ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

•Boston University’sMugar Memorial Library is the recipient of the personal collection of Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. The collection includes 6,000 scores, many of them important primary sources such as the first edition of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an English edition of a Beethoven piano concerto, and works autographed by Ravel and Stravinsky; 1,500 sound recordings, among them test pressings of Fiedler’s own performances; and manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia.

•The College of Charleston, South Carolina, Special Collections Department has acquired the Kenneth Hanson Archives of Sound Recordings. Chronicling the growth of the recording industry from the late 19th century through the 1940s, the collection includes over 4,000 cylinder records of marches, popular songs, vaudeville acts, and speeches. Also included are fourteen record players which were designed for the various types of recordings in the Hanson Archives.

Charleston has also received the papers of the Charleston High School (1843-1976, for white boys until recently), one of the nation’s oldest public institutions of secondary education, dating from 1839. Accompanying this collection are the papers of the Memminger School (1858-1950, for white girls until recently) founded by Christopher Memminger, later the Confederate Secretary of the Treasury; and papers of two black coeducational schools, the Avery Institute (1866-1940) and the Laing School (1866-1940). As segregated institutions throughout most of their history, the papers of these four schools offer an excellent opportunity for comparative educational and cultural history.

•Columbia University,New York, has received more than forty years of literary correspondence between the Harold Matson literary agency and many of this century’s best-known writers between 1937 and 1980. Among the writers represented are Ray Bradbury, William S. Burroughs, Lillian Heilman, Arthur Koestler, and William Saroyan.

•The State University of New York at Albany recently finished processing the papers of Emil Lederer and Hans Philip Neisser, German economists who came to the United States in 1933. The papers consist of correspondence, lecture notes, manuscripts, and publications, and are part of the Exile Collection in the University’s Special Collections.

•The University of California at Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office has completed a 13- year project to record oral histories with 149 key persons in California’s Earl Warren years, 1925-1953. The interviews include then governor Earl Warren, and 121 heads of government departments, assistants to the governor, legislators, leaders of political parties and factions, and 28 personal friends and family members. The series has been bound into 53 volumes and is now available for research at the Bancroft Library and the State Archives at Sacramento.

• The University of Texas’ Humanities Research Center, Austin, has acquired the archives of Gloria Swanson (1899- ), Hollywood film actress. Contents of the collection cover the years from 1913 to the present and include handwritten notes for Swanson’s autobiography Swanson on Swanson; scripts and publicity photos related to her many films; correspondence with Mary Pickford, William Faulkner, and other famous persons; videotapes and cassette recordings; scrapbooks, diaries, and business records; fan mail; and paintings by Swanson and paintings of her by friends. The collection will be housed in the Hoblitzelle Theater Arts Library in the Harry Ransom Center.

•York Universityand the Dance in Canada Association (DICA), Toronto, have signed an agreement in which DICA’s Jean A. Chalmers Choreographic Archives will be permanently housed at the Scott Library in York University. The collection contains works by choreographers in Canada, along with background information and technical and performance data on each work. The collection currently contains approximately 60 tapes, to which will be added new tapes donated by the Ontario Arts Council.

GRANTS

•The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, has received a grant of $80,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the cataloging of its American Printed Broadsides from 1801 to 1830.

•The Association of Research Libraries, Washington, D.C., has been awarded a grant of $63,739 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to add a preservation microfilming component to the ARL Microform Project. Jeffrey Heynen, coordinator of the project, will investigate preservation microfilming needs in North American libraries, and develop and implement a plan for coordinated action based upon his investigation. Heynen began work on the new component in October 1982 and will continue on a part-time basis until May 1984.

•The Boston Library Consortium has been awarded an LSCA grant of $39,358 by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to help support the conversion of the Consortium and Massachusetts Institute of Technology serials union lists to the new Faxon union listing system, currently under development. Grants funds will be used for

10 / C&RL Newsstaff and equipment needed to merge, load, and edit the data for the new system. The first list produced from this system is targeted for the summer of 1983.

•California State University, Northridge.has been awarded a grant of $440,000 from the Chancellor’s Office of the California State University System in Long Beach. Northridge was selected out of ten CSU campuses vying for the award. The grant will permit the Library to convert its existing machine-readable bibliographic files from abbreviated to full bibliographic status and consolidate the holdings onto a single tape file.

•New York Public Library’sPerforming Arts Research Center has received a grant of $168,500 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support staff positions and to allow the Dance Collection to continue its program of archival documentation and preservation. The monies will also be used by the Theatre on Film and Tape Project to continue recording Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional productions as well as informal dialogues with professionals of the theater.

•Providence Public Library,the only public library member of the Rhode Island Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries, has been awarded a grant of $340,000 by the Champlin Foundation to install a multiprocessor system that will provide online access to library resources and services statewide. Libraries joining the new high performance system will have immediate use of a database the the library has built during the past ten years.

•Southwestern University,Georgetown, Texas, has been awarded a $200,000 grant by the Pew Memorial Trust to launch a four-year retrospective conversion project. During the fourth year the library plans to implement a computerized catalog and circulation and acquisitions systems.

• The University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, have received a cost-sharing grant of $21,073 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the preparation of a subject thesaurus for approximately 10,000 titles in their history of economics collection. These titles were cataloged during the Libraries’ two-year project funded by a Title II-C grant from the U.S. Office of Education. The thesaurus will be published in 1984 by G.K. Hall as part of a two-volume descriptive catalog providing author, title, and subject access to the collection. The project was directed by Ann E. Hagedorn, who also directed the Title II-C history of economics cataloging project and wrote the grant application for the preparation of the thesaurus.

•The University of Notre Dame Libraries, Indiana, have received a substantial gift from trustee emeritus John T. Ryan, chairman of the board of Pittsburgh’s Mine Safety Appliances Company, to support library automation efforts and to endow the Irene O’Brien Ryan Library Collection in honor of his wife. The endowment portion of the benefaction will underwrite book acquisitions, an area severely affected by inflation.

OBERLY AWARD

The Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural Sciences, awarded biennially by ACRL’s Science and Technology Section, will be presented at the 1983 ALA Annual Conference to the authors) of the best bibliography published in 1981 or 1982 in agriculture or related sciences.

Nominations for the award will be evaluated on the basis of the timeliness of the topic, comprehensiveness, accuracy, format, and indexing methods. The principal author, editor, or compiler must be a citizen of the United States.

Please submit nominations for the 1983 Oberly Award no later than March 1 to: Frank Polach, Oberly Award Committee Chair, Library of Science and Medicine, Rutgers University, P.O. Box 1029, Piscataway, NJ 08854.

HIGHER EDUCATION SUMMARY DATA

The data on academic institutions gathered in the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is usually published in two forms: Institutional Data, and Trends and Summary Data. The Institutional Data for 1979 was published by NCES in 1982 (Library Statistics of Colleges and Universities: 1979 Institutional Data, available from the National Technical Information Service, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA 22161, $16.50 for paperbound, $4.50 for microform, PB-82-169087).

However, because of fiscal constraints in Washington, it is not known when NCES will be able to publish the Trends and Summary Data section for 1979. Because the Summary Data has all been tabulated, NCES has made the data available for ACRL to publish.

Library Statistics of Colleges and Universities: Summary Data 1979is available from ACRL at $10 for ACRL members and $13 for non-members (prepaid only). It contains 36 tables in 72 pages. Among the topics covered (and broken down by public and private institutions, type and size of institution) are: volumes and titles of bookstock held and added; data on periodicals, government publications, nonprint materials, and microforms; library operating expenditures; data on staff, including salaries by sex and by state; and data on circulation, interlibrary loan, library hours, and reference questions. Orders should be addressed to ACRL/ALA, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611, and should include a self-addressed mailing label and 50¢ for postage and handling.