ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

ACQUISITIONS

•Emory University’sPitts Theology Library, Atlanta, has opened to serious researchers the African Orthodox Church Archives (1880-1974). The collection contains approximately 5,000 items of manuscript and printed material documenting the history of an independent native South African church and the role of its archbishop, Daniel William Alexander (1882-1970). The material was shipped to the United States by the present head of the Church who feared that problems in South Africa might result in the extinction of this all-black church and the loss of its records. The Pitts Library acquired the collection in 1981 and has since processed the material and created a finding aid for its use. Inquiries should be addressed to Anita K. Delaries, Curator of Archives and Manuscripts, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322.

•The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan, has acquired the Dunbar Collection of travel materials. The collection consists of prints, broadsides, original drawings, manuscripts, maps, coinage, tickets, and other documents illustrating the origin and development of travel and transportation between 1680 and 1910. It was assembled by Seymour Dunbar in the process of compiling his four-volume history of travel in the United States and contains more than 1,750 prints and drawings.

The Museum has also added the Huegely Mill Collection of records, ledgers, orders, and correspondence reflecting wheat prices and the methods of production of the Huegely Mill of Nashville, Illinois, for the period 1850-1875.

•Indiana University’sLilly Library, Bloomington, has acquired a collection of letters and diaries of Sir Harold Nicolson (1886-1968), British diplomat and man of letters, and his wife, Lady Victoria Sackville-West (1892-1962), novelist and poet. The letters, about 10,500 exchanged between 1910 and 1962, offer a rich glimpse of the literature, history, and landscape architecture of the Edwardian Era.

•The National Library of Canada has acquired from one of Canada’s leading authors, Gabrielle Roy, a large collection of literary documents and personal papers which reflect the evolution of her career. The collection includes the author’s manuscripts, several in different versions, and some unpublished works, as well as rare examples of feature articles and fiction published in periodicals. It also contains the scripts of a film made from her most famous novel, The Tin Flute, publisher’s proofs, books with handwritten notes, and foreignlanguage editions of her novels and short stories.

•Ohio State University’sCommerce Library has acquired a collection of fifty historical fire marks representing insurance companies from 18 different countries. Fire marks were plaques placed on buildings to show early fire brigades which company owned the structure. The collection includes eight American, eleven British, and eight German fire marks. The earliest is a fire mark issued around 1860 by the Home Insurance Company of New York, and the most recent was produced in the early 1950s by the General Insurance Company of Cyprus.

•Syracuse University’sBird Library has received a collection of rare editions of music from the 17th through the 20th century. Included in the collection, which was donated by violinist Louis Krasner, professor of music at Syracuse from 1949 to 1971, includes first editions of scores by Beethoven and Mozart, and a unique prepublication copy of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with original hand markings. Other highlights are: first, early, and rare editions of books on the violin and string instruments; a collection of Napoleona materials; original manuscripts by 20th-century American composers; and an original death mask of Alban Berg made by Anna Mahler.

•The University of California, Los Angeles, Music Library has received music scores, annotated books and treatises, research notes, correspondence, and recordings of Sol Babitz (1911-1982), a Los Angeles violinist and music scholar. The Babitz Archive was presented to the library by his widow, Mae Babitz.

•The University of Pittsburgh has acquired the economic and philosophical papers of the English philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930). The papers consist of his working notes, reading notes, and drafts of his published and unpublished manuscripts. The acquisition is significant because of Ramsey’s contributions to the foundations of modern mathematics, logic, probability, and economics. The Ramsey papers will join those of the logical empiricists Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach which are in the Special Collections Department of Hillman Library.

•Wheaton CollegeLibrary, Illinois, has acquired the literary papers of Frederick Buechner, author of eleven novels and nine non-fiction works dealing with religious topics. The Buechner papers are now part of the college’s special collections, which also include the C.S. Lewis papers in the Wade Collection.

•The York University Archives, Downsview, Ontario, have acquired a collection of literary and political papers of the Canadian playwright, theater director, and teacher Herman Voaden. During the 1920s and 1930s Voaden was a leading exponent of Canadian national drama and the concept of “symphonic theater” that encompasses all the living arts. The collection covers the years 1897-1975 and includes Voaden’s personal diaries, correspondence, drafts of plays, notebooks, and approximately 700 playbills (1926-1945) from Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Europe, and Asia.

GRANTS

•Seven Association of Research Libraries members have received research grants of up to $4,000 each, as part of the Public Services in Research Libraries Project supported by a grant from the General Electric Foundation and operated by ARL’s Office of Management Studies:

University of Arizona—developing library instruction programs in a scientific discipline.

Cornell University—identifying appropriate library services for agriculture researchers.

University of Illinois, Urbana—assessing the needs of “invisible” users (those using the library via outside computers).

Michigan State University—identifying and analyzing non-users.

New York University—assessing users’ effectiveness with an online catalog.

Pennsylvania State University—comparative analysis of four types of user instructions for an online catalog.

TexasA&M University—the librarian’s role with end-user use of commercial databases.

The projects were selected from a pool of 23 by an advisory committee consisting of ARL library directors and a corporate information specialist. Each library will submit a final report that includes the methodology, findings, and conclusions of its projects. These reports will be available to the profession from the Office of Management Studies.

•Georgetown University,Washington, has been awarded a $100,000 grant from Merck & Company, Rahway, New Jersey, for the development of the Pharmaceutical Information Exchange (PIE) at the Dahlgren Memorial Library, Georgetown University Medical Center. This computerized database, to be called Rx, will provide bibliographic listings of journal articles and other reference materials describing the actions and uses of new pharmaceutical products. The PIE system will be the basis for a research study to test whether computerized pharmaceutical information can reduce the time interval between the introduction of a product and the physician’s use of it.

•The Library of Congresshas been given $500,000 by the Mary Pickford Foundation to support screenings and related programs to further the study and awareness of the history and development of the motion picture industry and its impact on the world. A week-long celebration at the library last May 10-17 included the dedication of a film theater named in honor of Mary Pickford, an exhibition, a one-day symposium dealing with the life, times, and films of Mary Pickford, and a fiveday series of silent films.

•The Research Libraries Group, Stanford, California, has been awarded a grant of $1,350,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a cooperative preservation microfilming program. Seven RLG members will participate in the project, which focuses on monographs, U.S. imprints, and Americana published between 1876 and 1900. Most publications in this period were printed on highly acidic paper and are now too brittle to be maintained in their original form. Participants plan to survey their collections systematically and evaluate every American monograph that falls within the period. If curatorial judgment deems a volume worthy of preservation, no other film is located, and the item is suitable for filming, the project will undertake its preservation. RLG also plans to develop model guidelines, procedures,and workforms, compile more accurate data on the cost of preservation microfilming and relevant bibliographic control, and test new preservationrelated features in RLIN. The libraries participating in the project are: Brown University, Columbia University, New York Public Library, University of California-Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and Yale University.

• Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library, Carbondale, has been awarded a second LSCA Title I grant to extend the Illinois Cooperative Conservation Program (ICCP) into a second phase. Phase Two will deliver a series of intensive, hands-on workshops to train library staff in simple book repair procedures. ICCP will continue to assist all libraries in Illinois to conserve their collections and preserve important research and local history materials.

•The University of Connecticut,Storrs, has received a $7,500 grant from the Tinker Foundation to fund phased preservation of a newly acquired collection of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and government documents dealing with Puerto Rico’s history and cultural development. The approximately 2,200 titles were collected by three generations of the Geigel family of San Juan, and span the past 150 years.

•The University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, has received a grant of $88,213 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring its Labadie Collection of radical materials under greater bibliographic control. The collection, a gift of Detroit anarchist Jo Labadie, contains personal papers, tracts, handbills, union publications, and the publications of numerous minority political and social reform organizations. The grant will be used to develop an online database for 8,000 serial titles and approximately 20,000 uncataloged pamphlets. In addition, the Bentley Historical Library will process three Labadie manuscript collections: papers of Mary Hays Weik, William A. Reuben, and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.

•The University of Oregon Library, Eugene, has received a gift of $50,000 from William Bowerman, Oregon’s well-known track coach in the 1950s and 1960s, to aid in the purchase of an automated acquisitions system. The gift, combined with funds from an earlier contribution made in honor of Bowerman, will enable the library to buy a technical services system known as Innovaq 100.

•The University of Rochester, New York, has received a gift of $191,484 from the estate of Fanny Knapp Allen to assist in further library automation. The automation program was started with the aid of an initial bequest of $180,000 from the estate of Mrs. Allen, who died in 1977. The funds will be used to convert cataloging records to machine-readable form.

•Two faculty members from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, have been awarded a grant from the Council on Library Resources’ Professional Education and Training for Research Librarianship (PETREL) program. Jordan M. Scepanski, director of Vanderbilt’s Central/Science Library, and Edwin S. Gleaves, chair of Peabody College’s Department of Library and Information Science, will use the funds to study the information needs, habits, and attitudes of the faculty of the George Peabody College for Teachers. In their study they will analyze existing data on faculty library use, survey the entire faculty about its information-gathering habits, and interview a representative sample to discover effective means of realizing faculty cooperation in the process of change.

NEWS NOTES

•The City University of New York dedicated the William H. and Gwynne K. Crouse Library for Publishing Arts in an official ceremony on May 10. The Crouse Library, housed in CUNY’s Graduate Center Library, contains 20th-century published materials on a wide range of topics pertaining to the book industry. The Crouses, who have provided an endowment fund to help maintain the collection, wished to honor the publishing industry in which William Crouse, author of over 50 volumes on automotive mechanics and the former editor of McGraw-Hill’s Technical Department, has enjoyed a long and fruitful career.

•The McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, has begun construction of a new addition that will house the museum’s extensive fine arts research library and the entire theatre arts library assembled by Robert L.B. Tobin. The Tobin Wing, scheduled for a grand opening in March 1984, was made possible with a $1 million gift from Tobin’s mother, Mrs. Edgar B. Tobin. It is an 8,000-square foot,two-story addition designed by Ford, Powell & Carson, Inc., of San Antonio. The theatre arts library, another Tobin gift, places a special emphasis on theatre construction and stage design. Before it enters the McNay, the collection will form the basis for a large exhibition to open at the Grolier Club in New York in September. ■ ■