ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

ACQUISITIONS

•Syracuse UniversityLibrary, New York, has acquired personal diaries, thousands of letters and manuscripts, photography, pamphlets, and books detailing the history of the Oneida Community, one of America’s most successful utopian enclaves. The collection was given to Syracuse by the Kenwood Historical Committee, whose members are descendants of the Oneida Community (1848-1881). A bust of John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the community, is included in the collection, as are business records, etchings, and steel engravings. Within the next year the collection will be put on microfilm. Until 1991 researchers who wish to use the works must be interviewed by the Kenwood Historical Committee. After that date the collection will be open to anyone with a need to consult primary sources.

•The University of California, Irvine, Library has received the renowned Menninger Collection of rare and valuable horticultural publications, as a bequest from Emma D. Menninger. This outstanding private collection, formed over many decades with a special emphasis on orchid literature, contains over 2,000 books, pamphlets, and serial volumes ranging in publication date from 1752 to 1983. The prize of the collection is an unbroken run of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine from its founding in 1787 through 1982.

• The University of California, San Diego’s Theater Arts Library has been given the professional archives of Academy Award-winning actor Charlton Heston. Among the memorabilia included in the gift are movie posters, still photographs, scripts, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, correspondence, interviews, awards, certificates, and videotapes from the 54 films that span Heston’s 40- year acting career. Heston formally presented his collection to the library at an official ceremony at the Westwood Marquis Hotel on January 28.

•The University of Georgia Libraries Special Collection Division, Athens, has acquired one of the largest collections of private press books, pamphlets, and ephemera in the United States. The basis of the collection was formed over a long number of years by Elmore H. Mundell, a private printer and one-time book designer for the R.R. Donnelley Company’s Lakeside Press in Chicago. Mundell brought together materials from over 1,200 different private printers. Many outstanding presses are represented, including the Gehenna Press of Leonard Baskin, the Grabhorn Press, Henry Morris’s Bird and Bull, the Perishable Press of Walter Hamady, and the Ashantilly Press operated by William Haynes in Darien, Georgia.

GRANTS

•The American Museum of Natural History, New York, has been granted funds by the U.S. Department of Education for a one-year project to catalog part of its Photographic Collection. One of the project’s goals is to provide subject cataloging at the sub-collection level (not individual images, but groups of related photos). To confirm the choice and structure of subject terms used during the project, periodic lists of the terms will be distributed to other natural history institutions for comment. To be placed on the subject terms mailing list, contact Diana Shih, Project Librarian, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024; (212) 873-1300, ext. 541.

•Harvard UniversityLibrary has been granted $1.2 million by the Pew Memorial Trust to support the purchase and development of an online acquisitions system. The new system will provide facilities for the searching necessary to avoid duplication of ordering; it will make all information about the status of new acquisitions available in the Distributable Union Catalog; and it will begin to automate the records concerning the library’s 95,000 serials. Harvard’s On-Line Acquisitions Planning Committee recommended Northwestern University’s NOTIS system as the most adaptable to the university’s collections. It is estimated that conversion to the online system will take between 18 months and two years.

•Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Waynehas successfully completed a $1 million endowment campaign for its Walter E. Helmke Library. The campaign, sponsored by the Indiana-Purdue Foundation, began in February

1982 and reached its goal in just over one year. Ninety percent of the contributions came from businesses, corporations, foundations, and individuals in the Fort Wayne area, with the remainder contributed by faculty, staff, and alumni.

•Rosemont College,Pennsylvania, has been awarded $150,000 from the Pew Memorial Trust to renovate the Gertrude Kistler Memorial Library. The college plans to upgrade its library to a point of greater efficiency and effectiveness as a learning resource center.

•Trinity University,San Antonio, Texas, has been awarded a three-year, $300,000 challenge grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish permanent endowments for the purchase of library holdings in the humanities. The grant requires that Trinity raise matching funds of at least three private dollars for each federal dollar awarded. At the end of three years, the total added to the university’s capital campaign will be $1.25 million dedicated to the project. The endowments will provide support for collections in art history,

English and American literature, foreign languages and literature, history, philosophy, religion, and theater history and literature.

NEWS NOTES

•Dartmouth CollegeLibrary, Hanover, New Hampshire, has been working on a Title II-C project on “Strengthening Polar Resources” and reports that much of its polar material is now or soon will be accessible in national bibliographic databases: RLIN, OCLC, UTLAS, and COLD (available through SDC). The project involves recataloging polar materials, in particular the Stefansson Collection, in the subject areas of exploration, history, languages, and physical and natural sciences. The library can now provide, for the cost incurred in producing a copy: a MARC format tape containing all polar records available in machine-readable form; guides to manuscript collections, including a 120-page guide to the Stefansson papers; an inventory of the pamphlet collection; and detailed descriptions of the Dartmouth polar collections and the library resources for polar study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, also located in Hanover. For further information, write the Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, NH 03755. ■■