicius, a cookbook originally written in the 3rd century; and Das Pfennig-Magazine der Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung gemeinnütziger Kenntnisse, a German periodical dated 1835, one of only 5 issues in the United States.

•The Texas A & M University Archives, College Station, recently received the papers of Ruth Margaret Hull, which contain a great deal of information about 19th century Texas Methodists and Methodism. Hull, who died in 1987, provided in her will that her papers should come to Texas A & M partly because much of the information in them relates to people and places in the geographic area surrounding the University. Ruth Hull was the great-granddaughter of Walter Smith South, a circuit riding Methodist minister in Texas during most of the second half of the 19th century. Through all of his ministerial career, South kept a diary in which he made brief records of his travels and activities as well as the people he met and visited. The Hull papers contain four original diaries; typescript copies of all fifteen diaries dated 1855-1897; and extensive files of notecards on Methodist ministers, relatives, other people and places. A great deal of genealogical information on the South and Burleson families is included. South married Mary Ann Burleson on March 21, 1861. Also included in the Hull papers is information on Indians and Indian tribes encountered by South in his travels as well as on the counties and towns South visited.

A delegation from the People’s Republic of China headed by Houston’s Consul General on February 14 presented Texas A & M University with more than 700 volumes written in Chinese. The books, including volumes in literature, history, political science, art, travel, and science, are intended as a step toward creating a better understanding between China and the United States. The Chinese collection will be housed in the Sterling C. Evans Library.

•The University of Illinois Archives, Urbana, has received the records of the National Association of Farm Broadcasters (NAFB) and the photo files of C. F. Marley, one of the country’s top agricultural photographers. The NAFB collection includes association minutes, newsletters, bulletins, radio listeners’ surveys, and other items covering the association’s 46-year history. The collection also contains hundreds of photographs of farm radio and television personalities and association events, and biographies of notable members. This collection will be the first for which the Archives will identify documents of bibliographic value to researchers for entry into a subject-area database, in addition to creating a traditional archival finding aid.

The Marley Collection of photographs, negatives, and slides covers the 40-year career of agricultural photographer C. F. Marley, of Nokomis, Illinois. Included in the collection are photos of many first-of-a-kind inventions or farming techniques, including strip-till corn planters, which preceded the zero-till planters; George McGibbens’s first zero-till planter; the first Dickey-John seed monitor; Henry Larson’s first pneumatic grain probe; and tandem tractors, which preceded the four-wheel drive. The indexing of these slides and photographs is being supported by the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station as a way of helping make them widely available to researchers.

Frank W. Smith, a 1941 alumnus in journalism of the University of Illinois, has donated his extensive collection of 4,000 phonograph recordings to the Music Library. The albums include not only standard orchestral and operatic music, but also special genres such as Gregorian chant, jazz, military bands and choruses, and folk music traditions. Some of the more unusual items include many items distributed only in Western Europe on such labels as Deutsche Grammophon, Eurodisc, Telefunken, and Polydor. Also donated by Smith were 175 record magazines and music books, wooden shelving for the recordings, reviews of some of the albums, and a catalog providing immediate access to the collection.

•The University of Miami’s Otto G. Richter Li-brary, Coral Gables, Florida, has acquired a 3,000-volume collection of rare publications on Spanish and Cuban history and genealogy from David Masnata, who died recently in New York. The collection also includes Masnata’s archives which occupy 15 filing cabinets and deal with documents and personal memoirs of his ancestors. Masnata, who practiced law in Cuba and Spain, was the grandson of Gonzalo de Quesada, a favorite disciple of José Marti, and was also the greatgrandson of Ramon Luis Miranda, Marti’s physician. Material providing links to these ancestors and their times include copies of newspapers edited by Marti, by Quesada, and by Enrique Trujillo, as well as a manuscript poem by Marti dated Christmas Day, 1892.

•The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, re-cently received a number of important manuscripts written by Soviet dissident writers. The authors’ originals, donated by relatives of the late U-M professor, Carl Proffer, are housed in the University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. All of the materials, most of which are unpublished in the Soviet Union, are written in Russian. The manuscripts are available for viewing on request.

•Yale University Library’s Collection of West-ern Americana has acquired papers and artwork by Philadelphia artists Richard and Edward Kern. The collection comprises eleven sketchbooks containing numerous finished watercolors of the southern plains, New Mexico, California, Chihuahua, and various locations overseas. In addition there are hundreds of preliminary sketches, three journals, and a miscellaneous assortment of letters and documents relating to the exploration of the American West in the 1840s and 1850s. Retween 1846 and 1853, Edward and Richard Kern were the most active and influential Anglo-American artists working in the American Southwest. Their sketches, drawings, and watercolors provided Americans with their first comprehensive visual record of the territory acquired in the course of the Mexican War. Before the days of photography, artists were employed by expeditions to record the landscapes and peoples that were encountered. The Kern brothers accompanied numerous U.S. government expeditions. The collection includes Edward Kern’s illustrated journal of John C. Frémont’s third expedition, which entered California just as the Mexican War began, and his fourth expedition, a privately sponsored enterprise to determine whether a trans-continental railroad could be built along the 38th parallel. This collection remained in private hands until April of this year, when it was acquired by the Yale Collection of Western Americana.

Grants

•Davidson College’s E. H. Little Library,Davidson, North Carolina, now has more than $1 million in its endowed book funds, thanks to a recent boost from Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity. SAE’s gift of $5,200 raises the fraternity’s book endowment to $25,800. SAE set up its book fund eight years ago and has continued to donate funds from the sale of its popular campus calendar. It is the only student organization with an endowed book fund. The library buys 10,000 new books and 1,500-2,000 periodicals each year to add to its collection of almost 350,000 books.

•Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida, hasreceived a gift of $250,000 from the St. Petersburg Times. This gift will be awarded $25,000 annually over the next ten years. Part of the gift will be used to sustain the library’s subscription level of 1,000 periodicals. The rest will be used annually to award funds to faculty members for collaborative collection development efforts.

•Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts,has received a grant from the Ford Foundation to establish a program in comparative scientific traditions. The award includes a $40,000 budget for the purchase of books and other library materials dealing with science in other cultures.

•Indiana University’s East Asian Collection,Bloomington, has received a library materials grant from the Japan Foundation. The grant, under the Foundation’s Library Support Program B, will pay three-fourths of a total of Y800,000 ($6,000) to buy Japanese materials for the East Asian Collection and ship them to the Bloomington campus directly from Japan, with handling and postage paid. The East Asian Collection will pay the other one-fourth to satisfy the cost-sharing stipulation of the grant program. The major item included in the grant proposal, prepared by Thomas H. Lee, East Asian Library, is the 90-reel microfilm set of Daitokyo Collection of Edo Literature, a collection of essential illustrated novelistic and dramatic works of the Edo period of Japan. The cost of this microfilm set alone is Y800,000 (about $5,800).

•New York University’s Bobst Library has re- ceived two separate preservation grants under the New York State 1989/90 Coordinated Preservation Projects. Funding for the larger of the two projects will go toward support of a pilot project in photograph preservation. Four thousand photo negatives from the District 65, United Auto Workers Union non-print collection, which is housed in the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, will be transferred from diacetate to a more stable polyester film. Bobst Library, serving as grant sponsor, will coordinate the distribution of funds to other cooperating institutions. Cornell University will be preserving photographs from its labor history collection and Columbia will focus on materials from its Russian History and theatrical collections.

A second award will support the preservation of labor history sound recordings, also part of the Wagner Archives collection. Recorded radio broadcasts, speeches, mass rallies, and demonstrations from the Transport Worker’s Union collection that are on acetate-based tapes will be transferred to a more stable medium. This cooperative project is currently in its fourth phase, having received state funding for the past three years. Other institutions working in tandem with NYU to preserve recordings are the New York Public Library (the project’s sponsor), Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester.

•The Saint Martin’s College Library, Lacey, Washington, has received a gift of $110,000 from Saint Martin’s alumnus Tom O’Grady. The majority of the gift is earmarked to strengthen the library’s collection of reference works, and will approximately double the size of the college’s reference collection. The remainder will be used for audiovisual equipment to support classroom and curriculum activities, as well as increase the use of research materials.

•Stanford University’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives has received a grant of $14,478 from the California State Library under the Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) for a six-month project to catalog the papers of four important California leaders in Mexican-American affairs. The personal papers of Armando Valdez, Eduardo Quevedo, Alfredo Castaneda, and Bert Corona, containing fifty-two linear feet of correspondence and organizational records, will be arranged for research use, and descriptive inventories for each of the collections will be written.

•The University of California, Berkeley, has re- ceived a grant of $10,000 from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. The grant is to be used for supplemental acquisitions of Hebraica/Judaica for the Main Library and the Near Eastern Studies Department Library.

•The University of Illinois, Urbana, has re- ceived two separate donations of $5,000 each, one from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and one from retired New York accountant Allen Toby, for the library’s Judaica collection. The donations will form the new Ruth H. Toby Memorial Judaica Book Fund. Mrs. Toby died in 1988. The gift from the Littauer Foundation will be used immediately to purchase books published in Europe on Jewish culture, society, language, and literature. The gift from Allen Toby will form an endowment whose interest will provide ongoing funds for book purchases over the years.

•The Washington Research Library Consor- tium (WRLC) has received a six-month grant of $46,746 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Preservation. The WRLC libraries will contribute an additional $59,664 in cost sharing. The grant will support planning for a coordinated preservation program among the members. It will support the conduct of a statistical survey of the condition of collections in seven general university libraries and four academic law libraries. The data will be analyzed individually and collectively to determine the urgency and magnitude of the deterioration problem in these large heavily used research collections, and to make recommendations for future preservation programs to be supported by WRLC and by grant funding. Special attention will be given to identifying and preserving the unique materials which form the core of the WRLC combined research collections. The following universities are WRLC members: the American University, Catholic University of America, Gallaudet University, George Mason University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Marymount University, and the University of the District of Columbia. Further information on the grant is available from Paul Vassallo at (202) 265-1313.

•York University Libraries, North York, On- tario, have been awarded $17,000 by the Canadian Council of Archives. The grant will support sorting, arranging and describing two groups of University records and the records of the Canadian literary journal Waves.

News notes

•Boise State University’s Hemingway Western Studies Center is sponsoring a new project to preserve and catalog the work of Idaho writers. The Idaho Writers’ Archive will compile a database of Idaho writers, both established authors and struggling artists, and collect and catalog books, magazines, manuscripts, and other works by these authors. The archive already has donated collections on ten Idaho writers and poets. They include Vardis Fisher and Ernest Hemingway as well as poet Charles David Wright, filmmaker Nell Shipman, outdoor writer Ted Trueblood, legislator and novelist Earl Wayland Bowman, essayist Paul Tracey, and others. The works will be cataloged and stored in the BSU Library and will be available to literary scholars. Included in the archive are files on Hemingway obtained from the FBI and the old Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. The files were donated by John De Groot, along with 130 books he used in writing Papa, a play based on Hemingway’s life.

•The Boston Library Consortium completed a major portion of its Collection Analysis Project in April and has issued a Report. The project is the largest automated conspectus-based analysis done to date, according to NÌarianne Burke, consortium executive director. The project sorted the collections of the twelve member libraries into 4,000 subject areas, counted the titles in each collection, and compared titles for overlap in each subject. Findings will improve cooperative use of collections and serve as a knowledge base for collection development in each institution. Funding for this project was provided by a grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and administered by the Board of Library Commissioners. The Report is available on a limited basis from the Board. Members of the Boston Library Consortium, a resource-sharing cooperative, include Boston College, Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis University, MIT, Northeastern University, Tufts University, University of Massachusetts campuses at Amherst, Boston, and Worcester, Wellesley College, and the Massachusetts State Library. For further information contact Marianne Burke, Boston Library Consortium, Room 339, 666 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02117; (617) 262-0380.

•Harvard University Library has recently es- tablished the Charles J. Tanenbaum Fund for Professional Development in the University Library. This is not the first endowment made by Mr. Tanenbaum for the library. Mr. Tanenbaum and his wife, Mary, had also endowed the Douglas W. Bryant Fellowship program which supports research by librarians. The Tanenbaum Fund for Professional Development will support a variety of programs to aid librarians in their current work settings and to encourage their career development. It will be used to cover the costs of workshops, seminars, and speakers brought to the University Library from the outside and to develop in-house programs when the capability and expertise is available. In some cases the fund may be used to assist librarians to attend training seminars or conferences, including costs of registration, travel, housing, etc. The fund may also be used to supplement the Bryant Fellowship Awards when especially worthy applications cannot be covered by the Bryant Award. Mr. Tanenbaum has been an enthusiastic supporter of the library and a member of the Library Visiting Committee since 1971.

•The Library of Congress has begun a major new program to use new technologies to disseminate electronic copies of portions of its collections—including manuscripts, photos, and books—to other libraries throughout the United States. The program is called “American Memory.” Preliminary plans call for transferring material related to American culture and history onto laser videodisks and various kinds of compact disks. Each disk will also include an interpretive introduction and annotated bibliography to extend its usefulness. The digitized images and information in “American Memory” will be formatted in a way that permits electronic copying into advanced word processing or desktop publishing software. Recently a demonstration of an “American Memory” prototype was presented at the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearings on the Library’s 1990 budget request. The demonstration simulated the experience of a college student using an “American Memory” workstation to prepare a research paper for a political science class. The prototype used an Apple Macintosh computer with HyperCard software. Some images were on a computer screen, while others (including an excerpt from a motion picture related to the topic) were displayed from a videodisk on a television monitor.

In preparation of prototypes, the Library has been assisted by Heller Information Services, with equipment donated or loaned by Apple Computer, Pioneer Video, and Sharp Electronics. The planning process also includes a user-needs survey of state library agencies and large research libraries conducted by Mary C. Chobot and Associates. Planning for “American Memory” is expected to continue through 1989, with the first products to appear in 1990. The Library’s coordinator for the project is Carl Fleischhauer.

•The Library of Congress and the U.S. Forest Service have announced a cooperative effort to organize a portion of the largest collection of personal papers in the Library. The collection, the papers of Gifford Pinchot, began arriving at the Library in the 1940s. The papers cover the whole life of Pinchot (1865-1946), who was the first chief of the Forest Service, a two-term governor of Pennsylvania, and a lifetime conservationist. Pinchot, together with Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, initiated efforts to conserve the natural resources of the United States 100 years ago. From their activities—and those who followed them—have come today’s national forests, national parks, and wildlife and wilderness protection. The project will undertake the processing of some 400 manuscript containers of papers covering the years 1890 through 1910. The period selected includes the years that Pinchot headed the Forest Service (1905-1910) as well as the beginnings of the conservation movement in the United States. The whole collection of Pinchot papers is contained in 3,235 manuscript boxes taking up more than 1,300 linear feet of shelf space. During the course of the project the papers will be examined and organized, marked for preservation work if appropriate, inserted into acid-free folders, and inventoried. The inventory will then be described in a database and cross-referenced for easy retrieval in the future. Because of the interest of the Forest Service, conservationists, and scholars in the life of Gifford Pinchot, the Service has made available $20,000 to cover the cost of the project.

•North Carolina State University’s Class of 1989, Raleigh, will provide attractive furniture— tables, chairs, reading lamps, bookcases—for the new reading room and comfortable lounge furniture for the lounges in the new addition to the D. H. Hill Library. The class solicited ideas from across campus for an appropriate class gift and selected the suggestion of the NCSU Libraries, celebrating their one hundredth birthday in 1989. The library’s building addition, to be completed this year, will comprise the new main entryway into the library. Although state funds were appropriated for this construction, provisions for furnishing its interior were inadequate. Early in February, the senior class held a phone-a-thon to solicit pledges for this gift from class members and obtained $126,400 in pledge commitments. Final payments on the pledges will be made in 1993. The reading room with its two lounges will serve as a central meeting place for future reunions and will stand in honor of the Class of 1989.

•Northwestern University’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of Africana, Evanston, Illinois, has completed the conversion of their catalog cards to machine-readable form, now accessible in the main library’s computer catalog system. The 18- month project, which accomplished the conversion of about 30,000 catalog records, was completed with the assistance of a grant from the U.S. Department of Education under the Title II-C Program for Strengthening Research Library Resources. The records are now available to researchers throughout North America via RLIN and OCLC bibliographic databases.

•The University of California’s nine-campus online library catalog system, the MELVYL catalog, has just acquired its five-millionth book record, continuing the database growth and expansion that has made the catalog one of the largest online public access systems in the nation. The fivemillionth book is Guide to Integrating Digital Services: Tl, DDS, and Voice Integrated Network Architecture by Robert L. Dayton (New York: Intertext Publications: McGraw-Hill, 1989). In addition to book records, the MELVYL catalog contains over half a million serials records as well as records of other UC materials, such as maps and music. It also holds book records of the California State Library and in the MELVYL MEDLINE database, the current three-year file of the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database, over 600,000 article citations indexed from over 4,000 health sciences journals.

•The University of Chicago has announced the addition of the five-millionth volume to its collections, an achievement celebrated by only ten other university libraries in North America. The work selected for this distinction is Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, by George Levine of Rutgers University, and published by Harvard University Press in 1988. In establishing selection criteria for the five-millionth volume, the library searched for a work with substantial scholarly value, not overly esoteric or rare, and one which would frequently be used by library patrons. In the chosen work, its author, George Levine, explores the impact of Darwin’s revolutionary concept of evolution on 19th-century literature. The five million printed volumes of the University of Chicago Library do not include the approximately seven million items in other formats—manuscripts, maps, microforms, sound recordings, and other media—which the library has collected through the years.

•The University of Nevada-Las Vegas Library has joined the Consortium of Hospitality Research Information Services (C.H.R.I.S.). The Library, which has one of the largest gaming collections in the world, becomes the fourth member of C.H.R.I.S., which has been formed to develop and print an electronic bibliographic database to hotel, motel, restaurant, travel, gaming, and related hospitality publications. Currently, the Hospitality Index: An Index for the Hotel, Foodservice, and Travel Industries, indexes and abstracts fifty-two publications in the hospitality industry and is available in both printed and floppy-disk formats. Other C.H.R.I.S. members are: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; University of Wisconsin- Stout, Menomonie; and the American Hotel & Motel Association.

•The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York, has announced the new Sibley Music Library. It opened on May 15, 1989, on the 1.5 acre-block adjacent to the Eastman School of Music. The new building, called Eastman Place, is an $18 million mixed-use facility which, in addition to the Sibley Music Library in its top three floors (approximately 50,000 of the total 122,000 square feet of the complex), houses commercial stores, restaurants, and office space on the lower level. The complex also includes an indoor atrium and an outdoor public plaza which will accommodate community arts performances and exhibitions. ■■