ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Dallas Theological Seminary, Texas, has received the archives of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, headquartered in Walnut Creek, California. Founded in 1977 with a ten- year agenda of summit meetings of biblical scholars, congresses for the Christian public, and regional seminars in local churches on the nature, meaning and applications of the Bible, ICBI ceased operations with the close of its tenth fiscal year March 31,1988. Its records include administrative correspondence, financial records, promotional materials, publications, papers of the summits and conferences, audio and video cassettes, minutes of Board meetings, news and prayer letters, and other items.

•Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.,has acquired the papers of Senator Brien McMahon (1903-1952), who represented Connecticut from 1944 to 1952. The papers are the gift of McMahon’s daughter, Patricia M. Fox. McMahon was an early architect of civilian control of atomic energy and the first chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; the Atomic Energy Act bears his name. Prior to his senatorial career McMahon had been Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, where he became known for prosecuting coal mine operators in Harlan County, Kentucky, who illegally opposed the right of miners to strike. The McMahon archives consist of seven linear feet of correspondence, manuscripts, speeches, phonograph records, photographs, and related printed items. The collection primarily deals with McMahon’s tenure as Assistant Attorney General, including materials on the Harlan County trial; Democratic politics of the 1930s and 1940s, both local and national; and McMahon’s Senate campaign. In addition, there is material from his two Senate terms, though the bulk of the McMahon senatorial papers are at the Library of Congress.

•Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, has acquired the papers of literary critic and conservative writer Joseph Michael Lalley (1896-1980). Lalley was a newspaper man in Philadelphia and Baltimore before becoming an editorial writer and literary critic for the Washington Post from 1937 until 1961. After retiring from the Post‚ he became the book review editor for the conservative journal Modern Age: A Quarterly Review. The papers, which are housed in the Special Collections Department, consist largely of incoming letters and Lalley’s writings.

•The New York State Library’s Manuscripts and Special Collections Unit, Albany, has received the papers of the Lydecker family, prominent in New York State history for more than two centuries. The papers are the donation of the Rev. William John Fisher Lydecker of Allendale, New Jersey, and include the materials of his grandfather, Charles Edward, and his father, Leigh Kent Lydecker. The papers will be of interest to researchers in the history of the famous 7th Regiment of New York City; World Wars I and II, including the role of nursing in the latter war; and the history of the Long Lake region of the Adirondacks.

•The University of Texas at Arlington’s Special Collections Division has acquired the papers of Texas businessman George Washington Armstrong (1866-1954), the gift of Armstrong’s grandson, Thomas K. Armstrong of Natchez, Mississippi. A lawyer turned entrepreneur, Armstrong amassed a fortune in oil, ranching, steel and farming interests before going bankrupt in the early 1920s. With the help of East Texas lumber magnate John H. Kirby, he was able to rebuild his empire in succeeding years. Armstrong wrote more than 20 pamphlets on topics ranging from the Federal Reserve System (whose deflationary policies he blamed for his bankruptcy), to the vagaries of Wall Street, and Communism. An ardent conservative, Armstrong unsuccessfully sought the governorship of Texas in 1932. His papers consist of approximately 100 linear feet of material, including business and personal correspondence, contracts, invoices, printed material, Armstrong’s published writings, deeds, abstracts of title, scrapbooks, and research files.

•The University of Texas at Austin’s Barker Texas History Center has acquired a collection of documents, correspondence and clippings from Lawrence C. Pope of Austin, a former bank president who spent 21 years in prison for armed robbery of two Texas banks, and is now a well-known prison reform activist. Assembled during his years of incarceration (1961-1982), the Pope collection focuses primarily on the Texas Department of Corrections and contains information on prisoner’s rights, violence in prisons, TDC finances, parole matters, prison farms, prison medical care and living conditions, and Pope’s contracts with inmates. Also included are materials on banks and banking. Augmenting the collection are nineteen 90-minute audiocassettes of interviews with Pope, in which he recounts his life from his earliest years to the present. Paroled since 1982, the 69-year-old Pope continues to devote much of his time to prison reform issues.

Grants

•The University of Idaho, Moscow, is among a consortium of seven Idaho libraries which have received a LSCA Title III grant of $41,800 to establish and operate a pilot project telefacsimile network. Idaho’s Main and Law Libraries are two of the seven involved. The other institutions are the East Bonner County District Library, Lewis Clark State College, Idaho State Library, Boise State University, and Idaho State University. For the 15 months beginning May 1988, participating libraries will use telefax transmission for all interlibrary document exchanges of 30 pages or less. The goal will be to transmit documents within 24 hours of the request, with rush orders to be delivered within four hours. The system may also be used to expedite communications and document delivery to out-of-state locations. It is seen as a prototype for document delivery projects elsewhere.

•The University of Iowa, Iowa City, has been awarded a grant of $140,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for conservation education. The three-year grant is to provide support for apprenticeship training and a series of advanced seminars for experienced conservators. Two persons will be intensively trained under a master conservator in all aspects of paper conservation, the structures of books from all periods, and the conservation of materials used in their creation. In addition, the apprentices will learn the art of fine binding. The advanced workshops will include one-week sessions on valuable pamphlet collections, 19th century cloth case binding, and non-adhesive bindings versus adhesive bindings on wrapper-covered books. These programs will be offered once each year for the three-year period.

•The University of Southern California, Los Angeles, has received a major $9 million challenge grant from the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation for a new teaching library to be built on campus. As a result of the gift, the largest to date in support of “The Campaign for USC,” the University is in the process of selecting an architect to design the building. USC has raised nearly half of the $24.7 million that will be needed to complete the teaching library, which is among the largest projects of the overall campaign. When completed, it will house a core collection of 200,000 volumes related to current instruction. A unique feature will be hundreds of individual computer and audiovisual workstations which will provide access to in- house, local and national databases.

•The University of Washington, Seattle, has re- ceived a 1987/88 HEA grant of $144,000 for the preservation of its J. Willis Sayre Historical American Vaudeville and Theater Photograph Collection. The project involves indexing the photographs using a microcomputer, creating an optical videodisk from the photographs, and linking the microcomputer database with the videodisk. The Sayre Collection includes some 24,300 vaudeville and theater photographs from the late 1890s to the 1920s as well as silent film stills.

•The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York City, has been awarded $23,167 as part of the New York State Library’s Discretionary Grant Program for Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials. As part of a one-year project which began April 1, the YIVO Library will microfilm 1,310 badly deteriorated Yiddish books from its Vilna collection, all published before 1939. For 15 years after its foundation in 1925, YIVO maintained its headquarters in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuanian S.S.R.). Its collections were systematically looted or destroyed during the Nazi occupation, but some of the materials were recovered after the war and brought to New York, where YIVO relocated in 1940.

News notes

•Augustana College’s Augustana Library Asso- ciates, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is the winner of the FOLUSA/Baker & Taylor Award for the outstanding academic library Friends group for 1987. Now in its fourth year, the Augustana Library Associates grew last year from 150 to 275 members as the result of an intensive direct mail and telephone campaign. Funds raised through membership likewise jumped by 78% to $13,700. In addition to purchasing badly-needed additional study carrels for the library, the Associates have continued a mission to bring cultural opportunities to its members and to the community. An Irish Festival centering around the life and works of George Bernard Shaw was a major feature of the past year’s program, following the donation of 400 volumes relating to the writer. Lectures, exhibits, and musical and theatrical performances were all included as part of the four-month event, mostly for free or at a nominal charge. In 1985 the Associates received a $15,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a Pulitzer Prize Winners lecture series that has brought many distinguished speakers to Sioux Falls. The group has also sponsored a weekly public radio show.

•The State University of New York at Buffalo’s Health Sciences Library is in the process of establishing a cooperative relationship with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College. The CAMS-PUMC medical library is China’s largest, with a collection of some 40,000 volumes. SUNY-Buffalo’s Health Sciences Library, now in its 142nd year, serves as a regional resource library for the National Library of Medicine. The agreement is the latest in a series of cooperative exchanges between SUNY-Buffalo and the People’s Republic, which began in 1980 when a SUNY professor was one of eight U.S. academics to help found China’s National Center for Industrial Science and Technology Management at Dailan. Since then, educational exchanges, an Intensive English Language Institute, a “young executive program,” and a China Trade Center have all been established. It is expected that the cooperative medical library arrangement will center around the transmission of emergency or otherwise inaccessible information via telefacsimile. The system would also be used for educational and research purposes, and could also be used by U.S. doctors seeking information on traditional Chinese medical practices such as acupuncture.

ACRL staff profile

JoAn S. Segal, ACRL’s tenth executive director, is completing her fourth year with the Division. The years 1984-1988 have been important ones for ACRL in building and implementing a plan- ning process, in the initi- ation and completion of many new projects, in continued fiscal success, in attention to commun- ication with officers, committee and Board members, and in inno- vative work relations at ACRL Headquarters.

JoAn Segal

Segal’s education in- cludes bachelor’s (Rutgers) and master’s (Columbia) degrees in librarianship and a doctorate (Colorado) in com- munication. Her long career includes work in aca- demic libraries (Rutgers Agricultural School, Fair- leigh Dickinson College, Teachers College at Columbia, and New York University); special li- braries (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carter Products, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education); consulting (National Center for Higher Education Management Systems); teaching (Colorado); and library networking (Bib- liographical Center for Research).

Just before coming to ACRL in 1984, Segal had served four years as BCR’s executive director, an excellent preparation for the association management principles needed at ALA. She helped move BCR out of its fund balance deficit, increased membership, initiated new services, carried out a planning process, improved communication with the Board, committees and members, and revised the staffing architecture.

Segal’s career has followed one of several typical female patterns. She completed her library education, worked for several years, then stepped out of the workforce to raise children, returning gradually—at first on a part-time basis—to her career and further education. But, like many well- educated and easily bored mothers of small children, she found other things to do. She worked for the United Negro College Fund, the Denver Adult Education Council, the Boulder Arts Council, and for 15 years worked as an actress in several community and repertory theatre companies in Colorado. Some of her favorite roles were in Pinter’s Birthday Party‚ Brook’s Marat/Sade‚ and Zindel’s Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

“I’m proud of the things that have been happening at ACRL while I’ve been here. But I still want more!” Segal said. “A more exciting conference, with large attendance and people clamoring for encores. New interesting publications, both periodical and monographic. More members and greater member participation. More projects that help members face the exciting but constantly changing reality of libraries. More cooperative projects with other ALA units and other organizations. More staff involvement in arranging our work. And more efficient use of automation and other resources, to improve our ability to be a client- centered organization.”

Returning again to her personal life, Segal described her Chicago experience. “Here I am, a gray-haired, middle-aged matron and grandmother, still espoused after more than a third of a century to the same man, but living alone in Chicago with my family in Colorado. (I believe the term ‘commuter marriage’ is an oxymoron!) But I’m taking advantage of the city; I’m a member of the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art; I subscribe to and attend all productions of the Goodman Theatre and the Steppenwolf; I attend chamber music and other concert series each season; I see two or three operas a year, other plays, and lots of movies. I like to entertain, so I invite people over a lot. I also like to cook, so they often accept. The moment of truth comes when they find the agenda includes reading plays or poetry and discussing them! Oh well, they can always leave— but usually they find they like it!”