ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Cambridge, have received a collection of rare early mathematics and mechanics books. The books are the gift of MIT alumnus, John D. Stanitz, who for over 30 years worked to build an outstanding collection of historically important works in the areas of solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, mathematics, machinery, and energetics. The ten volumes of the gift include works by Leonard Euler, Niccolo Tartaglia, and Thomas Harriot.

• Ohio University, Athens, has received a major gift of 430 books from The National Central Library in Taiwan, Republic of China. The books are a selection of the best of recent publications from Taiwan. This is the third gift of selected publications from the Republic of China to the university since 1982. Past gifts were made under a cooperative agreement in which the National Central Library has bartered significant Chinese publications for training of its staff at Ohio University under the latter’s international internship program.

• The University of Albany Libraries', New York, German Intellectual Emigre Collection has acquired the papers of social scientist Walter A. Friedlaender (1891-1984). The papers include correspondence and writings from the 1920s to 1970s. Friedlaender received a doctorate in law from the University of Berlin in 1913 and was from then until 1933 a magistrate in charge of the local office for youth and social welfare in the Prenzlauer Berg district of his native Berlin. He published numerous books and articles on international social services in the United States and Europe.

• The University of Arizona Library, Tucson, has received a major donation of Tennessee Williams materials from an anonymous alumnus. The collection consists of 51 items, including a rare, presentation edition of Kingdom of Earth With Hard Candy, a signed and illustrated broadside, a holograph manuscript poem dated 1931, and a variety of signed first editions.

• The University of Rochester’s Edward G. Miner Library (History of Medicine Section) ₅ Rochester, New York, has recently completed processing the papers of Wallace Osgood Fenn (1893-1971), chairman of the Department of Physiology at Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry from 1924 until 1959. The Fenn papers include extensive series of correspondence, reports, manuscripts, and lecture notes, as well as laboratory notebooks chronicling Fenn’s research activities from 1915 to 1971.

• The University of Texas Health Science Cen- ter, San Antonio, has recently purchased the Andrew A. Sandor Ophthalmology collection with special funds provided from the U.T. Permanent University Fund. The collection includes 389 titles published between the late 1400s and the early 1900s, with the majority from the 19th century when the development of the ophthalmoscope revolutionized the field of ophthalmology.

• Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, Richmond, have received an Ethics Collection endowment from a former alumnus and dean of the MCV School of Dentistry, Harry Lyons. It was established in memory of his sister, Til- lie Lyons, to support a collection of works on professional ethics at the university. The collection will feature books and materials that examine ethical issues and procedures in all professions.

• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, has received the papers of John T. Parsons and Melvin N. Gough for its Archives of American Aerospace Exploration. Parsons is a pioneer in the field of numerical control, or the application of computer technology to manufacturing, which revolutionized aircraft and spacecraft production in the 1950s. The Parsons collection contains approximately 200 cubic feet and includes correspondence, memoranda, technical drawings and specifications dating from 1935 to 1987. Melvin N. Gough was for many years chief test pilot and chief of flight research at the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA. His papers date from 1926 to 1962 and include his daily logs and reports on aircraft he tested, photographs of experimental aircraft, and correspondence and memoranda.

Grants

• The Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Silver Spring, Maryland, has received a $3,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will support the dissemination of an 860-page report documenting a yearlong study of standards and procedures relating to the preservation of recorded sound materials.

• The Augustana College, Sioux Falls College, Sioux Falls Public and North American Baptist Seminary Libraries, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, have been awarded a challenge grant of $120,000 by the Bush Foundation for a joint automation project. The four libraries plan to join a statewide automation system that includes the ten state- owned libraries in South Dakota.

• Columbia University Libraries, New York, have been awarded a grant of $80,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support preservation administration internships. The grant will provide for three interns over the next three years, beginning in 1989. The interns spend nine months gaining practical experience in running a preservation program by working in the Preservation Division of the Columbia University Libraries.

• The Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Champaign, Illinois, has received a grant of $539,869 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund a coordinated preservation microfilming project among member libraries to preserve crucial books important for research in various disciplines of the humanities. The project involves preservation of collections from the universities of Chicago, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, as well as at Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and Ohio State University.

• The Iienry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan, has been awarded two grants totaling $77,931, from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The first grant of $38,890 will fund the Museum’s two-year project to catalog, inventory, and cross-reference its collection of 5,000 radio and television artifacts. The second grant of $39,041 will support the Museum’s project to research, document, and catalog a collection of 23,000 paper items including posters, prints, scenic postcards, trade cards, greeting cards and a collection of travel graphics.

• The Municipal Reference and Research Center, New York Department of Records and Information Services, has received a grant for $3,000 from the New York State Discretionary Grant Program for the Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials. The grant will provide for the hiring of an environmental consultant to evaluate the Center’s physical environment and recommend corrections and renovations which will provide for maintenance of proper temperature and humidity levels throughout the Center. The Center is a depository for all official reports and studies published by New York City government agencies and has an extensive collection of clippings and pamphlets on City matters.

• Seven New York State research libraries have received a $130,000 grant from the New York State Education Department for map preservation. The maps to be preserved are transportation maps and city street maps of New York or areas within the state published prior to 1940. The participating libraries are Cornell University, New York Public Library, New York State Library, SUNY Albany, SUNY Stony Brook, Syracuse University, and the University of Rochester. The grant will be coordinated by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which is the sponsoring library. Each library will preserve an average of 300 maps from its collection.

• The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, have received a two-year $115,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will assist in completing a comprehensive computerized database of 14,000 titles of American fiction published from 1901 through 1925. The project continues the scholarly work of Lvle H. Wright, whose comprehensive bibliographies of American fiction cover the years 1774-1900.

• The Research Libraries Group, Inc., Stanford, California, has been awarded a grant of $500,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, plus an additional $500,000 in matching funds, for its Great Collections Preservation Microfilming Project. The grant will be used to support the microfilming of deteriorating scholarly books from seven research libraries, focusing on collections important to scholarship in American history, Chinese history, German literature, Near Eastern and South Asian history, and the history of science, political science, and economics. Participating in the project will be the university libraries at Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale, as well as the New York Public Library.

• The University of Alberta Library, Edmonton, Canada, has been awarded three grants totaling $50,000 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Specialized Research Collections Program. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library received $30,000 to purchase microform backfiles of annual and 10K reports for companies traded on the American, New York, and over the counter stock exchanges. The Library received $10,000 to develop its collection of works on British illustration from 1860 to 1939. And the remaining $10,000 will be used to purchase works in languages other than English or French and backfiles of specialized serials dealing with such subjects as epigraphy, numismatics and ancient art.

• The University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to be used for preservation of endangered research materials.

Berkeley’s East Asiatic Library also received a grant of $192,000 from the U.S. Department of Education for the second year of a special project to catalog and carry out conservation work on special collections of Japanese material.

• The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has been awarded a grant of $100,000 from the Los Angeles-based W. M. Keck Foundation to enhance the newly installed Carlyle online public access catalog, TOMUS. Combined with a recent $100,000 appropriation from the Nevada State Legislature, this funding will enable the library to complete the conversion of the card catalog to the system, to update the processing power of the hardware, and to conduct a systematic data quality control project to ensure the accuracy of the machine-readable records.

• The University of New Mexico Library, Albuquerque, has received a $64,000 Title II-C grant to catalog, preserve, and make available for use a unique collection of specialized research materials relating to the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The materials include newspapers, monographs, pamphlets and political ephemera published in Oaxaca between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries.

• The University of Texas, Austin, Barker Texas History Center has received a federal grant of $33,096 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. It will be used to process the Robert Runyon Photograph collection, which depicts revolutionary activity in northern Mexico, 1910-1917; the development of the Rio Grande Valley, 1909-1930; and the U.S. military presence at Fort Brown in South Texas in the early decades of this century. The 11,000 photographic negatives and prints in the collection were made by the late Robert Runyon (1881-1968), a Brownsville commercial photographer, and donated to the Barker Center by his family.

News note

• The University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, received the Library Project of the Year Award from the Texas Library Association on April 20, 1988. The award was presented for the innovative Library Information System/ Drug Information Service (LIS/DIS) project. LIS/ DIS was funded by a National Library of Medicine grant which placed microcomputer work stations with CD-ROM readers in three clinical sites, the Library, and the Drug Information Service, and provided staff support for consultations and assistance with drug-ielated information needs. In addition to dial-up access to the Library’s catalog and miniMEDLINE, the workstations are connected to the Micromedex Computerized Clinical Information System and to an electronic mail/consultation request module.