ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the field

Acquisitions

•Florida State University, Tallahassee, has acquired the collection of Congressman Claude Pepper’s official and personal papers, documents, photographs, recordings, books, and memorabilia. Also included are the papers, memorabilia, and paintings of Mildred Irene Webster, the Congressman’s late wife. The Pepper papers cover his politically active life from his years as Florida legislator in the 1920s, as U.S. Senator during the 1930s and 1940s under Roosevelt and Truman, to his career as U.S. Representative from the 1960s to the present. Highlights of the collection include a latter from FDR delivered to the Senator on April 11,1945, the day before the President died, and correspondence with Winston Churchill and other world leaders.

•The San Diego State University Library received a gift of science fiction books and manuscripts from Jean Sutton, author and alumna of the university. The Jeff Sutton Collection contains the research notes, manuscripts, publicity materials, correspondence, and other miscellaneous materials of the late Mr. Sutton, former World War II photographic correspondent and research engineer in the Apollo program. In addition to over 29 titles of books and short stories written by Sutton, some in collaboration with his wife, there are original manuscripts of many of his most popular space novels: Apollo at Go, Beyond Apollo, The Missile Lords, and Whisper from the Stars.

•San Francisco State University’s J. Paul Leonard Library celebrated its 2,000,001st acquisition in June with a lecture by William Paisley, professor of communications at Stanford University, on “2 Million and One and Beyond: Forces Shaping the Library of the Future.” The item chosen as the landmark acquisition was an optical videodisk entitled, Voyager: Exploring the Outer Solar System.

•Southern Methodist University, Dallas, received a gift of photographs and books pertaining to Theodore Roosevelt. A gift of Lawrence H. and Doris A. Budner of Dallas, the collection includes original photos of Roosevelt from the archives of Underwood & Underwood, a New York newspaper service.

•The University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Special Collections has received a virtually complete collection of the Vale Press from CU alumnus Walter W. Smith of New York City. The Vale Press was founded in 1896 in London by Charles Ricketts. Its purpose was to publish the great English classics in a beautiful form. The Smith collection contains 39 of the 45 books published before the press closed in 1903, as well as ephemera and mansucript material.

•The University of Kansas Library, Lawrence, has acquired the papers of retired Congressman Larry Winn Jr., who was a Kansas representative in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1966 to 1984. Winn was second-ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the ranking minority member on the Science and Technology Committee. His papers include correspondence, speeches, campaign files, press clippings, publicity releases, and photographs.

•The University of Minnesota Library, Minneapolis, has acquired a collection of over 1,200 renderings, sketches and models from which the Twin City Scenic Studio of Minneapolis produced theatrical scenery and backdrops. The Twin City Scenic Collection includes scenic renderings for vaudeville, various Masonic Scottish Rite degree initiations, the Chicago World’s Fair Minnesota Exhibit, the Ringling Brothers Circus, and scenic units for professional, college, and high school theaters in all parts of the United States. It is the largest collection known that chronicles the work of one scenic studio. The Twin City Scenic Studio was established in 1896 and located in the Bijou Theatre in Minneapolis. During the theatrical boom in the 1920s, the studio opened branches in Detroit, Syracuse, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Fort Worth. The Library plans to exhibit portions of the collection both locally and on a national tour.

•The University of Utah Library’s Middle East Collection has acquired the papers of Fayez A. Say- egh, senior consultant to the Kuwait Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1967-1980. The collection includes unpublished manuscripts, books, articles, pamphlets, newspaper columns, conference addresses, speeches, interviews, and a personal library of some 3,000 volumes on Islam, Christianity and Judaism, international law, Israel and the Jews, the Middle East and the Arabs, and U.S. foreign policy. Fayez held several diplomatic posts as member of the Delegation of Kuwait to the United Nations, advisor to the Delegation of Lebanon, and counselor of the Yemen Delegation.

•York University Library, Downsview, Ontario, acquired a small but important group of Canadian, British and American items relating to railways from the private collection of authorphotographer Ralph Greenhill. The acquisition focuses on 19th-century railway technology and operations. There are several early company and government reports, some guidebooks and promotion materials, and an important collection of pamphlets relating to New Brunswick railway development. The collection includes several classic works about locomotive engineering, many of them with magnificent technical drawings, as well as items which deal with railway management and operations, including a book by Dredge, The Pennsylvania Railroad (1879), a uniquely detailed account of American railway practice in the period.

Grants

• The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, received a grant for $49,700 from the Exxon Education Foundation, New York. The award will support the general administration of the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture.

• The Association of Research Libraries, Washington, has been awarded a grant of $220,000 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of an online inventory of North American research library collections. The project will build on the work of the Research Libraries Group begun in 1979 and collaborative efforts of RLG and ARL since 1983 to describe and assess research library collections in specific subject areas covering a full range of scholarly interests. During the three years covered by the grant it is expected that the inventory will grow to include data from nearly 100 ARL libraries.

• Brandon University, Manitoba, has received a $20,000 grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to build up the library’s Music Collection in the specific area of musical theatre. The grant will assist the Music Library in acquiring the collection of popular musical stage works of the 20th Century.

•The Detroit Public Library has received a $106,030 Title II–C grant for the preservation and identification of historic photographic prints and negatives contained in the library’s National Automotive History Collection. The photographs to be treated date from 1900 to the 1920s and depict all facets of automobiles, their manufacture and their varied uses.

•Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, has received a matching grant from the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation, Winter Park, for $150,000 over a two-year period. The purpose of the grant is to investigate, select, and implement an integrated library system for the Jack R. Hunt Memorial Library.

• Harvard University Library has received a Title II–C grant of $227,092 to support preservation microfilming of approximately 900,000 pages of fragile or rare materials. This is the eighth Strengthening Research Libraries Resources Program grant awarded to Harvard for this project. Materials scheduled for filming in the coming 15 months are publications on World War II, temperance and canals, Slavic publications, printing specimen books, official gazettes, and the Unitarian- Universalist collection.

Early motoring photograph from the Detroit Public Library’s National Automotive History Collection.

•Johns Hopkins University’s Eisenhower Library, Baltimore, has been awarded $720,000 from the Pew Memorial Trust to assist in the completion of the conversion of its card catalog to machine-readable format.

•The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received a Title II–C grant to provide national access through OCLC to the library’s collection of scientific and technical publications issued by the Institute from 1861 through 1974. The grant will also allow for bibliographic control and preservation of major archival and manuscript collections that document the research conducted at MIT in the post-World War II era.

•New York University has been awarded a Title II–C grant in the amount of $166,887 to aid in cataloging the Tamiment Institute Library, a special collection housed in NYU's Bobst Library. The Tamiment Collection includes the libraries of Max Schachtman, founding member of the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers’ Party, and Sam Dolgoff, a leading American anarchist. The Schachtman Library contains the most extensive collection of primary sources available on the German Communist Party. The project includes evaluating the physical condition of each volume and taking appropriate preservation measures.

•Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, received a grant of $141,000 under Title II-C of the Higher Education Act for support of Phase II of the enrichment of its Southeast Asian Collection project. Among holdings to be cataloged are serials, newspapers, and children’s books. The project will also develop software for control of Thai language bibliographic records on OCLC.

•Ohio University, Athens, received a Title II-C grant of $133,500 to catalog materials from its Southeast Asia Collection on the OCLC database. The project will also include Southeast Asia Microfiche from the Library of Congress that lack AACR2 cataloging as a Major Microform Project. A holdings list for the collection will be produced at the conclusion of the project.

•The Research Libraries Group, Stanford, has received $1 million from the J. Paul Getty Trust for retrospective conversion of materials in art. The funds cover local overhead and staff costs for recon by BLG member libraries as well as database usage charges.

•Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, received $13,750 from the New Jersey State Library to fund the retrospective conversion of those Rutgers cataloging records for 1984 and 1985 capable of being added to the OCLC database. This will result in the loading of approximately 50,000 records.

Rutgers has also been awarded $75,000 by the New Jersey Department of Higher Education to support acquisitions, programming, and delivery of the library’s New Jersey Humanities Media Resource Service. This service makes available to the public films and videos created by the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other states’ humanities councils.

•The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, has been awarded $125,000 by the U.S. Department of Education to begin cataloging 41,000 pamphlets in the Cutter pamphlet collection. The collection consists of various kinds of ephemeral publications that were acquired by the library between 1854 and 1966.

• The State University of New York at Buffalo received a grant for $109,707 under Title II–C of the Higher Education Act. The grant will be used to maintain the collection of research materials on 20th century English language poetry by contributing holdings to OCLC and upgrading the cataloging to conform to national standards.

• The University of Arizona, Tucson, received $1,000 from Roy Andersen, award winning artist, to be used for the purchase of books about philately. Andersen’s dog stamps won the national prize for most popular United States stamp in 1984, and part of his prize was a $1,000 gift to a library of the artist’s choice.

•The University of California, Berkeley, received two grants, one for $256,000 under Title II- C of the Higher Education Act, and the other for $146,733 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The money will support the cataloging and conservation of Japanese rare book and map collections from the Tokuwaga (1600-1867) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods. The grant project will result in the creation of full bibliographic records, as well as the repair and protection of fragile materials.

• The University of California’s Division of Library Automation has received a grant of $5,000 from Security Pacific Foundation. The funds will be used for the installation of additional terminals for the libraries’ online catalog, MELVYL.

• The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has received a Title II–C grant for $166,510 to upgrade the library’s mathematics collection. The project includes the preservation, microfilming, and upgrading of the collection of journals, classical treatises, and other works covering the history of mathematics, astronomy and science.

Another Title II–C grant was awarded to the University of Michigan in the amount of $66,256 for an inventory of its 18th-century books and manuscripts. The information will help update the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue.

Michigan has also received $120,000 in renewed support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as $60,000 in matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to allow the library to offer fellowships to archivists, historians, and other scholars to study problems concerning the administration, preservation, and use of modern records. The fellowships will be offered for three summers, 1986-1988. For further information, contact Francis X. Blouin, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, 1150 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113.

• The University of Texas, Austin, has received a $119,671 Title II-C grant to support research programs at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. The funds will be used to underwrite a Latin American cataloging project in 1985-1986 to catalog serial publications of state-owned corporations in Latin America and other serials relating to energy.

• The University of Vermont, Burlington, has received a $60,000 Title II–C grant to complete archival processing of the papers of Senator George D. Aiken and related Canadian/American collections. The manuscript collection has specific relevance for historians interested in the St. Lawrence Seaway Project, Aiken’s 30-year involvement in water and agricultural projects linking the U.S. and Canada, and his long-standing concern with environmental issues.

• The Yale School of Medicine Library has been given $8,000,000 by Betsey Cushing Whitney of Manhasset, New York, to construct a major addition to the library. It is the largest single gift ever received by the Medical School. The library will be named the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library to recognize two great names in the history of Yale and medicine; they are, respectively, Mrs. Whitney’s late father and husband. The addition and renovation will increase the library’s space for books and readers by 50 %.

ACRL units can get staff assistance in writing grant proposals

The ACRL staff would like to offer assistance to ACRL units working on grant proposals. The service is available to official ACRL units (committees, sections, discussion groups, chapters, etc.).

The ACRL staff recommends the following procedures:

1) The ACRL unit submits its grant proposal to Headquarters six months before the due date.

2) ACRL staff secures evaluation criteria and sends the proposal and criteria to the Board of Directors. The ACRL staff and Board of Directors read and critique the proposal.

3) The ACRL staff and Board of Directors return their critiques of the proposal and their suggestions for improvement (four months before due date.) The ACRL staff offers assistance to the unit in incorporating the suggestions into the proposal.

4) The ACRL unit submits the revised grant proposal to the Board of Directors for formal approval (two months before due date). The Board reviews and may offer further suggestions for improvements. The ACRL staff offers assistance to the unit in preparing the final proposal.

5) If approved by the Board of Directors, the unit submits its proposal to the funding agency.

The only step in this process that is absolutely required is the review and approval by the Board of Directors. ACRL units are encouraged, however, to seek the assistance of the ACRL staff to strengthen their grant proposals.