ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, has received a large collection of library and archival material on human sexuality in general and on homosexuality in particular, from the Mariposa Education and Research Foundation. The gift contains over 2,000 volumes and about 400 films, 300 videotapes, and extensive archival materials. In conjunction with the university’s current holdings in human sexuality, the Mariposa material will form one of Cornell’s most important research collections. With the help of a bequest in the will of 1954 Cornell graduate David Goodstein, a $2 millon endowment has been established to maintain the collection.

• Southern Oregon State College Library, Ashland, has acquired an extensive collection of authentic examples of regional dialects of English recorded over a period of 50 years from the 1930s to the 1980s. By far the major portion of the collection includes village and rural speakers of the British Isles, but dialects of the United States, Canada, and other areas where English is a first language are also included. Consisting of 47 cassettes organized in 8 volumes with much accompanying transcripted material, the collection is described in detail in a booklet available free upon request from Harold Otness, Southern Oregon State College Library, Ashland, OR 97520. The booklet, Dialects of English: Guide to the Tapes, was prepared by Donald E. Moore, emeritus professor of English and compiler of the collection.

• The University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection, Chapel Hill, has announced that its Allard K. Lowenstein Papers are open for research. Housed in 206 boxes and containing over 150,000 items, the papers document Lowenstein’s life as Congressman from New York’s 5th Congressional District, political activist, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs. They are specially valuable in materials on the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the “Dump Johnson” movement of which Lowenstein was chief architect, and materials on South Africa and Zimbabwe/Rhodesia. The papers were a gift to UNC from Jennifer Lowenstein Littlefield in December 1982. A printed guide to the collection is available from the Wilson Library for $5.00.

• The University of Texas at Arlington has added a number of important materials to its Special Collections Division during the past year. A major acquisition is the Fort Worth Star Telegram collection of over 200,000 photographs and clippings from the 1880s to the 1960s—one of the most complete newspaper archives in the United States.

Another major photographic collection consists of 20,000 prints and negatives by the noted Texas photographer Basil Clemons, emphasizing the oil boom of the 1920s and 1930s. The collection was a gift from Vicki Vinson, of Dallas.

The Political History Archives has received the papers of Bob McFarland, a noted Texas senator, and 44 boxes of papers of the Texas American Civil Liberties Union.

The UTA Cartographic History Library has received a collection of rare 19th century maps of the Texas Gulf Coast region from Perry Bass, of Fort Worth; a 16th century portolan chart of the British Isles by the Venetian cartographer Battista Agnese; and a manuscript map of the Texas borderlands drawn by the Franciscan priest Juan Agustín Morfí in 1778.

The Robertson Colony Collection has received the diary of Robert Leftwich kept in Mexico City from 1822 to 1824. The diary contains the first record of laws established for the colonization of Texas and as such is the cornerstone of Texas history.

Finally, the Jenkins Garrett Library has received a first-hand manuscript account by Karl Buster of the disastrous Mier expedition into Mexico in 1842.

• Yale University’s Collection of Western Americana recently acquired the archive of the Verein zum Schutze Deutscher Einwanderer in Texas, assembled and maintained by the directors of the Ve- rein. The archive, which preserves the history of one of the most important colonization efforts in Texas history, contains over 17 linear feet of manuscripts and printed material with original correspondence, reports, documents, business records, contracts, promotional material, and associated items. Only a small portion of the printed material has been recorded by bibliographers. The Verein, commonly known as the Adelsverein, was an organization of German noblemen first associated in 1842 for the purpose of supporting emigration by German nationals to Texas. During its most active years, the Adels verein was responsible for settling thousands of new residents in Texas, notably in the town of New Braunfels.

Grants

• The Associated Natural Sciences Institutions (TANSI) have been awarded a grant by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for the preservation of their archival holdings. The project will create a model for cooperative archival management that will permit easy and rapid access to a national network of natural history materials. The project member institutions are: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History, the California Academy of Science, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

• Brown University Library, Providence, Rhode Island, has received an HEA Title II-C grant of $170,845 to catalog the 18th century European Americana collections in the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries and to enter the records into the RLIN and OCLC databases. The initial focus will be on Continental imprints not yet in either database.

• The New York Public Library has received a $2.5 million donation by David Rockefeller in honor of Mrs. Vincent Astor, a great champion of the Library and the cause of literacy. The contribution will be used to relocate and restore the Reading Room of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, and to endow a curatorship for the Division. It will also establish an annual $10,000 award for distinguished leadership and outstanding achievement in literature, culture or education. The Reading Room, the curatorship, and the award will each bear the name of Brooke Russell Astor.

• Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded a $750,000 grant from the Pew Memorial Trust toward the $3.4 million expansion and renovation of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. The renovations, designed by the Boston architectural firm of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, will double the space the library now occupies and completely modernize its facilities. Planned improvements include new reading rooms, a centralized reader services area, climate-controlled storage areas, a conference room and offices for visiting scholars, expanded automation, new security systems, and improved access for the handicapped.

• The University of California, Berkeley, has received LSCA funds through the California State Library to improve access for the state’s public libraries to UC Berkeley’s library collections. The funds will permit a major step forward in the Library’s ability to participate in multi-library type programs and serve as an information resource for California public libraries. Project funds will be used to install terminals in the California State Library and seven regional system ILL headquarters to provide online access to UC Berkeley’s database, GLADIS. An online interlibrary loan module will be developed on GLADIS to support requests from the library systems and the California State Library for materials held at UC Berkeley. In addition, the number of Berkeley’s titles accessible online will be expanded through retrospective conversion of 30,000 manual catalog records for titles of particular interest to patrons of California libraries.

• The University of Minnesota Bio-Medical Li- brary, Minneapolis, has received a grant from the Research Libraries Group for the retrospective conversion of the holdings of the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine. In the first year of the project approximately 15,000 records will be input. Should continued funding be provided the entire collection of 31,000 records will be in RLIN by mid-1987, making it the first major history of medicine collection in that database.

• The University of Oklahoma School of Li- brary and Information Studies and its Science and Public Policy program have been awarded a grant of $148,000 to investigate the effectiveness of public versus private online scientific and technological information (STI) systems. The study will compare the effectiveness of the two types of systems, as well as recommend techniques to increase access to Federal research contained in these systems and provide a policy analysis of key issues related to the technology transfer process.

• The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music has received an HEA Title II-C grant of $233,000 for a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of proposed methods and standards for retrospective conversion of music materials. The standards are those developed at the Council on Library Resources Conference on Standards for the Retrospective Conversion of Music last year (see CirRL News, July/August 1985, p.342). The pilot project, in which the Universities of Indiana and California at Berkeley will also take part, will add or enhance approximately 30,000 titles in the OCLC and RLIN networks. Work on the pilot began in October and will continue for twelve months.

• The University of Texas at Arlington’s Special Collections Division has been awarded a grant of $76,000 from the Sid Richardson Foundation for the purchase of rare books, manuscripts and maps relating to the history of Texas and the Spanish Borderlands. Another grant of $10,000 from W. A. Moncreith Jr. has been added to a permanent fund for continued development of UTA’s Special Collections.

News notes

• The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries (CORAL), of San Antonio, Texas, has completed a two-year project to develop a union list of periodicals within OCLC’s union list component. The new CORAL Union List of Periodicals consists of 17,532 titles and 39,500 separate holdings records. The work was funded by successive one-year LSCA Title III grants of $61,000 and $85,000, which were administered through the Texas State Library.

• The Illinois Institute of Technology Library, Chicago, has been dedicated the Paul V. Galvin Library in honor of the founder of Motorola, Inc. The naming of the library recognizes the Galvin family’s long leadership role in IIT affairs and its generous support for the university. Robert W. Galvin, the chair of IIT’s Board of Trustees since 1979 and the son of the late Paul Galvin, was elected to IIT’s Board in 1953. The dedication marks the completion of a program for expansion of the library facilities for university and midwest business use. The departure of the John Crerar Library from IIT to the University of Chicago (see Cò-RL News, December 1984, p.606) enabled IIT to open up what had been two closed-stack libraries into a single open-stack library. Reference collections are now grouped on the upper level and circulating collections on the lower level near the new circulation desk and security checkpoint.

Two new staff members at ACRL headquarters

Mary Ellen Davis

Lorraine Dorff

Mary Ellen Davis has been appointed ACRL progam officer effective November 1, filling the position recently vacated by Sandy Whiteley. She was most recently program officer for the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies, an ALA division. In her capacity as ASCLA program officer, Davis was responsible for the daily operation of the division’s support activities and for the planning and implementation of programs and activities for the division. In addition, she functioned as assistant project director for AS- CLA’s “Let’s Talk About It” program.

Davis holds an MLS and a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from the University of Illinois, as well as a master’s degree in education from Central Michigan University. Her responsibilities at ACRL will include advisory services to the library profession and related organizations; management of the ACRL advisory, publications, and foreign exchange librarian programs; and counseling the ACRL executive director on academic library issues of national and local importance.

Lorraine Dorff has joined ACRL as assistant editor of College ò Research Libraries News, effective September 30. Her most recent position was in the publications department of the Illinois State Bar Association in Springfield, Illinois, where she was managing editor of the ISBA newspaper The Bar News. She has also worked as a newswriter for WILL-AM/FM radio in Urbana, Illinois, and completed a newsroom internship at WGN- TV/Channel 9 in Chicago.

Dorff holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois. Her responsibilities at ACRL will include compiling the “Appointments,” “Publications,” and “News from the Field” columns for CòRL News, coordinating the classified advertising, assisting in the production of ACRL section newsletters, and general production for C&RL News and Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship.