ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Mary Ellen Davis

Chapman University Library has been awarded a grant from Sun Microsystems to establish the InfoMagic-Sun Information Literacy Showcase. The grant consists of seven Sun computers valued at $69,235, a sum that has been matched by an anonymous donor as part of the university’s fundraising campaign. InfoMagic is a multimedia training program for teaching research skills, developed by Dallas Kenny at Chapman University Library. It is administered to all freshmen during their first and second semesters at Chapman. The purpose of the new lab is to develop and test InfoMagic training programs based on JAVA.

DePaul University Library has receiveda $35,000 grant from Ameritech for staffing for the digital geographic slides project. For this project, DePaul is digitizing geography travel slides from the last 50 years of travel of DePaul Geographical Society members and others. The project is also being supported by a $12,500 internal grant from DePaul’s Quality of Instruction Council (QIC). The library’s electronic reserve/annotation project also received $12,500 from the QIC.

Florida International University Libraries received two grants to further develop and expand the Everglades Digital Library. The National Park Service has awarded the library $74,000 to identify, catalog, and digitize technical reports, photos, maps, and datasets for inclusion in the Everglades Digital Library. The South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force awarded the library $5,000 to provide electronic publishing and cataloging services for the annual conference of the Walt Dineen Society, an interdisciplinary forum for South Florida Science. Visit the digital library at http:// everglades.fiu.edu/.

The Johns Hopkins University's MiltonS. Eisenhower Library received a gift of $250,000 from longtime library supporter Patricia Schaefer. The library is using the gift to launch a major renovation and expansion of its audiovisual center. The renovation will include the addition of state-of-the-art multimedia computer technology, the training of staff to manage and service new equipment, and the further development and preservation of audiovisual collections. Schaefer’s gift will also be used to initiate an endowment to assure the library’s continued ability to acquire new materials and equipment. Schaefer’s gift continues a family tradition of support for the university that began when her father, an alum, established two chairs in the School of Engineering. Patricia Schaefer has provided 30 years of library service to public libraries, and retired in 1995 as director of the Public Library of Muncie, Indiana.

The University of South Carolina hasrecently received three grants: $69,353 to the South Caroliniana Library from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for use for the project “Accessing the Emerging South: A Project to Enhance Access to Unprocessed Manuscript Collections in the South Caroliniana Library”; $4,980 to the Science Library from BellSouth to search for and organize science-related Internet resources into an electronic library that can be used directly by students; and $84,227 from the NEH to Henry G. Fulmer, librarian at the South Caroliniana Library, to catalog and preserve a collection of 18thand 19th-century records from South Carolina plantations.

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville,Libraries has received an additional $95,000 under the United States Newspaper Program, the NEH-funded program that aims to locate, catalog, and preserve American newspapers from the earliest colonial times to the present. During this third year of the Tennessee Newspaper Project, staff will continue to catalog and inventory the estimated 8,000 unique American newspaper titles held in Tennessee libraries, historical societies, and newspaper offices.

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; e-mail: tmorris@ala.org.

Virginia Union University, one of the historically black colleges and universities, received $200,000 from the Lilly Endowment to encourage faculty, staff, students, and the community to use its new library and resource center.

Acquisitions

The papers of William Maxwell, legendary editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1976, have been acquired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The papers include more than 5,000 letters to Maxwell from some of the country’s greatest writers from 1936 to the present, all of whom were edited by Maxwell for The New Yorker. They include: John Updike, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, John O’Hara, and Frank O’Connor. Also included in the collection are hand-corrected typescripts of nearly all of Maxwell’s own novels, and first editions and foreign-language editions of his books. Maxwell attended UIUC both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student.

This glass sculpture given to the U.S. Naval Academy honors two nuclear submarines lost at sea.

A 3,400-volume collection of booksabout submarines and submarine warfare was recently donated to the Nimitz Library, U.S. Naval Academy, by the family of the late Thomas O. Paine, administrator of NASA at the time of the first moon landings. In April the books were presented at a ceremony held at the academy. The ceremony recognized and memorialized the contributions of the navy’s submarine service, and dedicated and celebrated the gift both of the Paine collection and of a glass sculpture honoring the two American nuclear submarines lost at sea—USS Thresher (1963) and USS Scorpion (1968). Donations from 12 academy graduating classes funded the memorial and the cataloging of the Paine Collection, the latter enabling the library to accept the gift.

The Hugh Kenner Archive has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Hugh Kenner, considered by many the premier scholar-critic of literary modernism, is the author of 25 books, critical essays that have appeared in some 200 book publications, and nearly 1,000 pieces for periodicals. From his early 1951 study, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, to his monumental survey in 1971, The Pound Era, and continuing in 1989 and 1990 with his two collections of essays, Mazes and Historical Fictions, Kenner has mapped the modernist terrain. The archive encompasses the entire range of materials reflecting the production of the critic’s books, reviews, articles, and introductions. The publication record of Kenner’s books is represented by his files on the various subject authors and by his own manuscripts, typescripts, galley and page proofs, correspondence with authors and publishers, and graphics. The archives also contain interviews with and articles about Kenner, as well as his awards, honors, and honorary degrees. ■