ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Boston College has acquired the papers ofthe noted penologist, Howard Belding Gill, best known for his work at the Norfolk Prison Colony, a unique institution that housed inmates in dorms instead of cells, and had its own workshops, stores, and chapel. The Gill collection consists of over 110 linear feet of manuscripts, photographs, and audio discs, as well as a large number of charts and graphs pertaining to the Norfolk Colony. The collection was donated by Benjamin Gill, Howard’s oldest son and executor of the Gill estate.

• McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, has acquired the papers of Clarke Irwin, Inc. (1930-1983), one of Canada’s major publishers. The firm published such major authors as Robertson Davies, Emily Carr, and Tyrone Guthrie, and published standard texts such as Living Latin and Pirates and Pathfinders. The archive consists of approximately 90 linear feet and includes author correspondence, administrative and business records, editorial files, information on marketing and promotion, and photographs. The most extensive and valuable section is the editorial files, with records of correspondence with authors, reports on manuscripts, royalty and publications statements, and permissions for individual titles.

The University has also acquired the archives of Peter Martin Associates, a small publishing firm founded in 1965 and run for 16 years. The collection of correspondence, business files, promotion and subsidiary files extends to 14 linear feet and concerns authors such as Janet Lunn, Fredelle Maynard, and David Louis Stein.

• Northern Illinois University’s FoundersMemorial Library, DeKalb, has acquired Alice Lohrer’s personal collection of over 325 books, pamphlets, and magazines for children. The collection, which spans two centuries of children’s literature, includes a wide selection of historic fiction and non-fiction titles as well as Early American picture books, foreign-language titles from Burma, Thailand, Japan, and Iran, and many rare items acquired by Lohrer during her notable career as professor and advisor abroad. Among the items are an 1896 edition of Joan of Arc illustrated by the French artist M. Boutetde Monuil, an early edition of New Mother Hubbard and Mother Goose Melodies printed on linen, an 1843 miniature edition of the very popular New England Primer, and rare hand-painted picture books from Japan. Several of the items will become part of the University’s rare and special collections.

•Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania, hasacquired the personal library of physical therapist Mildred L. Wood. The collection contains more than 275 books and 700 magazines, including a complete bound set of the official journal of the American Physical Therapy Association datingto 1932, works signed by the husband and wife team of Kendall and Kendall, a limited edition work by G. B. Duchenne translated by E. B. Kaplan, and many works on anatomy, physiology, neurology, and related muscle activity. The collection will be part of the newly formed School of Physical Therapy at the University.

• Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, has acquired the library of George Kilpatrick, a renowned British New Testament scholar who died earlier this year. The collection of 94 boxes includes many classics in NewTestament scholarship, numerous Latin and Greek-language materials, NewTestament criticism, textual studies, background resources, interpretation, and both general and special introductory materials.

• The State University of New York at Al-banyhas acquired the papers of Marcia Brown (1918- ), the well-known children’s book writer and illustrator who has won the Caldecott Medal three times. The papers include illustrated manuscripts, rough sketches, dummies, and revisions for 32 published and unpublished children’s books written and/or illustrated by Brown including Stone Soup and Dick Whittington and His Cat; editorial and business correspondence; speeches and notes for speeches; and copies of all Brown’s books and presentation copies of books by other children’s writers. Also included are papers of Helen A. Masten, head of the Children’s Room at the New York Public Library, where Brown once worked as a librarian.

• The University of Alberta, Edmonton, hasacquired a rare painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger for its Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. The painting, Peasant Wedding Dance in an Interior, was the gift of Lucie Javitch of Montreal, who passed away in September 1988. She bestowed it upon the Peel Library in honor of her late husband Gregory, whose collection of North and South American Indian materials is one of the Peel Library’s most important collections. Brueghel the Younger made his career producing numerous versions of his father’s genre paintings. As with many other paintings by Brueghel the Elder, the original version of this work is lost.

• The University of Washington Libraries’Special Collections and Preservation Division, Seattle, has acquired the William L. Meed collection of photographs depicting life in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory and Alaska between 1898 and 1907. Over 100 of the more than 300 photographs in the collection were taken by Meed, an amateur photographer and the operator of several Yukon River steamboats. Other photographs are by prominent Klondike photographers already represented in the University Libraries. The collection also includes extensive annotations on each photograph and several reminiscences by Meed.

• Virginia Tech’s Archives of American Aerospace Exploration, Blacksburg, have acquired the papers of Apollo XI astronaut Michael Collins. The papers contain 25 cubic feet of manuscript material dating from Collins’s early training in the 1950s to the present including training notebooks for Collins’s Gemini X and Apollo XI flights; correspondence; speeches; audio tapes; and notes and drafts for books he has written including Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys (1974) and Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure into Space (1988).

The Archives have also acquired two other collections related to the history of the Apollo program. The papers of John D. Clark (1907-1988) document the career of the chemist who led a team of scientists in developing a new family of storable high-energy liquid propellants that were later used in the Apollo program. The collection contains 4 cubic feet and deals with Clark’s science fiction stories as well as his rocket fuel research.

The papers of Evert B. Clark (1925-1988) cover his career as an aerospace journalist, first as editor for Aviation Week Magazine and later as a reporter covering the space program for Newsweek and the New York Times. The collection includes 14 cubic feet of correspondence, memoranda, research notes, and drafts of published and unpublished articles. The collection also includes Clark’s research files on the Watergate scandal, which he covered for Newsweek.

• Wayne State University, Detroit, has acquired the folklore collection of Beverly Borovitz, a local bookstore owner. The Borovitz Collection contains approximately 400 volumes, some of which date back to the mid-1800s. Noteworthy titles include The Story of the Jubilee Singer (1880), The Comic Songster (1870), and volumes I through VIII oíEnglish & Scottish Ballads (1857-1858).

The University has also acquired the personal electrochemistry collection of George Dubpernell, a pioneer researcher in chromium plating and world-renowned expert in the history of electroplating, for its Science and Engineering Library. The Dubpernell library of some 5,000 volumes dates from 1923 and includes his early research in chromium plating, as well as subscriptions to journals in the original fields of metallurgy and electrochemistry.

Grants

• The Harvard University Library has re-ceived a $1.8 million NEH grant to fund three preservation projects. To be filmed from Baker Library are 9,550 volumes on business thought and practice from 1870 to 1920. To be filmed from Widener Library are some 8,000 volumes on the Italian Risorgimento, a particularly strong collection on a historically significant period. To be filmed from the Law School Library is a 10,000- volume collection of pre-Soviet Russian law, perhaps the most impressive and unique collection outside of the Soviet Union. In all, the three-year project will preserve more than 27,500 volumes representing more than 16,000 titles.

• Paine College, Augusta, Georgia, has received a $150,000 grant from the Callaway Foundation, Inc., to fund a new library/learning resources center. The award from the Georgia-based charitable foundation will allow construction in the fall of the $2.3 million project. Designed to accommodate a student body of 1,000, the two-story, 31,000 square foot structure will include individual and group study rooms, a curriculum laboratory, three computer rooms, production and language laboratories, a computer literacy office, and space for a collection of 111,000 volumes.

• The Research Libraries Group has beenawarded a $2,029,845 NEH grant to support the second phase of the Great Collections Microfilming Project. The project focuses on 13 outstanding collections important to humanities research at nine of RLG’s member libraries. The result will be the reformatting of over 34,000 volumes over the next three years. Materials from the following collections will be filmed: Brown University—3,000 volumes from the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays and 3,000 volumes on the history of mathematics; Columbia Teachers College— 3,080 volumes of American public school curricula material from the Early Twentieth-Century Curriculum Collection; Dartmouth College—917 volumes of New England local history, 1,402 volumes from the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration, 451 volumes of 19th-century dime novels, and 391 volumes of New Hampshire imprints; Emory University—4,000 volumes from the Hymnody and Psalmody Collection; New York Historical Society-—315 volumes of Anglo-American black history; New York University—7,350 volumes from the Fales Collection of British Literature; Northwestern University—5,000 volumes from the Africana Collection; University of Florida— 4,500 volumes from the Caribbean Basin Collection; University of Iowa—1,000 volumes of American literature.

• The Rochester Institute of Technology’sImage Permanence Institute has received a $385,403 NEH grant to study the effects of air pollution on archival microfilm. Information stored on microforms is subject to deterioration from pollution if the microforms are not stored properly. The grant will make it possible for RIT to study the susceptibility of such materials to environmental factors including ozone, sulfur dioxide, and peroxides. The Institute will then try to determine which factors are most important to control and how contaminants react with other factors.

• The University of Alberta Library, Edmon-ton, has received grants totaling $50,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Two awards of $20,000 each will support the further development of the Library’s collections of modern children’s literature and modern methods of music analysis. Two awards of $5,000 each are dedicated to the purchase of Chinese government documents and of English popular literature, 1750-1830.

• The University of California at Riverside’sEighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue for North America has received a $ 156,936 U. S. Office of Education Title II-C grant to support the first year of a three-year project to provide machinereadable cataloging for U nits 1-48 of Early English Books, 1475-1640, a microfilm set published by University Microfilms International. These units contain approximately22,500 items selected from A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640.

• The University of Kansas Libraries’ Depart-ment of Special Collections, Lawrence, has been awarded a $178,398 Department of Education Title II-C grant to catalog the books, serials, and ephemeral materials in the P. S. O’Hegarty Irish Library, one of the four largest Irish collections in the Western hemisphere, and to continue performing essential conservation of fragile materials. Acquired in the 1950s, the collection contains major holdings of Irish imprints, works on Irish topics, and works by Irish authors dating from the 17th to the early 20th century. In all, 14,000 titles of books and pamphlets and 430 serial titles will be cataloged and made internationally accessible through the OCLC database.

• The University of Texas at Austin’s GeneralLibraries has received a $142,947 NEH grant to preserve on microfilm several thousand valuable books and pamphlets on Mexican history that are on the verge of disintegration. The materials are at UT Austin’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, one of the most eminent of its kind. In addition to the microfilming effort, the NEH grant will allow the Libraries to encase 4,000 Mexican history pamphlets and small monographs in new chemically neutral binders that are much saferthan older chip board binders that are highly acidic.

The University also received a $ 1 million grant from Houston Endowment, Inc., to establish the Houston Endowment Library Fund, the income from which will help support the Tarlton Law Library at UT Austin. The new fund will be used primarily to assist the Library in increasing its book budget and in upgrading professional staff salaries.

And UT Austin has been awarded a $156,591 Department of Education grant to catalog the Robert Lee Wolff Collection ofVictorian Fiction, one of the world’s eminent collections of its kind that is now part of the University’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The collection of about 8,000 titles (16,739 volumes) was assembled over a period of years, and encompasses the entire range of Victorian fiction, representing about onethird of fiction published between 1837 and 1901. When completed in 1990, the computerized catalog will be widely accessible throughout the world via the OCLC database.

• Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, has received a $71,000 grant from the Charles A. Dana Foundation, Inc., to encourage the integration of library skills in its liberal arts curriculum. The grant will support a new Faculty-Librarian Partnership Program designed to strengthen the role of the library in Wheaton’s undergraduate curriculum and to promote informational literacy in students. Workshops will bring teachers and librarians together to incorporate library instruction into existing courses in order to deepen students’ understanding of what a library is and how to use it. Emphasis will be placed on new library technologies such as the latest computerized information systems. The program will complement the college’s new general education curriculum, adopted in 1986, which includes the introduction of the use of the library as a primary tool for learning.

News notes

• California State University, Northridge’s Oviatt Library entered its second phase of construction in September. The $16 million project includes the addition of an East and West wing to the existing library, and a controversial and innovative Automated Storage/Retrieval System named the Leviathan II. This system, which has a capacity of950,000 volumes, will provide an economical solution to space needs and will serve as a pilot project for the entire CSU system of 19 campuses. Books will be stored in bins along six aisles. When a student requests a book from a terminal, a forklifttype machine will retrieve the bin and deliver it to a workstation, where the requested book will be pulled by a library worker and signed out at the Circulation Desk. Approximately 50 percent of the library’s collection will initially go into the Leviathan II. Library personnel and consultants at CSU are now working with GEAC staff to develop an interface with the GEAC online catalog that will enable apatron to use a terminal to order and check out a book from the Leviathan II.

• The City of New York’s Mayor Edward Kochand Commissioner of the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), Eugene Bockman, announced that the Municipal Archives Reference and Research Fund will award $130,000 to three New York City agencies to arrange, preserve, and restore historical records created by city government and make them available to the public. The agencies benefiting from the fund this year are: the NYC Department of Taxes Photograph Collection Preservation Project; the Old Town Records Collection Processing Project; the La Guardia Community College Fiorello H. La Guardia Papers Preservation Project, Continuation; the Colonial Records Preservation Project, Phase II; and the Art Commission Correspondence Files of the Art Commission, Phase III. The fund was created in 1985 to enable DORIS to receive proceeds from the sale of non-archival collectible items. The initial investment consisted of proceeds from the 1985 sale of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, which netted $1.4 million.

• The Library of Congress and Bowdoin Col- lege,Brunswick, Maine, have announced a cooperative agreement to preserve a rare and historically significant film collection depicting early 20th-century exploration of the eastern arctic. The films, which were shot on the arctic voyages of the renowned Canadian explorer Robert Bartlett from 1926 to 1946, are part of an extensive collection of artifacts, films, and documents housed at the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. They feature traveling by dog sled and hunting from skin kayaks, villagers making and repairing implements, and communities gathering for festivities. Some of the world’s foremost arctic explorers appear in the footage, along with scenes of northern wildlife and wooden ships sailing through icy waters. Under the terms of the agreement, the Bartlett films will be transferred from deteriorating 35-millimeter nitrate stock to stable safety film by the LC’s Motion Picture Preservation Laboratory. And, as part of the joint agreement, Susan Kaplan and Gerald Bigelowof the Arctic Museum will help catalog the LC’s collection of films made by Donald B. MacMillan, a leading American arctic explorer and one of Bartlett’s contemporaries.

Also at LC, James Billington has announced the selection of 14 libraries as sites for a pilot project to test dial-up access to the library’s computer databases. The six-month experiment will put the library online to the nation by offering direct access to its automated bibliographic, Congressional bill status, copyright, and referral information. The project is an outgrowth of Billington’s meetings with librarians across the country last year, in which he received numerous requests for general access to the library’s online computer systems. The sites chosen are: the Boston Public Library; the D.C. Public Library; the U.S. Information Agency; the Los Alamos National Laboratory; the state libraries of California, Oregon, and New York; Lehigh University; the University of Southern California; the University of Kentucky/Kentucky State Library; the University of Maryland; the University of Michigan; Duke University; and Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies.

•Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania, recentlydedicated its extensive collection of books on Japanese culture and history in honor of Harold E. Helmrich, one-time director of SRU’s library services, and the man responsible for the collection plan developed more than 25 years ago. The collection of more than 3,000 English-language books is housed in the Special Collections Room of Bailey Library.

• The University at Albany, State University of New York,is launching the Capital District Labor History Project with a $37,500 grant to survey, describe, and help preserve the records of labor organizations in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area. Aproject archivist from the University Libraries at Albany will work with labor organizations and leaders around the Capital District to document the long and distinguished history of organized labor in that area. Included in the survey will be historically important privateand publicsector unions to be selected from among 200 labor organizations with guidance from an advisory board of labor leaders, historians, and archivists. The project is a component of the ongoing Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Labor Documentation Project, which is being funded by the NYS legislature in order to identify and preserve records of historical significance from among some 3,000 labor organizations in New York State.

• The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music announced the opening of its new Sibley Music Library on May 15, 1989. The new library is housed one block away from the school in Eastman Place, an $18 million mixed-use facility which houses, in addition to the Sibley Library on its three top floors, commercial stores, restaurants, and office space. The complex also includes an indoor atrium and an outdoor public plaza that will accommodate community arts performances and exhibitions. With a collection of over half a million items, the new library now takes up approximately 50,000 square feet.