ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The Library of the STATE UNIVERSITY College at Buffalo has acquired on microfilm the work of psychologist J. P. Guilford relating to his research on the Structure of the Intellect (SOI) model. The nearly 200 reels contain the tests, answer sheets, and supporting data for his SOI theory. The material corresponds to the Psychological Laboratory Reports located at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. An index to the microfilmed material by test and SOI “cell” name has been prepared by the college’s Department of Creative Studies.

• St. John’s University, New York, officially opened its William M. Fischer Lawn Tennis Collection on April 18, 1978. The collection was started by the late Mr. Fisher, an accountant and tennis enthusiast and contains material going back to the 1870s. The books, periodicals, pamphlets, yearbooks, rosters, newspaper clippings, and souvenir programs amount to more than 2,000 items. In addition there are boxes of photographs, three silver medals, and a silver cup won by Samuel Percy Hardy and Charles Sumner Hardy in the Pacific States Doubles in 1893.

Some of the more valuable monographs include C. F. Peile’s Lawn Tennis as a Game of Skill, 1884, and Lawn Tennis by James Dwight, 1886. Periodicals include Lawn Tennis and Croquet (1897-1905), Lawn Tennis and Badminton (1907-58), and American Lawn Tennis (1907-58). All books and periodicals are cataloged according to the Library of Congress Classification system.

The collection is open to scholars and researchers by previous arrangement.

• California State University, Long BEACH (CSULB) has acquired the remaining materials of the Dorothy Ray Healey Collection; this complements the original acquisition of 1974.

The collection is Healey s personal archive of radical-left literature acquired from the 1920s through the 1970s. Healey is considered one of the most influential woman Communists in America, a celebrated member of the Communist Party’s policy-making National Committee for twelve years and the chairwoman of its Southern California district for nearly twenty-five years, until her resignation in 1973.

The completed collection consists of numerous personal files, leaflets, periodicals, pamphlets, documents, and books. The materials are unique, in that this sort of political literature is seldom retained in an organized fashion and often gets lost or is discarded.

The diversity inherent in this collection will appeal to scholars interested in politics, especially in the areas of American labor history, California politics, and political repression. A partial listing of some of the items includes: a wide collection of internal discussion papers of the American Communist Party; early documents of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), including the founding document “Port Huron ”; materials documenting the black struggles from the 1930s through the 1970s; English-language documents on Chinese Communism dating from the 1930s; a wide collection of Soviet documents and pamphlets; materials from the House UnAmerican Activities Committee; publications of the LaFollette Committee; minutes of the first California Conference of the National Negro Congress; copies of Science and Society, the oldest continuous Marxist publication in the world; a collection of the Socialist newspaper Rip-Saw; and a complete file of the defense papers in the Smith Act trial.

The collection is deposited in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the university library.

• The University of Florida Library has acquired the Rabbi Leonard C. Mishkin Judaica Collection, which will be housed in the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica on the Gainesville, Florida, campus.

Rabbi Mishkin, superintendent of the Associated Talmud Torahs of Chicago, amassed approximately 55,000 volumes dealing with the political, social, economic, and intellectual history of the Jews in the ancient, medieval, and modem periods and in virtually all geographic areas.

Charles Berlin, Lee M. Friedman Bibliographer in Judaica at Harvard College Library, evaluated the collection, which contains complete runs of every major and most minor periodicals in the area of Jewish history, virtually every scholarly festschrift published in Jewish studies, and all the general universal histories of the Jews by Jewish scholars such as Graetz, Jost, Jawetz, Dubnow, Baron, and Mahler. The broad general surveys of particular aspects of Jewish history are included, as well as practically every general history by country and a very large number of histories of smaller local communities.

In addition to books and monographs, there are thousands of ephemeral publications commemorating an anniversary of an institution or of a person.

General and specialized reference works in the collection are comprehensive, and there is considerable strength in rabbinic literature. Special mention should be made of the more than 500 Passover Haggadah rituals, including such items as the Amsterdam 1695, Sulzbach 1712, and Triesti 1864 editions, as well as a number of Kibbuts Haggadot.

With the acquisition of Rabbi Mishkin’s collection, the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica will be a major research resource for the field when it is opened to the public in early 1979.

• Rice University’s Woodson Research Center has recently acquired the papers of Walter Benona Sharp and Estelle Boughton Sharp. Walter Sharp helped usher in the oil boom in Texas, drilling at Spindletop some seven years before the famous gusher. Later he played a prominent role in the Texas Company and was cofounder of Sharp-Hughes Tool Company. Sharp died an untimely death in 1912 after struggling to put out an oil field fire. His papers consist of letters written to his wife and family from 1890 to 1912 as well as business papers. His wife, Estelle Boughton Sharp, maintained the family’s interest in oil but increasingly turned to what she called her hobbies: social services, women’s clubs, and the international peace movement. Throughout her long life, Mrs. Sharp was a progressive in spirit if not in name, and in keeping with the goals of that movement she helped establish the United Fund, or as it was called then, United Charities, in Houston. Later she was involved with the League of Nations and the Texas Centennial Commission of 1936. Her papers cover a variety of topics, including United Charities, the peace movement, Rice University, her business and financial affairs, and her efforts to record the history of the oil industry in the Southwest.

Through the generosity of Dudley C. Sharp, Sr., son of Estelle and Walter Sharp, funds have been provided to process and add to the Sharp Collection. By September 1, 1978, a multidimensional collection composed of oral interviews, photographs, newspaper clippings, letters and business documents should be ready for the use of any interested researcher.

• Robert Burr, director of the Crosby Library at Gonzaga University, has announced the acquisition of first editions of fifteen different works by Charles Dickens.

The works, which include rare first editions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and his well-known novel, David Copperfield, were presented to the library by Mark F. Moran.

Other novels included in the set given to the library are Bleak House‚ The Pickwick Papers‚ Domhey and Son, Little Dorritt, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Cricket on the Hearth.

AWARDS

• The Council on Library Resources, Inc. (CLR), has chosen nine midcareer librarians to receive fellowships for the 1978-79 academic year. The fellows have developed research projects or internships aimed at improving their competence in the substantive, administrative, or technical aspects of librarianship. As in past years, this year’s fellows have selected topics that range widely in the field, from collection development in academic health sciences libraries to the organization of public libraries.

The CLR fellowship program began in 1969 and has thus far contributed to the professional development of more than 200 librarians. The fellowship award covers costs (exclusive of salary) incident to the proposed program, for which the candidate must have a leave of absence of at least three months.

Fellows were selected in a two-stage competitive process involving a screening committee and a selection committee. Screening committee members were Ina C. Brownridge, librarian, State University of New York at Binghamton; F. Kurt Cylke, chief, Division for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress; Joan Gotwals, associate director of libraries, University of Pennsylvania; and Foster E. Mohrhardt, former CLR senior program officer.

Selection committee members were William S. Dix, university librarian emeritus, Princeton University; Frederick Wagman, director of libraries, University of Michigan; and Robert Vosper, professor of library science, University of California at Los Angeles. Louis B. Wright, director emeritus of the Folger Shakespeare Library, chaired both committees.

The 1978-79 CLR fellows and their projects follow.

Virginia M. Bowden,associate director, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. A study of current monograph collection development in academic health science libraries to include the identification of current trends and institutional variables and the establishment of a base line for future comparisons.

Jay B. Clark,chief of technical services, Houston Public Library. The identification of technical and political problems in selected computer-based networks of public libraries similar to that planned for the Houston metropolitan area.

Virginia M. Bowden

Florence Kell Doksansky

Wayne Gossage

Hugo Kunoff

Jean F. Trumbore.

Florence Kell Doksansky,assistant librarian, Rotch Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A comparative study of staff development practices in several major academic libraries.

Wayne Gossage,library director, Bank Street College of Education, New York City. A study of education library services of twenty-three leading research universities.

Hugo Kunoff,subject librarian for modem languages, Indiana University. A study to be carried out in German archives and libraries of the emergence of research as a major responsibility of universities and its early impact on academic libraries.

Mary Drake McFeely,head, Reference Department, Smith College Library. The preparation of a bibliography on women and work in the United States and England from 1890 through World War I.

Dorothy A. Pearson,serials librarian, Princeton University. A study of the current organizational structure of and within technical services departments in large research libraries.

W. Boyd Rayward,assistant professor, Graduate Library School, University of Chicago. A study of the organization and administration of large public libraries and public library systems.

Jean F. Trumbore,associate reference librarian, University of Delaware. A two-month internship in the documents section of the Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, to improve her skills in the administration of an academic documents collection and a one-month internship at the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, to gain on-the-job experience in legislative reference work.

GRANTS

• The Houghton Library of HARVARD UNIVERSITY is in the midst of a microfilming project that will ensure future generations of scholars access to a unique and invaluable research tool—its own accessions records. The project is being carried out under the direction of Rodney G. Dennis, curator of manuscripts in the college library, with funding from a $13,803 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its purpose is twofold: first, to make a negative microfilm of the library’s accessions records and manuscript indexes, which are deteriorating and irreplaceable; and second, to supply electroprints of these records to agencies in Washington for inclusion in two ongoing nationwide manuscript surveys.

Every book, manuscript, and manuscript collection acquired by the Houghton Library since it opened in 1942 has been recorded on accessions sheets listing date of acquisition, source (donor, dealer, or sale), fund used for purchase, and exact price paid. The descriptions of printed books and manuscripts that appear in these documents often are useful to catalogers later, while the comprehensive inventories of manuscript collections remain the fullest treatment these receive, subsequent cataloging serving in fact to reduce, not to amplify, the accession descriptions. At the end of each year the sheets are bound into several thick volumes and shelved in Houghton’s Reading Room to be consulted by scholars. Presently there exist ninety-eight such volumes.

Shelved nearby, in addition, are about seventy-five bound indexes describing manuscript collections that were acquired by the college prior to 1942.

Together these volumes provide detailed documentation of the activities of one of the world’s great rare book and manuscript libraries from the day it made its first acquisition. The listing of printed books and analyses of manuscripts contained in the accessions records constitute important scholarly resources, and the exposition of provenance and price is peculiar to the Houghton Library.

• Northwestern University Library (NUL) and the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS have announced they have begun a cooperative project to make bibliographic data on African materials more readily available to other libraries.

The project is being undertaken with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has awarded Northwestern University an outright grant of $127,445. This was accompanied by a gift and matching offer of $74,437, making possible a total grant of $276,319.

Project director is James S. Aagaard, professor of computer sciences and electrical engineering and head of NUL’s Information Systems Development Office.

According to University Librarian John P. McGowan, NUL will create and maintain catalog data and location records for its own extensive African collection, housed in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, and for other libraries specializing in Africana.

To ensure that the data is of high quality and consistent with Library of Congress records, NUL will search all titles and entries in the Library of Congress files. If a title is not found, a new record will be created. If a title is found but the cataloging needs revision, the record will be corrected.

At regular intervals NUL will transfer its records to the Library of Congress in the machine- readable cataloging (MARC) communications format. The records will be distributed to the library community via the MARC Distribution Service and eventually incorporated into the Library of Congress data base.

• Northwestern University Library has initiated its new scholar-librarian program with the appointment of Ross W. Atkinson as the first scholar, according to University Librarian John P. McGowan.

A grant of $79,624, awarded jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council on Library Resources, will support the program for five years.

The program is designed to integrate the library more fully into the teaching and learning activities of the university, said Assistant Collection Librarian Charles Osburn, principal investigator on the project.

“The scholar-librarian program will help students, especially undergraduates, to he better informed about the library and the use of its facilities,” said Osburn.

The program is the only one of its kind in the U.S., according to Bibliographer Paul Saenger, associate principal investigator. “Our program will serve as a model for other university libraries,” he said.

Atkinson is the first of three scholar-librarians that will be appointed, each for three years. According to Osbum, each will have a doctorate degree in one area of the humanities, as well as a graduate degree in library science. Atkinson has a Ph.D. in German literature from Harvard University and a Master of Library Science degree from Simmons School of Library Science.

As scholar-librarian, Atkinson will assist in collection development in the area of German literature, provide bibliographic instruction for graduates and undergraduates, and engage in research leading to publication.

This spring, Atkinson will teach a course on German bibliography for upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students. The course will be offered through the German department. He also will develop a new course on the history of printing and publishing and their effects on literature.

MEETING SUMMARIES

• The annual membership meeting of the Texas Information Exchange (TIE) was held in the Perry-Castañeda Library of the University of Texas at Austin General Libraries on May 5, 1978.

TIE is a network of forty-eight major Texas libraries organized for the purpose of improving the sharing of library resources among Texas libraries through operation of a communications network and cooperation with other networks. The membership includes thirty-seven Texas academic libraries, the ten public libraries serving as major resource centers in the Texas State Library Communications Network, and the Texas State Library.

At the TIE business meeting, $1,000 was allocated to the Texas Conference on Library and Information Services to help cover expenses of conference publications and delegate orientation programming. Reports on a TIE survey on the use of computer-based reference services and the OCLC interlibrary loan module were heard. A resolution was passed that TIE and the AMIGOS Bibliographic Network explore the ramifications of closer cooperation in such areas as regional interlibrary loan policy, the Texas Numeric Register, a photoduplication accounting system, etc.

The program meeting featured a talk by C. Lee Jones, health sciences librarian at Columbia University, on the proposed National Periodicals Center.

MEETINGS & WORKSHOPS

JULY 21: WORKSHOP II is the second annual workshop to be held in Urbana, Illinois. The program, sponsored by the Illinois Clearinghouse on Academic Library Instruction, is aimed at the academic librarian interested in instructional programs. The workshop will address several areas of interest in library instruction: publicity and instructional programs, instruction for use of online systems, instruction for women’s studies research, instruction in the use of government documents. Among the speakers will be Michael Gorman, director of technical services at the University of Illinois, who will give a talk on “Catalog Use Studies and Their Implications for Instruction.”

Registration is $8 and includes lunch. To register, contact Susan Brandehoff, University of Illinois Library, 230 Library, Urbana, IL 61801.

July 31-August 3: The User Encounters THE LIBRARY: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FOCUS ON THE USER/SYSTEM INTERFACE IN Academic Libraries is the topic of an institute to be sponsored by Northeast Louisiana University, Sandel Library, under a grant from Title IIB Higher Education Act 1965 as amended. Its purpose is to present academic librarians with information and concepts to assist them in planning, reevaluating, and redesigning library environments to enhance the positive effects on usage. There is no registration fee, and accommodations, if desired, are $55 for the entire institute. Enrollment is limited to approximately fifty administrators or public service librarians in academic libraries and library science faculty.

For further information contact: Dr. Larry Larason, Project Director, Sandel Library, Northeast Louisiana University, Monroe, LA 71209.

August 3-4: Libraries and Information: Forecasting and Funding for the Future will be a day-and-a-half workshop conducted by the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Society for Information Science (LACASIS). It will take place at the University of California, Irvine campus. The keynote speaker will be Allen Kent, professor at the University of Pittsburgh. A sampling of topics included in the workshop are: applications of futures research to information science, the technological impact of new media, grantsmanship, and facilities design. The workshop has a nominal registration fee, and oncampus meals and lodging are available. For further information contact Katie Frohmberg, R & D Associates, Technical Information Center, 4640 Admiralty Way, P.O. Box 9695, Marina del Rey, CA 90291; (213) 822-1715, ext. 229.

September 8-11, 13-16: A four-day, intensive workshop entitled THE NUMBERS GAME: Quantitative Methods for Library PRACTITIONERS will be offered by the University of Michigan School of Library Science. The workshop is designed to provide participants with introductory knowledge of quantitative techniques that will be useful in managing libraries, such as concepts of measurement, data organization and representation (tabular and graphic representations), and use of descriptive statistics. Principal presenter will be George d’Elia, statistician/library consultant; Raymond Durrance and Rose Mary Magrill of the School of Library Science faculty will serve as program consultants. Two sessions of the workshop will be held, and attendance at each is limited to thirty-five. Registration closes August 15; fee for the workshop will be $135. For further information, contact the University of Michigan Extension Service, 412 Maynard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; (313) 764-5304.

MISCELLANY

• The Library of Congress has announced the formation of the Bibliographic Advisory Committee as an advisory group on the nationwide data base design project. The project, directed by the library’s Network Development Office and funded by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), will develop the design concepts and specifications for the configuration of a nationwide library' data base.

The design project is a continuation of efforts begun at the Library of Congress in 1976 to determine the role of authority files in a network environment. During the course of the initial study of two years ago, which was also funded by NCLIS and conducted by Edwin Buchinski of the National Library of Canada, it became apparent that designers of the network system had to address authorities concurrently with the problems related to bibliographic records and locations.

The role of the Bibliographic Advisory Committee will be to review the work completed by consultants who will be engaged to carry out parts of the design project and to assist in making those bibliographic decisions that may affect national bibliographic policy.

The members of the committee were chosen to provide representation of a broad spectrum of library needs. The persons who have agreed to serve on the committee are Frances Hinton, Free Library of Philadelphia; Joseph A. Rosenthal, University of California at Berkeley; Jeanne M. Holmes, National Agricultural Library; Paul Kebabian, University of Vermont; Ann Ekstrom, Ohio College Library Center; and Joseph H. Howard, Library of Congress.

As the authority system of the Library of Congress will be a major component of these efforts, the committee will be chaired by Joseph Howard. A liaison has been established between the Bibliographic Advisory Committee and the Network Technical Architecture Group (NTAG), which is currently involved in the design of a system to connect automated library bibliographic services. Howard Harris, the NTAG member from the University of Chicago, will provide the liaison.

The first meeting of the Bibliographic Advisory Committee was held during the Annual Conference of the American Library Association in June.

• The Library of Congress is replacing its National Union Catalog (NUC) with a series of master registers and brief entry indexes in an effort to trim publication costs, lessen the catalog’s unwieldiness and bulk, and improve user access to bibliographic information. The NUC, recording everything that appears on LC catalog cards and issued monthly, is cumulated every three months and again at year’s end. As a result, each entry is repeated two or three times. The prospective monthly master registers would reproduce all the same data supplied by the NUC but would not cumulate, thus eliminating duplication of entries. Separate registers would be issued in such areas as books, serials, films, maps, manuscripts, and microforms.

To enhance access to the data provided in the registers, LC plans to publish a series of “cumulative brief entry catalogs,” which will contain “sufficient data under each entry to satisfy many, perhaps most, reference needs.” These indexes, keyed to machine-generated reference numbers assigned to the entries in the register, will include a “Name Brief Entry Catalog,” “Title Brief Entry Catalog,’’ “Subject Brief Entry Catalog,” “Monographic Series Brief Entry Catalog,” “LC Class Number Brief Entry Catalog,” “Dewey Class Number Brief Entry Catalog,” “Register of Locations/LC Card Number Index,” and “ISBN/ISSN index.” Some of these represent entirely new finding tools, as LC currently does not produce indexes by title, ISBN, LC card number, LC classification, or Dewey.

• A new undergraduate readers’ library that will be constructed at the UNIVERSITY OF Virginia has been named the Harry Clemons Library, honoring the university’s tenth librarian.

The university’s board of visitors took the action Saturday, April 1, during a regular meeting at Charlottesville.

The $5 million library, included in the state’s $125 million bond referendum last November, is scheduled to be completed in July 1980. Working drawings for the 120,000-volume facility are to be ready in May, and bids opened in August.

Dr. Clemons, who died in 1968 at the age of 88, is credited with the construction and expansion of Alderman Library, which opened in 1938. He went to the university in 1927, when the library was still in the Rotunda, and remained there until his retirement in 1950.

During his tenure, the Alderman collection increased from 150,000 to approximately 600,000 volumes, and the number of manuscripts rose from a few thousand to about 3.5 million. Some 68,000 maps and 50,000 photographs, prints, and other items also were added.

A Corry, Pennsylvania, native, Dr. Clemons wrote University of Virginia Library, 1825-1950: Story of a Jeffersonian Foundation.