ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Hugh Thompson

Alvemia College's Frank A. Franco Library Learning Center has received $20,000 from the Arcadia Foundation to increase its collection of materials in the areas of early childhood, elementary, and secondary education. The funds will be used to pur- chase books, audiovisual material, educational soft- ware, and a multimedia workstation.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) was awarded $228,646 by the U.S. Department of Education under its Strengthening Research Library Resources Program (HEA Title II-C) for a one-year project to increase researchers’ access to foreign newspapers in the CRL collection. The focus of the project is to catalog the backlog of foreign newspaper titles and add bibliographic and holdings information to CRLCATALOG (the Center’s online public access catalog), to the OCLC database, and to the Research Libraries Group’s RLIN database.

Radcliffe College has received a grant from the Carl J. Herzog Foundation to endow the position of curator of manuscripts at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. The funding consists of a $250,000 gift plus a two-year challenge grant, under which the Herzog Foundation will match contributions up to $625,000. If the challenge is fully met, Radcliffe College will receive a total of $1.5 million to endow the curatorship.

The Research Libraries Group (RLG) has received an unrestricted grant of $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to be spent over the next two years to improve RLG’s operating infrastructure and broaden its services.

The grant will support bring- ing some contracted services in-house and carrying out institutional changes to im- prove long-term efficiency and economy.

Trenton State College's Roscoe L. West Library has been awarded a competitive grant of $25,000 from the Central Jersey Regional Li- brary Cooperative, and has been designated a Tele- phone Reference Referral

Center. The library will provide telephone ref- erence assistance and referral to the 180 mem- ber libraries of the regional cooperative, which covers Mercer, Monmouth, and Ocean coun- ties in New Jersey.

The University of Arizona Library has received a $24,000 grant from the Council on Library Resources to develop methods and models for achieving quality goals and productivity improvements in research libraries. The results will be compiled into a resource notebook and made available to other libraries through the Association of Research Libraries Office of Management Services.

The University Center in Georgia Libraries’ Special Collections Group has received a grant of $228,966 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and $70,000 from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in New York. The funds will be used for a two-year project to enter descriptions of the libraries’ manuscript collections (some 2,500 personal papers, diaries, business records, and organizational records) into RLIN and OCLC.

The University of Hartford's Allen Music Library has received two grants from the William and Alice Mortensen Foundation totaling $12,325 to be used for the acquisition of books; art music scores or parts and music theater vocal scores; sound recordings of art music, music theater, and folk music; and music theater videos.

The University of Illinois Asian Library has received an $18.000 Library Support Program Award from the Japan Foundation to pur- chase material on modern Japanese drama and theater. The 450-volume collection of 20th-cen- tury works will emphasize post-World War II Japanese theater and will include plays, drama criticism, histories of Japanese theater, video- tapes, and the collected works of contempo- rary playwrights.

Ed. note: Entries in this column are taken from library newsletters, press releases, and other sources. To ensure that your news is considered for publication, write to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795. Photos related to your news will be considered for publication.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Health Sciences Library has been awarded a $302,000 grant from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust to provide health care work- ers in rural North Carolina electronic access to health information. Selected community, migrant, and rural health centers, and county health departments will be connected to the li- brary by computer. A con- nection is planned for at least one primary health care site in all 100 North Carolina counties and in other sites where the com- puter technology is already in place.

The University of Penn- sylvania Library has re- ceived $30,000 from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York to catalog and preserve some medieval and early modern codex manuscripts of Italian origin. Penn’s library holds more than 1,400 codex manuscripts ranging in date from the 12th to the 19th centuries, and from Europe, the co- lonial Americas, and the Islamic world. Catalog records will be entered into the Archival and Manuscript Control database of RLIN in a cata- loging format developed at Penn for codices. Holdings information will be shared with OCLC.

The University of Redlands in California has received a large gift from Frank Moore, the retired co-owner and editor of the Redlands Daily Facts, and his wife Sidney, for the computer automation of Armacost Library. The gift completely funds the second phase of automation, which will include computers and software to enable library users to determine what materials are held by the library and what is available, as well as supporting administrative functions such as accounting and management of periodical orders and subscriptions.

Samuel Beckett

Photo credit: Boston College

Acquisitions

A collection of correspondence between Samuel Beckett, the Irish novelist and play- wright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, and Alan Schneider, the man who di- rected every Beckett play premiere in America, has been acquired by Boston College’s John J.

Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collec- tions. The correspondence, which covers a 30-year period from 1955 to 1984, includes over 500 letters that cover a range of spe- cific questions regarding sets, staging, music, and production strategies for Beckett’s plays.

Revised copies of much of the published poetry of Robert Penn Warren have been acquired by Emory University. These working copies were revised by the poet in preparation for a collected edition which was never completed. Each of the major collections was revised, some slightly and others substan- tially. Warren crossed through two entire po- ems from Being Here (1980), writing “bad poem” in the margin of one. The revisions are an important resource for scholars interested in Warren’s poetic development and cast light on the concerns of his final years.

Two gifts of recent publications from Taiwan on a variety of subjects have been received by the Ohio University Libraries. A gift of 200 books was given by the National Central Library in Taiwan and 253 books were given by the Taiwan-based Cultural Foundation of the United World Chinese Commercial Bank.

The Cotsen Children's Collection, a gift of Lloyd E. Cotsen, a member of the Class of 1950, has been acquired by Princeton University Library. The collection of over 20,000 items includes illustrated books, prints, drawings, manuscripts, games, puzzles, hornbooks, and toys. Highlights include a unique, privately printed first edition of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit inscribed as a Christmas present to Potter’s cousin. The oldest items date from the 15th century: a Latin primer from 1486 and a Latin translation of the ancient Hindu fables of “Bidpai” printed in 1489.

The National Pasta Association (NPA) collection, composed of important materials relating to the development of the pasta industry in the United States, has been acquired by the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. The collection includes about 75 volumes of unique materials, including issues of the NPA’s first official publication, The New Macaroni Journal. Historical data is presented about the manufacturing and marketing of pastas, as well as the transition of the industry from immigrant family-based manufacturers to multinational firms.

Custody of the archives and records of both the American Law Institute (ALI) and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has been given to the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Biddle Law Library, which will index and inventory the archival materials. Included is comprehensive documentation of both organizations’ continuing joint efforts over the past half century to develop, monitor, and update the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). The UCC is a joint venture of the NCCUSL and the ALI first proposed officially in 1940 and initially promulgated in 1951. It has been enacted in some form in all 50 states, as well as in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The personal and business papers of Keith Hayes Kahle, engineer and founder of Central Airlines, have been acquired by the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The papers document the creation of Central Airlines in Oklahoma and its subsequent operations from Fort Worth’s Meacham Field and Amon Carter Field from 1949 to 1967. Included among the 115 cubic feet of papers are correspondence, diaries, photographs, corporate minutes, charts, and scrapbooks documenting the political and business effort necessary to create and operate a successful airline, one that maintained a perfect safety record during its 18 years of operation.

The Robert C. Gibson Rare Book Collection, comprising over 4,000 volumes of rare Canadiana, has been acquired by York University Archives and Special Collections. Included in the collection are works related to the Arctic and early exploration of North America, pre- and post-confederation works, early monographs pertaining to provincial and local history across Canada, and rare works on English and European history.

York University has also acquired the papers of Herbert Whitakker, a drama critic for the Montreal Gazette and Toronto’s Globe and Mail. The acquisition includes correspondence, lectures, and theater reviews from Whitakker’s distinguished career in the theater arts spanning the years 1933 to the present, which included directing and designing as well as criticism.