ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

•The Auburn University Libraries, Auburn,

Alabama, have received several acquisitions of note.

The university library’s Special Collections Department has added to its collection of Bibles with the acquisition of a 1541 Great Bible, a 1575 Bishops’ Bible and a 1582 Rheims New Testament. The Great Bible, a revision of the 1535 Coverdale Bible, was commissioned by Thomas Cromwell because the 1535 Bible had been prepared mostly from Latin and Dutch translations without a complete comparison with Greek and Hebrew texts. Cover- dale completed the first edition in 1539; the volume acquired by Auburn is thought to be from the fifth edition. The Bishops’ Bible was completed in 1568, the work of “able bishops and other learned men,” whose efforts were coordinated by Archbishop Matthew Parker. The volume acquired by Auburn appears to be from the sixth edition. The Catholic Rheims New Testament, sponsored by Cardinal William Allen and translated and annotated by Gregory Martin and others, was known at the time for its unabashedly controversial annotations. All three acquisitions are housed in the Treasure Room of Auburn’s Ralph Brown Draughon Library.

Auburn’s Library has also received a significant aerospace studies/aviation history collection. The collection, which was purchased from Hampton Books, Newberry, South Carolina, numbers between 5,000 and 6,000 items and is especially strong in materials for the study of the history of flight. While most of the collection is composed of monographs and serials, there are a number of technical reports and manuals, government agency documents, and other forms of printed material. Much of the collection is in English, but there is a significant amount of German language material. Other languages represented include French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and several others.

•Harvard University’s Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received a unique archive of tapes, slides, and periodicals relating to the influential Indian religious teacher Sri Anandamayi Ma (1896-1982). The archives were compiled by Gary Empie, a young American who lived in one of Sri Ma’s ashrams for eight years, until his death in 1981. Sri Anandamayi Ma taught by answering questions put to her, and Empie gathered 139 cassette tapes of these questions and answers, as well as films, slides, and photographs of Ma, and magazines and books relating to her life and work. The archives were presented to Harvard by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Empie and Markell Brooks.

•The Kent State University Library, Kent, Ohio, has received a cache of the rare, personal letters of Hart Crane (1899-1932), one of America’s major poets. More than 100 pieces of correspondence between the poet and his parents, publisher, and patron were donated by Crane scholar Vivian H. Pemberton, associate professor of English at KSU’s Trumbull Campus. Pemberton discovered 115 letters in the possession of Crane’s cousin, Betty Crane Madden of Cleveland. The letters include key correspondence between the poet and his father written between 1917 and 1931. The majority have never been published. Included among the letters is Crane’s carbon of a 1930 letter to critic Yvor Winters defending his 1930 poem “The Bridge.” Although the gist of the contents were known, the original had been destroyed by Winters. The collection also includes a 1930 letter to the poet from the widow of John Roebling, engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a letter to Crane’s stepmother from Peggy Cowley, his companion on the Orizaba, the ship from which he jumped to his death in 1932. Pemberton’s donation also includes a small pillow embroidered by Crane’s grandmother, subject of his poem, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” and the poet’s christening gown, acquired from another Crane cousin, Helen Hart Hurlbert, and her daughter, Zell Draz.

•Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has acquired the papers of Joan Kelly (1928-1982), professor of history at the City College of CUNY and a pioneer in women’s history and feminist theory. The papers, which include syllabi, lecture notes, and other teaching materials, as well as draft chapters of an unfinished work on the history of feminism and feminist thought, were donated to the library by Martin Fleisher, Kelly’s husband.

•The State University College at Buffalo Library, New York, has officially opened the Courier Express Newspaper Collection which was donated in 1984 by Cowles Media of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society and housed in SUNY-Buffalo’s Butler Library. Included in the collection is every issue of the newspaper, more than 100,000 photographs, about one million news clippings and several photographic works by the late Wilbur R. Porterfield, noted for his scenic photographs of New York State. The library has also received over 3,100 bound volumes (1880-1980s) of the Buffalo Evening News, the only major newspaper still in existence in Buffalo, New York.

•The Texas A & M University Library, College Station, has purchased four collections from the John Crerar Library. The collections include 2,666 volumes in botany and an additional 750 volumes in the areas of paleology, transportation and general geography. Acquisition of the collections became possible when the John Crerar Library merged with the University of Chicago and duplicates resulting from the merger became available.

•The University of Massachusetts Library, Amherst, has received from Professor of English John C. Weston 584 items in the field of Scottish literature. Authors featured in this donation are Robert Burns (62 items) and Hugh MacDiarmid (56 items); in the latter group are many signed and/ or inscribed copies presented to Professor and Mrs. Weston. Also included is a rare set of John Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 1879 revised edition, five volumes and supplement.

•Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired an extensive collection of manuscripts and letters by the 19th- century ornithologist and artist John James Audubon. The papers were given to Yale by Morris Tyler, Audubon’s great-great-grandson. The donation, marking the bicentennial of the naturalist’s birth, enriches an already large collection of Audubon materials at Yale. Most of the papers are from the period beginning in 1838, when Audubon was living in London producing and promoting The Birds of America, through the 1840s, when he and his sons were collaborating on their second project, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. The heart of the archive consists of correspondence among Audubon family members, letters to Audubon from colleagues in the natural sciences, and correspondence about the production of The Birds of America.

Grants

•The Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Chicago, has been awarded a grant of $15,000 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for support of a study on the availability of publications of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in North American research libraries. The Center entered into an agreement with the Academy in 1959, whereby the Center receives all their publications, except those with limited distribution. In exchange, the Center purchases U.S. publications for the Academy. Since the Center’s mission is to acquire rarely held publications which supplement and complement major collections in North American libraries, the question arose as to the extent to which the Center’s Slavic materials duplicate the collections of Center member libraries. An advisory panel chaired by Martin D. Runkle, director of libraries at the University of Chicago, has designed a study based on a randomly selected sample of 578 titles from the Academy’s 1980 bibliography. The sample has been checked against the OCLC and RLIN databases and the holdings of the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the Center. The MacArthur Foundation funds will be used to support checking the sample against the holdings, both cataloged and uncataloged, of as many as possible of the major collections of Slavic materials in this country and to analyze the results.

•Harvard University’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, supported by a three-year, $220,000 grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, has begun work to inventory music manuscripts written in the United States between 1600 and 1800. The inventory is part of the Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), an international effort centered in Kassel, West Germany, which is compiling and publishing catalogs of music source materials dating from before 1800. To date, 30 volumes have been published by RISM, dealing mostly with printed music.

•Kalamazoo College, Michigan, has received a $500,000 grant from the Pew Memorial Trust, Philadelphia, to support library automation activities. The grant will enable the college to select, install, and implement an integrated online library automation system during the next three years.

•Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, has been awarded a $750,000 grant by the Pew Memorial Trust toward the installation of state-of- the-art environmental controls in its University Library complex. Northwestern initiated its Preservation Project in 1982 to raise funds to install environmental controls to retard widespread paper deterioration, relieve damaging overcrowding in the bookstack areas, improve security and fire prevention procedures, and install exhibit cases for the university’s most valuable collections.

•The Research Libraries Group (RLG), Stanford, California, has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to aid in the creation of a nationally accessible database of state archival materials. The purposes of the grant are to create a national database of descriptions of state government records; improve user access to the records of each participating archival institution; provide a tool that will assist state government archivists in managing their holdings; provide a mechanism and a method for improving the appraisal public records; and establish an authoritative list of agency functions (a thesaurus of terms describing the activities of governmental bodies). The grant consists of $208,014 in outright funds for the first year, and $85,264 in matching funds for the second year. With the help of this grant, the state archives of California, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Utah, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are joining RLG to enter over 25,000 records into the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), RLG’s online bibliographic information system.

•Syracuse University Libraries, New York, has received a $160,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education for preservation of the Margaret Bourke-White collection. The collection includes 18,550 negatives, 24,000 prints and numerous personal papers left to Syracuse by the renowned Life magazine photojournalist at the time of her death in 1971. An interpositive (a print on transparent film) will be made for each negative and will become the archival image. The interpositive can be used to create a negative for production of future prints. The original negatives will be stored in a refrigerator or freezer. Original prints and personal papers will be placed in acid-free folders in acid-free boxes and stored in a low- humidity, low-temperature environment. Each image will be copied onto microfiche and indexed so that researchers can order copies. The preservation project, started in November, will be completed over a 15-month period.

•The University of California Office of the Assistant Vice President, Library Plans and Policies has received an LSCA grant of $173,700 from the California State Library for the University of California Libraries Retrospective Conversion Project. The project seeks to improve bibliographic access to an important segment of the libraries’ collections housed in the Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF) at Richmond, California, one of the two regional compact shelving facilities constructed by the University to provide housing for less-used research materials. The funds will provide for the total conversion of 50,000 titles, consisting of 30,000 Berkeley campus deposits and 20,000 Davis campus deposits. These materials are, for the most part, older and less common publications which are cooperatively held by the University in a single copy at the Facility. Many of the titles are unique to California, and even to the nation.

•The University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, have received an HEA Title II-C grant of $126,147 for the first year of a proposed three-year project to catalog the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements. The Wilcox Collection is considered an outstanding collection of American extremist political literature. The collection represents the ideological positions of nearly 7,000 left- and right-wing organizations in the United States from the 1950s to the present.

•The University of Maryland Health Sciences Library, Baltimore, has received a resource grant from the National Library of Medicine to mount a subset of the MEDLINE database on a library minicomputer. Under the $252,795, three-year grant, HSL will develop a user-friendly interface to allow easy access to the database by faculty, staff and students. The subset will include all MEDLINE journals currently held by the library and will cover a timespan of three years. HSL/MEDLINE will be mounted on a library minicomputer with 1.8 gigabytes of storage.

•The University of Pittsburgh Libraries have been awarded two HEA Title II-C grants totalling $150,485 for one year beginning October 1, 1985. One of the grants will be used to catalog and preserve a Bolivian Pamphlet Collection. This unique collection of pamphlets consist of primary source materials for research on Bolivia in the areas of political and public policy announcements, debates, party platforms, opinions and political discussions. The collection covers 1850 to the present. Catalog records generated by the project will be entered into the OCLC database; the pamphlets will be preserved by microfilming.

The second grant will begin the cataloging and preservation assessment of a collection of over 15,000 textbooks which comprise the John A. Nietz Textbook Collection. This collection is one of the three largest of such collections in the U.S. covering pre-1900 primary and secondary school texts. Although it is anticipated that the project will require two years to complete, over 6,000 of the textbooks will be cataloged during the first year and their catalog records added to the OCLC database.

News notes

•The Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, has named its Popular Culture Library’s Research Collection after Dr. and Mrs. Raymond Browne. Browne is professor and chair of the popular culture department at Bowling Green, and his wife Pat is editor and business manager of the University’s Popular Press. Browne and his wife have been frequent donors of materials to the Popular Culture Library, and he is a founder of the nationally recognized Popular Culture Association. A formal ceremony honoring the Brownes will be held this Spring.

•The Queens College Library, Flushing, New York is scheduled to be converted into a new $20 million art school, museum and art library for the college. Renovation will begin this Spring on the old library facility, known as Paul Klapper Hall. The general library facilities will move to a new building on campus. The art center is expected to occupy the new quarters, totalling 95,000 square feet, by spring 1988. The centerpiece of the project will be a new public art museum on the main floor of the three-story building. The former book stacks and reading rooms will be converted into studios, exhibit areas, and offices. A new auditorium and storage space will also be built. The project architect is the Manhattan-based firm Beyer Blinder Belle.

•The University of Missouri system has utilized a one-time state appropriation of $5,865,893 to link the state’s seven regional public libraries with a computerized catalog of library holdings on all University of Missouri campuses. The links enable UM libraries to disseminate acquisitions throughout the state, fill gaps in collections, strengthen holdings in subject fields, and address special needs.

•The Washington University Business School, St. Louis, Missouri, moved to a new building in January. The new facility includes a 14,000 square foot library, ten times larger than the Business Library’s previous facility. The library has an online catalog with access to the major vendors of online services and state-of-the-art microform readers and printers. Dedication of the new building is scheduled for April 2. ■ ■