ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe GaIloway

Johns Hopkins University has received a$230,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize nearly a halfcentury of recorded Peabody Conservatory classical music performances and make them available on the Web. The collection contains rarely recorded solo and ensemble repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the avant garde.

Willamette University has received a grantof $500,000 from the Meyer Memorial Trust to help support a $2 million endowment goal set for the Mark O. Hatfield Political Archives. The Hatfield Archives contain materials that date back to 1950, when Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-Oregon) first ran for public office. The collection includes public and private papers, photos, memorabilia from all stages of his political career, audiovisual tapes, and his book collection.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has received a $ 1.5 million gift to establish its first faculty chair. Robert and Juanita Simpson of Mount Vernon, Ohio, have endowed a fund that will provide permanent support for a chair in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library. Robert Simpson, a 1949 University of Illinois graduate, is founder and chairman of MFM Building Products Corporation in Coshocton, Ohio.

Acquisitions

Artist and filmmaker Camille Billopsand theater historian James V. Hatch have donated to the Special Collections and Archives of Emory University a significant portion of a collection of African-American cultural art assembled over the past 35 years. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hatch and Billops began to conduct oral histories with artists in all disciplines—art, cinema, dance, drama, literature, music—and on related educational and political topics .Billops began photographing the works of black artists in exhibitions and private collections. To complement this project, that now numbers nearly 10,000 slides, they assembled a library of books, periodicals, and clippings. Hatch began to collect published and unpublished plays, set designs, theater programs, and historical and biographical works, creating a comprehensive black theater collection.

A collection related to abolitionist JohnBrown has been acquired by Plattsburg State University of New York. The Edwin Cotter Jr. Collection was amassed by the longtime manager of the John Brown State Historic Site outside Lake Placid, New York. From the beginning of his 30-year career there, Cotter was interested and involved in John Brown scholarship, maintaining correspondence with other researchers and writers on the subject. He sought out descendents of Brown when construction of the ski jumps for the 1980 Winter Games threatened to engulf the Brown farm and Brown’s grave. An extensive library of books and other publications about Brown, as well as photographs, extensive research notes, and drafts of Cotter’s published and unpublished works are included in the collection.

Thousands of rare books and journalsfrom the Massachusetts Horticultural Society have been acquired by the Chicago Botanic Garden, including first editions of Darwin’s botanical works and a collection of botany, horticulture, and gardening journals published in the 18th century. The collection contains historical and scarce volumes dating back as far as the 1400s, including a priceless collection of 2,219 rare books and 2,000 journal titles. The oldest book in the collection—published in Treviso, Italy, in 1483—is De Historia Plantarum by Theophrastus, who was Aristotle’s favorite student and is often thought of as the father of botany. ■

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: agalloway@ala.org.