ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Syracuse University’s George Arents Research Library, New York, has acquired the largest known private collection of Steven Crane materials. The collection contains 62 letters by Crane, 39 letters by his wife, a portion of his sister’s diary, as well as numerous books, photos, and related materials. Originally owned by the late Crane scholar Melvin H. Schoberlin, the materials were stored by his widow in Oahu, Hawaii, before their transfer to Syracuse. Highlights of the collection include Crane’s earliest surviving manuscript, a poem written when he was 10 or 11 years old; four inscribed presentation copies of Crane novels; and letters written for Crane by his wife during the last six months of his life.

• The University of Wisconsin-Platteville has received a unique surname index to persons located in the Upper Mississippi lead and zinc mining district from 1815 through the 1860s. Gerald Fieldhouse, of Dodgeville, Wisconsin, has spent the last 25 years compiling this index of people who lived, worked, or passed through southwest Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois. The sources used include the Wisconsin territorial census between 1836 and 1847, the Illinois and Michigan census for 1830 and 1840, the federal census for 1850 and 1860, and many other local polls and records.

Grants

• The Boston Library Consortium has been awarded a grant of $10,000 from the Florence Roblee Foundation to develop a training module to assist librarians in dealing effectively with the human impact of technological change. The funds will support an initial survey of practicing librarians to identify relevant issues, and the development of a model workshop which will be presented and tested with representatives from a variety of Massachusetts libraries. Materials produced and collected for the project will be edited and made available so that the workshop may be replicated by other libraries and consortia.

• Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research, Chicago, has received a grant of $30,000 from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation for the establishment of a computerized reference system and a union catalogue of black music holdings in selected Chicago-area libraries.

• The Moravian Music Foundation, Winston- Salem, North Carolina, has received two grants totaling $43,832 to support the preservation of its archival collections of manuscript music. The John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation presented $10,414 and the James G. Hanes Memorial Fund/Foundation gave an additional $33,418. The conservation program was started by a $25,200 grant given earlier this year by the Winston-Salem Foundation.

• The University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York, has received a Title II-C grant of $233,000 on behalf of the Associated Music Libraries Group (AMLG). The money will fund a pilot project to be undertaken by three AMLG libraries—Eastman, Indiana, and Berkeley—to demonstrate the feasibility of proposed methods and standards for retrospective conversion of bibliographic information in the field of music. The standards are those developed at the Council on Library Resources Conference on Standards for the Retrospective Conversion of Music (see CirRL News, July/August 1985, p.342, for details). The pilot project will add or enhance approximately 30,000 titles in the OCLC and RLIN networks, which in turn are committed to the exchange of MARC tapes resulting from the project.

• Illinois State University, Normal, has received a bequest of $50,000 from the estate of the late Harold Sage, of Normal, for the maintenance of the library’s collection of Abraham Lincoln books and pamphlets which Sage had donated to the University in 1979. The collection consists of some 1200 books and 1500 pamphlets on Lincoln, many of them limited editions.

• Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, has been awarded a grant of $22,084 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the conservation of 45 maps in the Old Sturbridge Village Research Library. The conserved 18th and 19th- century maps, previously underutilized due to their poor physical condition, will expand the library’s offerings of historic resources. The conservation work will be done by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts.