ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Young

Emory University has been awarded a$314,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize and create an online database of 330 American and British detective, crime, and romance novels authored by women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The extensive collections of Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library and the Indiana University’s Lilly Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts will provide the source texts for this digitization project, which will create a digital collection of texts by women authors as well as the largest text-based, searchable database of digitized dime novels. The period addressed by the database will roughly coincide with the peak of the popularity of dime novels, which flourished in America from the 18ó0s through the 1920s. During the two-year project, staff will identify, digitally convert, proofread, and encode approximately 130,00 pages from 330 literary texts.

The University of Tennessee (UT) Libraries have received $500,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to identify, preserve, and catalog historic newspapers in West Tennessee, including the Advocate and Western District Intelligencer and the Memphis Appeal. The grant will also complete the ten-year effort to discover and catalog historic newspapers in Middle and East Tennessee. UT began identifying and describing more than 6,000 unique titles in 1994 with NEH funding, and they expect researchers to find 4,000 more titles in West Tennessee collections.

Johns Hopkins University has beenawarded National Science Foundation grants totaling $3 million for two digital research projects in the Sheridan Libraries. Both projects are collaborative efforts that focus on applied research driven by real world educational and scholarly problems, said Nancy K. Roderer, interim dean of university libraries. One project involves the creation of three-dimensional images of ancient cuneiform tablets, the oldest written documents in the world. The second project, which comes out of the libraries’ Digital Knowledge Center, involves enhancing a data capture technique that will allow researchers to digitize a wide range of cultural materials from ancient Greek texts to medieval French manuscripts to music for the lute from the 17th centuiy.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL)has been awarded a $510,000 grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support strategic initiatives in cataloging, the development of distributed print archives, and cooperative collection development. The initiatives, to be carried out over the next two years, will enhance CRL’s ability to catalyze cooperative resource building and preservation among its membership of North American research libraries and to more closely engage area studies specialists and scholars in those efforts.

Acquisitions

Ben Shneiderman

The papers of Ben Shneiderman, profes-sor of computer science at the University of Maryland (UM), College Park, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Stud- ies and of the Institute for Systems Research, have been donated to the UM Libraries’ Ar- chives and Manu- scripts Department. Founder of the Soft- ware Psychology So- ciety (1976) and founding director of the UM’s Human- Computer Interaction Lab, Shneiderman de- veloped the notion of “direct manipulation,” which led directly to the invention of the “embedded menu” or “hot link” that became a key contribution to the usability of the Web. Materials in the collection, which include working papers, correspondence, manuscripts, and other related items, span his entire career, beginning in 1968 with his graduate studies at SUNY-Stony Brook and continuing to the present.

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

The U.S. Naval Academy's Nimitz Libraryhas received a generous gift of two 18th-century letters relating to John Paul Jones from Faith McCurdy of Cold Spring Harbor, New York. One letter is from George Washington to John Paul Jones, dated July 22, 1787, during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The other letter is from John Paul Jones to the editor of the Gazette de Leyde, written “On board the Bonhomme Richard’s prize the late British Ship of War Serapis Texel November 11th, 1779.” McCurdy gave the letters in memory of her late husband James Am,son McCurdy, naval architect and designer of the sail training vessel known as the Navy 44. Her daughter, Sheila McCurdy, is a member of the Fales committee, which advises the Naval Academy about its sailing program. The letters were presented during a ceremony in the Nimitz Library’s Special Collections and Archives Division on April 24, attended by faculty, staff, administrators, and other friends of the Academy. ■

Sheila McCurdy and Faith McCurdy present Vice Admiral John R. Ryan, superintendent of the Naval Academy, with letters from George Washington and John Paul Jones, during a ceremony at the Nimitz Library on April 24, 2002.