ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The University of Connecticut Library recently acquired the Pierce Gaines Collection of Americana consisting of some 4,600 items relating to United States secular history for the period 1789-1809. Original contemporary materials form the bulk of the collection, while approximately 1,000 volumes of relevant secondary sources also are provided for historical and bibliographical reference.

The collection is especially rich in early government documents, including the journals of the House and Senate, accounts of receipts and expenditures of the government through 1802, and acts passed by the first through the tenth congresses. The public writings of great Americans of the period are generously represented. There are, for example, fifty-four Alexander Hamilton items, twenty-nine James Madison items, fifty-eight Thomas Jefferson items, and twenty-nine Thomas Paine items. Among association copies some of the more prominent owners represented are John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, Hamilton, John Jay, Jefferson (a book from his Monticello library with his secret bookmark), Benjamin Rush, George Washington ( a book from his library signed by him), and Daniel Webster. Connecticut owners include Timothy Dwight, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Jeremiah Wadsworth, and John Cotton Smith.

There is a law library of United States imprints such as might have been collected by a well-to-do lawyer of 1810. Included are the statutes of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington (city), Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, and Orleans Territory. Trials and treatises number about forty volumes each.

Other original materials include contemporary periodicals, newspapers, and a few dozen manuscripts, as well as a host of important pamphlets dealing with all of the vital issues of the times.

The secondary materials are particularly strong in works of travel in the U.S. for the period 1789-1817. This section contains 108 works by sixty-eight authors and includes landmark works by William Bartram, Crèvecoeur, Andrew Ellicott, Washington Irving, Benjamin Latrobe, Lewis and Clark, and Zebulon Montgomery Pike.

The collection was formed over a period of about twenty-five years by the late Pierce W. Gaines of Fairfield, Connecticut.

• The University of Delaware Library has recently acquired the Ulick O’Connor Archives, a collection of material accumulated over the past twenty-five years by the well- known Irish biographer, poet, playwright and journalist Ulick O’Connor.

The archives, a rich source for research in Irish literature, are available to qualified scholars in the special collections room of the Hugh M. Morris Library on the campus.

O’Connor’s biographies of Irish dramatist Brendan Behan and Irish poet Oliver St. John Gogarty have been internationally recognized as definitive, and much of the archives consists of material used by O’Connor in writing the books, according to John W. Dawson, director of university libraries, who announced the acquisition.

• A working collection of more than 10,000 volumes of German literature has been acquired by the Eugene McDermott Library at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The Helmut Rehder Collection of German literature, which he acquired over a thirty-year period, has been obtained from his estate by UT-Dallas library officials and is in the process of being cataloged and shelved, said James T. Dodson, university librarian.

Rehder was the Ashbel Smith Professor of German Literature at UT-Austin before his death earlier this year. A native of Germany, he traveled extensively in Germany throughout the years to collect volumes, and corresponded with German dignitaries, including Karl Jaspers, Benno von Wiese, and Hugo Friedrich.

The collection includes several benchmark works. About 300 of the volumes were published before 1800, many of which are sixteenth-century works. More than 75 percent of the collection is in German.

GRANTS

• Yeshiva University,New York City, has recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help the university preserve, arrange, and describe its manuscript collections. The grant is for two years, with matching funds for a third year. Bernard Leibtag, a Ph.D. candidate in Jewish history at Columbia University and former archivist for the World Jewish Congress, has been appointed archivist for the project. The archives are composed of thirty collections, with approximately 825 cubic feet of records of various American Jewish organizations, congregations, and papers of prominent American Jews dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Many of the collections have photographic records along with usual reports, correspondence, etc. Although the records are of American origin, a number of the collections deal with aid to Eastern European and Palestinian Jewish communities during the interwar period and thereby shed light on Jewish life in those areas.

• The New England Library Board (NELB) reports a grant of $73,745 awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for the development of an archival microfilm capability and an archival consulting service at the New England Document Conservation Center in North Andover, Massachusetts.

One of NELB’s major programs, the Conservation Center makes its services and facilities available to public libraries; state and local archival agencies; and private nonprofit historical, educational, and cultural institutions located mainly, but not exclusively, in New England.

The present role of the center is to operate a workshop with the necessary facilities and staff to restore and preserve the physical condition of books, prints, maps, broadsides, manuscripts, and similar documentary materials of historic, archival, or cultural interest; to provide field inspection and consultation services to assist institutions in carrying out conservation programs; to give emergency aid in cases of damage to collections by water, fire, or other disaster; to conduct seminars, workshops, and other training opportunities for staffs of libraries and archives; and to publish conservation bulletins.

The grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission will enable the center to expand its services to provide archival quality microfilm reproduction; advice and assistance in the use of microfilm for historic projects; and assistance to state, county, and local public records repositories, archives, historical societies, libraries, and other institutions in microfilm publication of appropriate materials.

• A New York Historical Resources Center is being planned at Cornell University, with its first objective being to develop a computerized index pinpointing the location of manuscript and archival collections, artifacts, documents, photographs, genealogical materials, architectural records, and other historical information bearing on New York State.

Supported by a $17,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a $2,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, the center will provide both scholars and the general public greater access to the materials illustrative of the state’s history. The aim is to stimulate scholarly and popular interest in the heritage of the area.

Funding will cover planning over the next year leading to the formal establishment of the center. Activity will be limited to identifying, not collecting, things of historical significance. Herbert Finch, assistant director of Olin Library at Cornell and overall supervisor of the project, emphasized that the center would be gathering information, not taking physical custody of any materials.

He said the center also would provide technical information to organizations requesting guidance in the care and administration of manuscripts, archives, and other items. In cases where records face imminent danger, attempts would be made to locate an appropriate repository.

Finch said Cornell is the ideal location for such a project. He cited Cornell’s central geographic location, its outstanding collection of New York history materials, and its public service mandate as the state’s Federal Land Grant institution. Funding to continue the center beyond the initial grant period will be sought from various sources, both public and private, according to Finch.

• The Urban Archives Center of Temple University libraries has received a grant of $15,650 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for a one-year field work project. A full-time field worker will identify, locate, and collect records and personal papers documenting the social history of Philadelphia over the past 100 years. It is hoped that the project will provide some guidelines for documenting subjects, such as social welfare, housing, planning, education, criminal justice, and ethnic communities, in all of the nation’s largest cities.

• The College Park Library System, University of Maryland, has received a $117,- 079 grant to preserve the library’s valuable and unique East Asian Collection of allied-occupa- tion materials.

The grant, awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will support a three- year project resulting in the creation of a fully catalogued and integrated research and reference collection. It is the largest single grant to be received by the library system.

According to Jack Siggins, project director and assistant director of libraries for reader services, this project establishes the University of Maryland as a major university center for allied-occupation research and enhances the reputation of the Washington metropolitan area as the major source of materials for the study of Japan during the immediate post-war period.

Included in the East Asia Collection are approximately 11,000 titles of newspapers, 11,000 titles of periodicals, 40,000 volumes of books, and numerous other documents.

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is supporting a joint study of community colleges-public library cooperation in humanities education by the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (AACJC) and the .

NEH has awarded a grant of $17,326 for the project, which will involve a survey of current cooperative efforts. Results will be published and widely disseminated by the two national organizations. Findings will also be reviewed and discussed at workshops and meetings of ALA and AACJC.

Sandra L. Drake, information and research associate with AACJC, will direct the survey.

MEETINGS & WORKSHOPS

• December 2; A Copyright Workshop on the consequences of the new copyright law for librarians and other information specialists will be held at the University of Pittsburgh, cosponsored by the university’s Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, Pennsylvania Library Association, Special Libraries Association (Pittsburgh Chapter), and American Society for Information Science (Pittsburgh Chapter).

Rights and responsibilities of information handlers and users under the regulations to take effect January 1, 1978, will be discussed by Robert Stevens, Copyright Office, Library of Congress; Ronald Naylor, chairman, Inter- library Loan Committee, American Library Association; William Z. Nasri, assistant professor, GSLIS, University of Pittsburgh.

Inquiries about the workshop may be addressed to Dr. William Z. Nasri, Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.

• January 6: The Pratt Institute Graduate School of Library and Information Science will offer a workshop on Project Management in Libraries and Information Systems.

The purpose of the workshop will be to provide an overview of important management techniques. Emphasis will be placed on Program Evaluation and Review Techniques (PERT) and Critical Path Method (CPM) and on their applications for library and information systems. The participants will learn by optimizing PERT/CPM networks representing projects of their own choice.

The workshop is designed for library and information systems administrators, middle-management-level individuals, and those involved in acquisitions, marketing, and evaluation of library and information systems.

The workshop will be held at the Pratt Manhattan Center, 160 Lexington Ave. at 30th St., New York City. Registration fee, which includes lunch, is $80.

For further information and registration form, contact Rhoda Garoogian, Assistant Dean, Pratt Institute Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Brooklyn, NY 11205; (212) 636-3702.

• January 14, 17, 19; 21, 24, 26: The Pratt Institute Graduate School of Library and Information Science will once again offer two institutes on On-Line Terminal Searching.

The first, On-Line Terminal Searching; Perspective and Practice, which is designed for reference librarians and information scientists with little or no experience in this area, will be given on Saturday, January 14, 1978; Tuesday evening, January 17; and Thursday evening, January 19.

The second, On-Line Terminal Searching; Advanced Strategies, will be offered on Saturday, January 21; Tuesday evening, January 24; and Thursday evening, January 26.

Both institutes will be held at the Chemists Club, 52 East 41st Street, New York, N.Y.

Registration fees will vary; $75 for one full- day session only, $140 for full-day and two evenings (no credit); and $175 for full-day and two evenings for one credit. This includes a computer laboratory fee of $25.

For further information and registration form, call or write Rhoda Garoogian, Assistant Dean, Pratt Institute, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Brooklyn, NY 11205; (212) 636-3702.

• February 24-March 3; The School of Library Science of Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas, will sponsor an Institute on the Librarian as Manager. Designed to offer an opportunity for librarians in management, as well as those interested in assuming managerial responsibilities, to study new management techniques and their implication for libraries, the institute will be directed by Kenneth E. Beasley, vice-president, University of Texas at El Paso, assisted by the following panel members; Bernard M. Franckowiak, School of Librarianship, University of Washington; Beverly Lynch, director of libraries, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle; and Patricia Woodrum, director, Tulsa City-County Library.

The director and panelists will utilize a variety of program formats to highlight such topics as the philosophy and principles of management, styles of management, decision-making, budgeting, goal setting, leadership, public relations, and evaluation.

In addition, in a series of clinics, each participant will study an actual management problem and design a viable solution to that problem.

Participants must have had at least two years of significant library experience (e.g., responsibility for administering a unit or program), supervisory responsibility or consultant responsibility, and must submit with the application a statement of an actual management problem worthy of study in depth. Each participant must also be recommended by the respective supervisor as an outstanding person whose library will be benefited by this week of study.

Each institute participant will receive a stipend of $75. One hour of graduate credit is optional. For more information write or call the School of Library Science, (316) 343-1200, ext. 203 or 204.

• February 26-March 3: Kent State University Libraries announces the continuation of its series of Intensive Workshops on OCLC. Additional workshops will be held in 1978: April 23-28, and June 4-9.

The workshops will be especially useful to (1) technical services librarians in an institution about to go on-line or to the same individuals in libraries that have been on-line less than one year, (2) the public services librarian wishing to become further acquainted with the system as it now begins to affect work with patrons more directly, and (3) the library educator who is concerned with networks and with interinstitutional bibliographic control. Each participant will be guaranteed individualized hours working on-line.

A fee of $325 will cover all sessions, materials, and single-room accommodations in university housing, Sunday through Thursday nights.

For further information contact Anne Marie Allison, University Libraries, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242; (216) 672-3021.

• March 6-8: The 13th Annual Community College Learning Resources Center Conference will be held at the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. The conference theme is “Learning Resources: Trends for the 80’s.” For further information contact Robert Veihman, Learning Resources Center, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137.

MISCELLANY

• The Library of Congress and the Bib- lioteca Nacional of Brazil recently agreed to a major international exchange program involving microfilms of Brazilian newspapers. This new program will strengthen the holdings of Brazilian newspapers in both national libraries as well as resources throughout Brazil and the United States.

In recent years the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, under the leadership of Dona Jannice Monte-Mor, has developed its capabilities for archival microfilming and inaugurated a preservation microfilming program for the major newspapers published throughout Brazil during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Biblioteca National’s microfilming program presents to the Library of Congress and other research libraries a unique opportunity to acquire film holdings of Brazilian newspapers, for which there are relatively sparse holdings in the United States.

The Library of Congress has been microfilming a selected group of contemporary Brazilian newspapers since 1962 and over the years has built up a significant collection of holdings on film. Further, in 1970-72, the Library of Congress arranged for the cooperative microfilming, in Brazil, of the complete holdings of the São Paulo newspaper O Estado de São Paulo for the period January 1875 through August 1956.

Under the program, the Library of Congress and the Biblioteca Nacional will exchange reels of positive microfilm of the titles each institution has filmed, thereby mutually strengthening the holdings of each library and eliminating duplicative original filming.

Filming the complete holdings of the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Jornal do Commercio for the period 1827 to date has the highest priority under this program. O Jornal do Commercio is the oldest continuously published newspaper in all of South America and is considered by many historians to be the most significant Brazilian newspaper for the nineteenth century and one of the more important national newspapers published today.

• The Council on Library Resources, Inc. (CLR) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will offer three internships in health sciences library management for 1978-79.

Interns will spend one year, beginning September 1978, working closely with the director and top administrative staff of a leading academic health sciences library. The purpose of the program is to provide opportunities for midcareer librarians to be exposed to and participate in all facets of health sciences library management. Although individual programs will vary, interns will take part in the variety of planning and decision-making experiences required for high-level positions in academic health sciences libraries.

The internship covers a full year, with about ten months spent at the host library, up to a month at NLM, and a month for leave.

The award consists of a stipend equal to the normal basic salary and benefits (up to $25,- 000) received by the intern during the 1977- 78 academic year. Costs of travel and other activities required by the program, as well as up to $1,500 for moving expenses, also will be covered by the grant.

The program is open to U.S. citizens, noncitizen nationals, and foreign nationals with permanent resident status in the United States. Applicants must have had by September 1978 at least five years of professional library experience. The selection panel also will take into consideration the candidate’s statement of goals and concerns as expressed in the application, recommendations from personal references, and the candidate’s interest in health sciences library management as evidenced by experience, education, and/or training.

Completed applications must be postmarked no later than February 1, 1978. The names of successful candidates will be announced by May 1978.

Applications may be obtained by sending a self-addressed #10 envelope or mailing label to: Health Sciences Library Management Intern Program, Council on Library Resources, Inc., One Dupont Circle, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20036.

• CACIC is the acronym for Chicago Area Computer Information Centers, a new project sponsored and coordinated by the Illinois Regional Library Council to provide broader access to computer-assisted reference services for residents of the Chicago metropolitan area. The CACIC project, which began officially on May 1, 1977, makes use of existing equipment and expertise to offer on-line bibliographic search services to those Chicago-area library users whose primary libraries do not offer such services.

Since May 1, Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago Public Library, John Crerar Library, and Northwestern University’s Main Library have been performing on-line searches as CACICs for users or librarians of other council- member libraries. The Library of the Health Sciences (University of Illinois/Medical Center) and Northwestern’s Medical School Library will begin accepting CACIC referrals in the near future. Through these institutions, Chicago-area residents have access to all data bases available from the major vendors: the Information Bank, Lockheed, National Library of Medicine, and System Development Corporation.

A particularly important facet of the project is the installation, for a two-year pilot period, of the Information Bank service of the New York Times in the Newspapers and General Periodicals Center of the Chicago Public Library. Because the Information Bank, the data base of greatest potential value to the general user, is not available elsewhere to the general public of the Chicago metropolitan area, CPL and IRLC are offering the service as a cooperative venture. IRLC is underwriting the costs of installation and training, and CPL provides space and staffing for the terminal.

The referral mechanism used by a participating library to send one of its users to a CACIC is the Datapass. This four-part, self-carboning form contains the pertinent information about the referring library, the CACIC, and the person for whom the search is to be performed, including a natural language statement of the information request. It also includes the time and date of the prearranged search appointment, and it can be used as either receipt or bill, depending on whether payment is made at the time of the search or later.

The expense of on-line searching precludes offering free services, as neither the council budget nor the budgets of the majority of council members could absorb the costs involved. Thus, the actual cost of each search plus an administrative fee (to partially offset CACIC overhead costs) are charged back to the referring libraries and/or their patrons who use the service.

While the most obvious objective of the CACIC project is (in line with the mission of the council itself) to improve access to information for Chicago area residents, CACIC has several additional key purposes: to educate council-member librarians and library users in the appropriate uses of on-line searching; to determine the extent of demand for such services; and to encourage member libraries to offer these services if demand for them is demonstrated.

The educational function has received most attention to date from the council’s Standing Committee on Data Base Services, the group with direct responsibility for planning and organizing the CACIC project. The committee has organized a CACIC Introductory Workshop, which offers an overview of data-base searching, guidelines to help referring librarians determine the searchability of an information request, and specific CACIC access procedures. Each workshop attendee receives a copy of the CACIC Procedures Manual and Directory, a reference tool developed by the committee to supplement the workshop information and to be used by the referring librarian when making Datapass referrals.

Attendance at a workshop is a prerequisite for issuing Datapasses, a condition set by the committee to insure understanding of the program and proper use of Datapasses by referring librarians. During April and May the Introductory Workshop was repeated eight times to a total audience of 161 area librarians from all types of libraries. The committee has planned additional repeats during the summer and fall of 1977, toward the goal of having at least one CACIC-trained librarian in each of the 314 council-member institutions by the end of the year.

The monitoring and demand assessment functions of the project are expected to come into play after it has been underway for several months and as awareness and use of the service grow.

• The Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC), which achieved official status from the regents of the University of California in 1975, includes as members all librarians of the University of California. The association advises campus chancellors and library administrators through its local divisions, and advises the university presi-

dent through its statewide officers and executive board. LAUC announced the following statewide officers for 1977 after elections on each of the university’s nine campuses: president—Katherine Mawdsley (UC Davis); vicepresident/president elect—Virginia Sherwood (UC San Diego); secretary—Charles Martell (UC Berkeley).

• The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) adopted a resolution at the meeting of June 1, 1977, supporting the approval of a protocol (or supplement) to the Florence Agreement extending duty-free import status to nonprint materials.

Extending duty-free import status to audio, visual, and microform materials on the same basis as printed materials is essential not only to the commission’s long-range goal of equal opportunity of access to information for all but also to the International Federation of Library Associations’ (IFLA) long-range goal of the universal availability of publications internationally.

The Florence Agreement, which has been of great benefit to library and information systems in the United States and sixty-five other countries through elimination of import duties on publications and other educational, scientific, and cultural materials, should be extended on the same basis to nonprint materials. A resolution adopted by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science recommends to the president that he submit the protocol to the Florence Agreement to the U.S. Senate and further urges the Senate to approve the protocol.

• In March 1975 the academic vice-president at Midwestern State University asked the library to do a collection evaluation. This was done by checking the library holdings against the main bibliographies in the fields in which the university offers degrees. The results of this evaluation were presented to each department. They were asked, in turn, to provide a list of specific items that they felt were needed to improve the library collection. The total amount of money involved was $270,000.

In November 1976 the university launched the Advance Midwestern campaign—a drive to obtain private monies to help the university. The development of the library was one of the areas to be stressed in this campaign. When the 1977 Texas Legislature convened, university president John G. Barker asked for a onetime special appropriation of $134,000 for library development. This amount would be matched by funds obtained through Advance Midwestern. The legislature granted the special appropriation for the academic year 1977-78. The library portion of Advance Midwestern is making progress and will be used at a later date.

• The Council of National Library Associations, which was founded in 1942 and which currently has fifteen national library association members, has elected Theodore Wiener, Association of Jewish Libraries, as vice-chairman (chairman-elect), and Susan T. Sommer, Music Library Association, as secretary/treasurer for 1977-78.

Other officers and board of directors are John T. Corrigan, CFX, Catholic Library Association (chairman, 1977-78); Morris Cohen, American Association of Law Libraries (director, 1977- 80); Erich Meyerhoff, Medical Library Association (director, 1975-78); Claudia Hannaford, Church and Synagogue Library Association (director, 1976-79); Immediate Past Chairman Robert M. Henderson, Theatre Library Association.

The Council of National Library Associations exists to provide a central agency for cooperation among library associations and other professional organizations of the United States and Canada in forwarding matters of common interest.

For further information concerning the Council of National Library Associations, contact: John T. Corrigan, CFX, Catholic Library Association, 461 West Lancaster Ave., Haverford, Pennsylvania; (215) MI 9-5251.

• A State University of New York campus library recently marked an impressive milestone in SUNY’s participation in the Ohio College Library Center’s (OCLC) on-line cataloging system. The Crumb Memorial Library at the State University College, Potsdam, had the distinction of adding the three millionth bibliographic record to the on-line library computer data base being built cooperatively by libraries at the OCLC. Potsdam is one of the 126 libraries in New York and one of the 1,182 libraries in the nation which have terminals linked to OCLC’s computer system for library cataloging, interlibrary loan, and other services.

The three millionth record was added at 5:04 p.m. (EST) on Friday, May 27, when Potsdam input catalog data describing More Irish Street Ballads, collected by Colm O’Lochlainn, printed in Dublin in 1965. The time was carefully logged, of course, since there was great competition for the honor of the three millionth. The Potsdam library edged out the University of Wisconsin-Parkside at Kenosha, which recorded the 2,999,999th entry, and Loma Linda Universities, California, which followed with number 3,000,001.

The extraordinary range and depth of the data base is demonstrated by these three records. In addition to the music score input by Potsdam, the University of Wisconsin input a record for a videotape called The Lysenko Affair and Loma Linda University created a record for a book by Franklin Beiden, Masterpieces of Art, published in Ohio in 1907. Fourteen thousand seven hundred records were input into the system that week in May, with an average interval of twenty seconds between each addition to the file.

This input rate is a current measure of an accelerating rate of growth for the data base. The first million records took more than three years to create, and the second million seventeen months. It took just fifteen months to create the last million records.—The News (SUNY)

• The University of Chicago Graduate Library School will offer scholarships and fellowships for the academic year 1978-79, of varying amounts, for study leading to the M.A. degree, to the Ph.D. degree, and to the Certificate of Advanced Study. Apply before February 1, 1978, to the Dean of Students, Graduate Library School, University of Chicago, 1100 E. 57th St., Chicago, IL 60637. ■■