COLLEGE & RESEARCH LIBRARIES NEWS

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Cornell University’s Echols Collection, Ithaca, New York, has received 190 reels of positive and negative microfilm of Javanese historical and cultural materials covering a period from the 18th to the 20th century. The collection represents the equivalent of about half a million pages of text. The microfilming was done at the sites of the original collections in three libraries in Surakarta, Java. Initially submitted for funding under Title II-C, the filming was undertaken in 1980 with a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, with additional support from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program. The materials cover an enormous range of traditional Javanese concerns, from classical literary romances, historical chronicles, and the correspondence between the Javanese rulers and the Dutch colonial government in the 18th and 19th centuries, to 20th-century court diaries and correpondence as recent as the Indonesian Revolution of the late 1940s.

• Friends University Library, Wichita, Kansas, has received a collection of printed music, manuscripts, and memorabilia of Noble Cain (1896-1977), noted choral composer, arranger, and conductor. Cain gained national recognition as director of several Chicago-area choral organizations, eventually becoming director of choral music for the National Broadcasting Company. The collection was donated by Cain’s daughter, Harriet Cain Reisser.

• Northern Illinois University’s Regional History Center, DeKalb, is actively collecting historical records from the 18 northernmost counties of Illinois, excluding Cook County. In addition to university archives the Center’s holdings include private manuscript collections and local public records from the region. Private manuscripts span the period from 1830 to the present and focus on several major themes in the region’s history: agriculture, politics, ethnic heritage, commerce and industry, the role of women, and urban expansion.

• Southern Illinois University Library’s Special Collections Department, Carbondale, has acquired the archives of the Library of Living Philosophers (LLP). The LLP, a publishing project, was founded by Paul Arthur Schilpp in 1938 to provide a forum for contemporary philosophers to reply to their critics. The collection contains correspondence from John Dewey, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, G.E. Moore, and Albert Einstein.

• Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, recently acquired the library of Professor Ronald Hilton of Stanford University. The Hilton Library is one of the largest private libraries on Latin America and the Caribbean and includes over 10,000 books on those regions and Florida, the American Southwest, California, and the Philippines during the Spanish period. Also in the collection are 270 audiotapes of Hilton’s interviews with prominent Latin Americans; 34 autograph letters, including a letter to Hilton from Argentinian leader Juan Peron; and 56 photographs of Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

GRANTS

• Cornell University has been awarded a $150,000 challenge gift from Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Hill, of Rancho Santa Fe, California, to aid in the creation of an endowment that will enable Cornell to build the premier collection of books on North American ornithology. The Hills have also given the library rare 19th-century illustrated bird books from their private collection and have established a $50,000 research fellowship endowment for users.

• Harvard College Library has been awarded a matching grant of $5,000 by the Canadian Department of External Affairs to enrich its holdings on Canada. The library is a depository for Canadian documents and in recent years, under the auspices of the University Consortium for Research on North America, academic and research activities in Canadian studies at Harvard have increased and the library collections further strengthened.

• Nassau Community College Library, Garden City, New York, has been awarded a grant of $5,240 by the State of New York for the 1981- 1982 academic year. This is a new grant funded by the legislature last summer to provide state aid for cooperative college library acquisitions programs and other library services. The funds will be used to purchase books and other materials and will supplement the current operating budget.

• Northern Illinois University’s Founders Memorial Library, DeKalb, has received an LSCA grant of $144,941 from the State of Illinois to support the beginnings of an online union list of serials for Illinois. The project will utilize the union list capability of OCLC’s Serials Control Subsystem. Elaine Rast, Automated Records Department, is project director.

• Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey, has received a grant from the Council on Library Resources to undertake an inventory of machine-readable texts in the humanities. The one-year grant will provide for a survey questionnaire to be sent to scholars and institutions requesting information on texts which they have encoded. The information will eventually be entered into RLIN.

• Southern Illinois University’s Special Collections Department, Carbondale, has received a $90,000 Title II-C grant for the second year of its processing its philosophy collections. A guide to the philosophy holdings will be published in 1983.

• The University of Texas, Austin, has been awarded a grant of $34,983 from the National Endowment of the Humanities for the project “Microfilming the San Carlos Collection of Key West, Florida.” The San Carlos Collection is composed of deteriorating and now inaccessible archives held by the San Carlos Institute in Key West. The bulk of the collection consists of archives of the Cuban consulate in Key West from 1894 to 1960. After the project is completed in 1983, copies of an expected 120,000 microfilm exposures will reside in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas.

• Vanderbilt University Library, Nashville, has been awarded a three-year grant of $109,109 by the Research Resources Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The money will be used to catalog the books in the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire Studies located in the library’s Special Collections Department. The project will establish bibliographic control over the Baudelaire Collection, which contains the most extensive collection of materials by and about Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet and critic.

NEWS NOTES

• The Council of National Library & Information Associations’ Joint Committee on Specialized Cataloging has completed work on three cataloging manuals: graphic materials, manuscripts, and archival film. The two-year project was supported by an NEH grant with the assistance of personnel from the Library of Congress. The manuals underwent final revision last March and will be published later this year by LC.

• The Library of Congress will conduct the first large-scale test of its mass paper deacidification process this month. Using a large vacuum chamber originally designed to test satellites destined for outer space, the library will attempt to neutralize the acid found in most modern paper. The program aims to extend the life of books and valuable papers for at least four times their anticipated current life span of 25-100 years. The chamber, located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will be loaded with 5,000 books to be subjected to a week-long treatment with a special chemical vapor according to a patented process. The treatment is expected not only to neutralize the harmful acids that would otherwise destroy the paper, but will also leave an alkaline reserve to combat future acidic intrusion.

The process to be used is known as vaporphased deacidification, used at LC since 1976. NASA’s experience with vacuum technology provided the library with an ideal test site to demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale applications. After the volumes are placed in the chamber, the air is removed and the books are dried for two days at low pressure. Diethyl zinc (DEZ) gas is then introduced and allowed to permeate the volumes for four days. After a purging with nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water are introduced for one day. Backfilling with air completes the process and the books are removed.

Following the test LC’s Preservation Research and Testing Office will conduct exhaustive tests to ascertain that each of the 5,000 volumes has been completely deacidified. Results are expected before the end of 1982 and will be announced by the National Preservation Program Office at the Library of Congress.

• Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive has been awarded a Certificate of Special Recognition by the Tennessee Association of Museums for its work in 1981. Specifically cited was the archive s role in supplying compiled tapes of news broadcasts to the U.S. State Department for the reorientation of the hostages held in Iran from November 1979 to January 1981. The material was viewed by the hostages in West Germany following their release.

During the winter and spring of 1982 the news archive has been regularly given screen acknowledgment for its services in the preparation of Inside Story, a weekly PBS series which critiques news reporting.