ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• The Archives of Appalachia, Johnson City,Tennessee, has acquired the Mary Barnicle-Tillman Cadle Collection, an important group of field recordings. The late Mary Elizabeth Barnicle was one of a handful of early American folklorists who realized the importance of field recordings. The collection consists of over 500 field recordings which include original recordings of such folk music luminaries as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Aunt Molly Jackson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Jim Garland, and others as well as recordings of the Adams family, the first commercially-recorded sacred harp singers.

• The Colonial Williamsburg FoundationLibrary,Virginia, recently received the papers of the Major-Marable family of Charles City and Sussex Counties, Virginia. The papers (1703-1929), donated by the Major family, document the economic life of planters, merchants, and their families near the James River in colonial, postrevolutionary, and antebellum Virginia. This collection (4.5 cubic feet) consists of correspondence,. receipts, and accounts which concern plantation management, slavery, tobacco crops, and estate administration. Also included are account books for a tavern (1794), a postmaster (1840s) and medical doctors (1830-1850). Among the individuals who generated these papers are Hartwell Marable (d. 1774), John Major (1740-1810), George B. Major (1804-1872), shoemaker Jacob Trappell (d. 1800) and overseer Turner Jackson (d. 1782). The papers not only document 18th-century economic life, they also shed light on everyday life in colonial Virginia by detailing purchases, debt, taxes, credit, and legal matters. In addition, the papers mention several hundred names of merchants, planters, and others including prominent members of the Tyler and Harrison families.

• Colorado State University, Fort Collins,recently acquired a collection of rare books donated by Dana K. Bailey to the University’s Morgan Library. Bailey’s collection consists of books about science and nature that date from the 1700s through the 1900s. Many of the books contain hand-painted, color lithographs and illustrations. Bailey, botanist, physicist, and explorer, has collected books about the study of plants, particularly conifers since 1937. The collection will be housed in Special Collections in Morgan Library.

• The Kent State UniversityLibraries, Ohio, has acquired a major collection of books and artifacts on the history of crime presented by Albert I. Borowitz, author of A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives, published by the Kent State University Press in 1982. He has amassed a research collection of more than 6,000 volumes about the history of crime in the United States, England, and France primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. Items in the collection include a history of thieves published in Rouen in 1636, a 19th-century Ohio imprint about the murder of president McKinley’s brotherin-law, and major holdings about Jack the Ripper, poison mysteries, presidential assassinations, and the Mayerling suicides. Borowitz and his wife also are donating an important Sherlock Holmes collection. The collection, which will be housed in Kent’s Department of Special Collections, also includes original broadsides, a grouping of Staffordshire pieces relating to criminal cases, paintings and other artwork and ephemera.

• The Ohio University Libraries, Athens, recently received a large body of personal papers from Jack Matthews, Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University and author of the novels Hanger Stout, Awake (1967) and Sassafras (1983) and the recently released essays, Memoirs of a Bookman. The collection includes manuscripts for many of his nearly 200 published short stories, for poetry, for some of his novels, and for his essays on book collecting. The materials span the decades from the early 1950s to 1989.

• The Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL),Washington, D.C., have purchased a large portion of the Franklin Institute’s former Trade Catalog Collection consisting of some 56,500 items. The catalogs range in date from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century and cover a full range of American machinery and manufacturing, agricultural, and technological development, reflecting the historical interests of the Franklin Institute. The Franklin Institute was the pre-eminent technical institute of the 19th century, and the purchase of this national treasure by the SIL lays the foundation for generations of productive research in a dozen and more areas of scholarly interest. Many of the catalogs in the collection were presentation copies and contain the signature of the authors. Some 2,500 describe steam engines, boilers, appliances, furnaces, stokers, and pumps; another 1,000 relate to railways, locomotives, and related railway matters. Other fields with substantial representation are mining and drilling machinery, pre-1900 machine tools, geology and mineralogy, and agricultural and farm machinery.

• Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library, Dallas, has acquired a major collection of the works of Southwest writer and artist Paul Horgan. The collection consists of over 2,300 items, including all of Horgan’s books in first editions, his contributions to books, periodical publications, criticism, translations, artwork, correspondence, and manuscripts. It was assembled over a 35-year period by Sally Zaiser of San Francisco. Paul Horgan, one of the major figures in American arts and letters, was born in 1903 and spent many of his younger years in the Southwest, particularly New Mexico. Out of his experience he has written numerous essays and works of history and fiction. The acquisition of the Horgan collection is, in part, a gift of Zaiser.

• The University of California, Berkeley s Bancroft Library has acquired proofs of the woodcuts from a masterpiece of the Kelmscott Press, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, printed in 425 copies and finished in 1896. William Morris designed the type, the binding, the ornaments, and laid out the book and Edward Burne-Jones designed the 87 illustrations. The 18 proofs are a gift of Norman H. Strouse. The Strouse proofs are printed on stiff paper (except for one) in the strong black German ink that Morris favored despite the objections of his pressmen. The Bancroft has three complete copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer available for comparison, each in a different binding. The copy in the full pigskin binding was also presented to the Library by Norman Strouse.

• The University of Southern California, LosAngeles, has acquired the papers of S.L. Stebel, author of the recently published novel Spring Thaw and a film writer who played a key part in the Australian film revolution, donated by thë author himself. Stebel’s papers include successive working drafts of his novels Spring Thaw, The Collaborator, and The Vorovich. They also include materials from The Shoe Leather Treatment, a biography of an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane, and screenplays on which Stebel worked, notably Picnic at Hanging Rock and Storm Boy. Both films won best-picture awards at the Australian Film Awards.

Grants

• The Center for Research Libraries, Chi- cago, has received a $236,331 bibliographic access grant from the U.S. Department of Education under the Higher Education Act Title II-C Strengthening Library Resources Program. This award will enable retrospective conversion of 56,000 Roman-alphabet records for monographs in the center’s card catalog. The federal funds are financing all of the production costs.

• Colorado State University, Fort Collins,has been awarded $250,000 by the Anheuser- Busch Foundation to be used for a current periodicals room in the main library building, Morgan Library. The room to be named for Anheuser- Busch will be designed and stocked to house both general interest and specialty periodicals used by the more than 18,000 students enrolled at Colorado State.

• The Commission on Preservation and Access, Washington, D.C., has received $254,000 from the Getty Grant Program to develop a joint task force and support research and demonstration projects on preservation microfilming for brittle books and photographs. The Commission’s proposal to the Getty Grant Program was based upon the needs and priorities identified by a group of art historians, art librarians, technical specialists, and an academic press publisher of art books during a three-day seminar at Spring Hill, Wayzata, Minnesota, in September 1988. A report from that seminar, funded by The Getty Grant Program, is available from the Commission under the title Scholarly Resources in Art History: Issues in Preservation.

The Commission on Preservation and Access has also been awarded a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support international preservation initiatives that complement and strengthen similar activities in the U.S. and Canada. The award, to be used over a period of approximately three years, will support the development of an international database of bibliographic records for preserved library materials. The funds also will help facilitate cooperative preservation microfilming outside the U.S. linked to similar work in this country.

•Radcliffe College'sSchlesinger Library, Cambridge, Massachussetts, has received a grant of $50,000 from the Ford Foundation. The grant will fund a two-year project to create a guide to all unpublished holdings of the Library and the Radcliffe College Archives that include information on Black history. The Grant also funds the processing of several manuscript collections important for the study of the history of Black women in the United States.

• The University of California, Los Angeles,Louise Darling Biomedical Library, History and Special Collections Division has been awarded a $51,051 costsharing preservation contract from the National Library of Medicine. The year-long contract provides funding for the preservation microfilming of 267 bound Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts. Additionally the grant funds the fabrication of a lignin-free phase box for each manuscript. Both collections are acknowledged as being among the foremost of their kind in the United States.

• The Folger Shakespeare Library, Wash-ington, D.C., has been awarded a Title II-C grant in the amount of $129,319 from the U.S. Department of Education to acquire microform source materials. The grant will allow the acquisition of materials that will complement the Folger’s extensive holdings. Specifically, the microform categories consist of: books and related manuscripts, materials primarily related to Shakespearean and Elizabethan drama from libraries located for the most part in Great Britain; British manuscript sources of early modem history, manuscript collections from some of the principal libraries of Great Britain related to political, social, and ecclesiastic history of England and Colonial America.

• The University of California, San Franciscohas been awarded a $750,000 challenge grant by the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Michigan, for its new health sciences library. The new library is a $35.9 million project that is being financed with $25.9 million in state funds for planning and building construction. The $10 million balance is being raised by UCSF from private sources, with the money going to furnish and equip the building. To date, UCSF has raised just over $6 million in cash and pledges. The computer network in the new facility will include 200 computer stations and a special non-print media room. Study carrels will be equipped with individual microcomputers or terminals for searching library catalogs and indices on specific topics.

• The University of California and Pennsyl- vania State Universityhave both received grants from Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, Massachusetts, to support the linking of major information retrieval systems at these institutions. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the California State University System will also participate in the project. The project will enable users of the Penn State and University of California bibliographic library systems to search the holdings of either system while using the familiar commands of their own systems. To accomplish this, researchers will use a new application-layer protocol for computerto-computer information retrieval, National Information Standards Organization Z39.50. The protocol permits the separation of the user interfaces from the information servers. The online catalog systems of the University of California (also used by the California State University System) and Penn State are among the largest and highest volume in the country, each handling 200,000-300,000 queries per week, open to the public, and serving a total of 54 campuses. Their online catalogs are based on different software systems and on different computer platforms, an IBM 3090 at UC and Digital’s VAX 9000 system at Penn State (to be installed in 1990). The project represents the first implementation of the Z39.50 protocol in a high-volume public access environment.

• The University of Chicago Library has re-ceived grants of $262,650 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and $241,310 from the United States Department of Education for projects to microfilm brittle books on classical and ancient India. The 7,500 titles to be microfilmed are among the most important books covered in the forthcoming South Asia Books in Series: Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali, a bibliography in preparation at the University of Chicago Library.

• The University of Detroit has been awardeda Title II-D HEA College Library Technology and Cooperation grant. The grant of $64,109 will fund partial DALNET mebership costs and equipment for the second phase of NOTIS implementation at the University’s Main Library. The University of Detroit also received a $125,529 Title II grant last year. The combined total of $189,638 is approximately 31% of the total $609,755 the project is estimated to cost over a five year period.

• The University of Houston Libraries havebeen awarded a $99,852 Research and Demonstration Grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Library Technology and Cooperation Grants Program to create an Intelligent Reference Information System (IRIS). This system will combine two emerging technologies—networked CD-ROM databases and expert systems—to create an experimental electronic information system. IRIS will identify and describe appropriate electronic and printed resources to meet users’ reference needs; link users to appropriate networked CD-ROM databases; and provide users with location information about appropriate stand-alone CD-ROM databases and printed reference sources. Funds provided by the U.S. Department of Education will pay for 51% of total projected costs of the IRIS Project.

• The University of Illinois Library at Ur- bana-Champaign’s Library Friends group has received a gift of more than $1 million to help meet the $3 million goal of the National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant. The gift, from the estate of George F. and Edna Brown Titus of Falls Church, Virginia, forms the new George F. and Edna Brown Titus Endowment.

• The University of Kentucky library system,Lexington, has received a $750,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The money, along with funds raised from private and corporate donors, will be used to establish a $3 million endowment that will be used to purchase humanities literature and publications. UK was one of 41 universities, colleges, museums or public library systems chosen for funding by the federal agency this year. The agency made its selections from 166 applications for the grants. A substantial humanities requirement for graduation in all majors at UK is one of the reasons the school was awarded the federal grant. To obtain each dollar in grant money, UK must raise three dollars in matching funds from private or corporate donors.

• The University of New Brunswick, Freder-icton, has been awarded a $30,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The grant will be used to broaden the scope of the University’s children’s literature collection. It will enable the acquisition of two microform sets of historical children’s books, one British and the other American, and allow for the purchase of guides and catalogs to other collections of children’s literature, microform back files of 19thcentury children’s periodicals, selected theses in microform, and reprints of children’s books.

•The Research Libraries Group(RLG) has >received a grant of $144,000 from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) to make enhancements to the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) for Arabic and other modem languages using the Arabic Script. The grant from KFAS will allow RLG to make changes to the RLIN terminal software running on an AT-class PC so that users will be able to produce, display, and transmit Arabic characters to the RLIN mainframe computer. Changes made at the mainframe will permit the storage and transmittal of Arabic data according to national and international standards.

News notes

• The Center for Research Libraries, Chi-cago, and the Institute for Scientific Information in Social Sciences (INION) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR have signed an exchange agreement that will increase access to research materials in the social sciences and humanities. The agreement between the Center and INION will provide access to materials that heretofore have not been available to researchers in the United States. The current agreement will be in effect for one year, and may be expanded in the future to include more social sciences and humanities subject areas.

• The Northeast Document Conservation Center(NEDCC), Andover, Massachusetts, will move its headquarters to space in Brickstone Square, in Andover, this spring. NEDCC is rapidly gaining recognition as a national cultural resource and has experienced a dramatic increase in demand for its services. The new facility will double the Center’s space, improve its climate controls, and provide a highly professional image. NEDCC is a non-profit regional conservation center. Its purpose is to provide the highest quality paper conservation services to museums, librarians and historical organizations that do not have in-house facilities or that need specialized expertise. The original use of the building as a textile mill is highly compatible with NEDCC’s current use as a conservation laboratory. NEDCC shares with the mill’s original proprietors the need for large open work spaces, oversized freight elevators, high ceilings, natural daylight, and the capacity for unencumbered movement of large objects. NEDCC’s architect, Lawrence Bauer, of the firm of Crissman and Solomon, is developing plans to modify the space as a state-of-the-art conservation facility. With this in mind, NEDCC is launching a capital fund drive to raise the money it needs to renovate the space in its new headquarters, to purchase equipment, and to generate endowment funds to support operating costs of an expanded facility.

• The New York Public Library has estab-lished a Tiananmen Archive which documents last spring’s democracy movement in China and the subsequent government massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators on June 4. The collection is part of the Library’s continuing effort to chronicle important events in the history of modem China. Several thousand items of historical significance have been acquired by the Library to date, including a wide variety of primary source material from democracy groups in China, such as copies of declarations, slogans, public letters, and resolutions. The Archive also houses materials documenting the action of China’s Communist Party, as well as numerous items from pro-democracy groups in New York’s Chinese community and around the world.

•OCLC,Dublin, Ohio, will introduce a new cataloging service in February 1990 for all federal depository libraries. Called GOVDOC, the new service is designed to allow libraries to get government documents cataloged quickly and fully without spending a lot of money or devoting a lot of staff time. Every month, through GOVDOC, OCLC will produce each month OCLC-MARC tapes or catalog cards for all items distributed through the federal depository program including posters, charts, audiovisual materials, and machine-readable files. Libraries use a customized order form to indicate which item numbers they want and whether they want tapes, cards, or both. For member and non-member libraries, OCLC will also attach their institution symbol to the record in the database for resource-sharing purposes. The price per record depends on what product a library receives, cards or tapes, but it will less than threefourths the cost of standard online cataloging.

• The Purdue University Library, West Lafay-ette, Indiana, celebrated its new online catalog system by sponsoring “THOR Day” on Nvember 29. THOR is an acronym for “The Online Resource,” a system based on the NOTIS, Inc., software. Although the THOR system had been available in campus libraries and through dial-up service since the beginning of classes in August, the celebration and dedication was delayed until access was available through all local campus networks as well as the international Internet system. Students in local residence halls can easily connect to THOR using the “data-over-voice” (DOV) connection available in their rooms. Purdue University is one of the “nodes” in the Indiana State University Library Automation Network (SULN) which will link to other sites in the state to provide remote searching and resource sharing services. Each site maintains its own local system but will also have the capability to automatically search and request materials from a remote site without the necessity of re-entering a search. The State of Indiana and private development funds have provided most of the support for this development.

• The University of Hawaii at Manoa Li-brary’s Nina Horio, head of the Science-Technology Department and president of the University of Hawaii system’s 2,900-member faculty union (the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly), Was instrumental in obtaining one of the nation’s best collective bargaining agreements of this year. All librarians in the UH system, which includes the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the University of Hawaii at Hilo, the University of Hawaii at West Oahu, and the seven Community College campuses, are classified as faculty. The unprecedented four-year contract, which is effective July 1, 1989, will substantially increase all faculty salaries, with raises ranging from approximately 32% to 54% over the period of the agreement. Negotiated into the agreement was a 4% longevity adjustment for all faculty who have ten years or more of service with the University. The library faculty has been an extremely stable one over the years, causing nearly 65% to be eligible for this special adjustment. Once funding for the new agreement is approved by the state’s legislature, the entry level salary for librarians at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (the flagship campus) will be $27,144 and increase to $29,076 effective July 1990.

• The University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, have established an Affirmative Action Internship Program to provide professional work experience to recent graduates of accredited library science programs. The internship aims to improve the representation of minorities and other underutilized groups at the university libraries, and will seek minority candidates interested in careers in research libraries. The two-year program will introduce new librarians to a wide range of library services and research operations in order to help them plan careers and select an area of specialization in research librarianship. The internship also includes a mentoring system, opportunities for involvement in professional associations, service on library and university committees, and other professional development activities.

Submit all materials to George M. Eberhart, Editor, C&RL News, ACRL/ALA, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611.—GME.

• Western New England College,Springfield, Massachusetts, is embarking on a project to donate books from the general collection in D’Amour Library to the Munzatsi Secondary

School in Maragoli, Kenya. The Munzatsi Secondary School just completed construction of a new library this summer, but the library has very few books, the college is donating slightly outdated books and duplicate copies of books in its collection. The volumes cover a broad area of knowledge—everything from classic literature to textbooks.