ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

•The New York University Archives, New York, has acquired the professional papers of Bayrd Still, director of the Archives. Still, whose association with NYU began in 1947, served as head of the History Department, 1955-70, as acting dean of the College of Arts and Science, 1958-60, and as acting dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, 1971. Upon his retirement from teaching in 1974, Still became director of the Archives, and was active in the organization of the university’s sesquicentennial celebration in 1981-82. His scholarly works include Milwaukee: The History of a City (1946, 1955), Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (1956), and Urban America: A History with Documents (1974). The collection, which spans 60 years, includes material from Still’s years as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under the historian Frederick L. Paxson; his early teaching career at what is now the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and Duke University; the war years in the Army Air Force Historical Office; and his long association with NYU. Included are correspondence, articles, speeches and research notes, many on the history of NYU, Greenwich Village, and New York City.

•The University of California, Los Angeles Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Division, has acquired two manuscripts of note. One is a Henry Miller notebook, containing notes of his tour around the United States in 1940-41. The notebook contains material which Miller used for The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New York, 1945-47) and complements other notes, manuscripts, typescripts, and drawings in the Henry Miller Papers at UCLA. The notebook includes more than 200 pages of holograph notes, an itinerary of the trip, and five original drawings. Some of the entries in the notebook were repeated verbatim in the book, but much of the notebook contains unpublished materials that will contibute to further Miller scholarship. The notebook is one of the few Miller manuscripts not originally deposited at UCLA by Miller. It was sold by Miller in 1942 and remained in private hands until its acquistion by UCLA.

UCLA has also acquired the manuscript of Fe- derigo Commandino’s translation of Archimedes (ca.1553), the copy which Paolo Manuzio used to print the Aldine edition (Venice, 1558). The manuscript is in the handwriting of both Guidobaldo dal Monte and Commandino himself, whose marginalia offer both translation corrections and printing directions which were carried out in the printed edition. Commandino was the most important translator of Greek mathematical treatises in the 16th century.

•The University of Denver’s Houston Fine Arts Center is now the home of one of the ten largest dance libraries in the country, the Martha Faure Carson Dance Library. The collection came to the University when DU purchased Colorado Women’s College. A recent bequest from the now defunct Agnes Kragh Hearn Foundation has enabled the University to move the library to more spacious accommodations in the Center’s Lyle True Gallery and to retain Denver Post music and dance critic Glenn Giffen as part-time curator. In addition to books and periodicals, the collection consists of press kits, photographs, posters, videocassettes, audiotapes, and record albums.

•The University of Minnesota-St. Paul Campus Libraries have received a collection of more than 5,000 family social sciences volumes from the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR). The catalog contains materials covering a wide variety of topics, including family relations, education, human psychology, family social history, and human sexuality. Although most of the titles have a post-1970 publication date, the collection was compiled over the past 25 years by Ruth Jewson, recently retired NCFR executive director. The NCFR will also donate to Minnesota any subsequent volumes as they are acquired.

♦The University of Texas at Austin Library has acquired, by gift and purchase, a massive archive of materials documenting life in the Old South between 1780 and 1900. The materials, which have been designated the Natchez Trace Collection, were acquired for UT-Austin’s Rarker Texas History Center. The name of the collection is derived from an old Indian trail and later post road between Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi. The “Trace,” an important military and commercial route from the 1780s to the 1830s, passed through the old Natchez District, which had been organized by France and was later ruled by Great Rritain and Spain. It became the richest cotton-growing region in the U.S. in antebellum days. Through diaries, correspondence, court records, periodicals, household inventories, business ledgers, newspapers, slave bills of sale, medical records, maps, broadsides, catalogs, battlefield letters, and sheet music, the collection paints a picture of life in Mississippi and Louisiana during the Old South era as it pertained to slavery, cotton, the economy, law, medicine, politics, religion, education, plantations, women, agriculture, the Civil War, and many other subjects.

Grants

•Brown University Library, Providence,Rhode Island, has received a $750,000 NEH challenge grant to establish an endowment to cover the costs of library acquistions in the humanities, including classics, old world archaeology, history of mathematics, history, area studies, language and literature, theater arts, the history of music and art. The grant will also enable staff to catalog these holdings. The university plans to raise an additional $2,250,000 to provide the necessary fundmatching dollars required by the grant.

•Haverford College, Pennsylvania, has received a $1 million grant from the Pew Memorial Trust for the conversion of the college’s bibliographic records to machine-readable form. The grant is to be shared by Haverford with Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges, and subsequent phases of the automation plan will provide for an integrated online system accessible to all three colleges’ faculty, students and staff. Presently, the three college libraries utilize OCLC. The libraries will continue their interlibrary loan system, and the OCLC database records will be transferred to the new system, providing online access to holdings, bibliographic information, and other library records. In total, the three libraries hold almost two million volumes, and over seven thousand periodical subscriptions. Each of the libraries has an extensive collection of government documents, rare books, manuscripts, and microforms.

•Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick,New Jersey, have been awarded a $25,000 grant from the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities in support of the New Jersey Humanities Media Resource Service. The Resource Service circulates films and videos throughout the state of New Jersey to community groups and colleges, schools, health-related institutions, and the business community. Brochures, speakers, and programming are also provided.

•The University of Alberta, Edmonton, has received an $8,000 grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to help fund the acquisition of the Home Museum Collection of artists’ books. This collection of artists’ books was formed by the American artist Francis Brown, between 1971 and 1984. It includes over 400 books produced by artists from the U.S., Canada, and many other countries. Among the artistic concepts embodied are minimalism, conceptualism, work by the Fluxists, and correspondence art. Also part of the collection are many volumes of documentation and reference, plus correspondence and more than 200 periodicals. The Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, where the collection will be housed, has been collecting modern artists’ books for six years.

•The University of Georgia Libraries has received a $10,000 United States Newspaper Program Planning Grant from the Office of Preservation of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The main objective of this planning grant is to survey repositories in Georgia to establish primary newspaper holding locations within the state, to provide a count of both in-state and out-of state newspaper titles, and compile a checklist of the instate newspapers. This compilation will become the basis for future microfilming and cataloging. The grant will be administered by the Georgia Newspaper Project. The United States Newspaper Program (USNP) is a cooperative effort among the NEH, the Library of Congress, Online Computer Library Network (OCLC), and the USNP participants to build a national database of bibliographic and holdings information for newspapers published in the United States. The program will provide access to newspapers and preserve them through microfilming. The Georgia Newspaper Project began in the 1950s as an effort to preserve Georgia’s newspapers on microfilm. By 1985 five hundred and seventy titles on over 8,000 reels had been microfilmed. The University Libraries retain the master negatives as well as a positive working copy for each title. In addition to providing the means for achieving the main objectives of the USNP, the NEH grant will allow the University of Georgia Libraries to host a number of planning workshops throughout the state. These workshops will provide a method for involving county officials, librarians, individuals, historical and genealogical societies in the planning for Georgia’s participation in this program.

•The University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries have received a $202,757 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to improve the availability of special collections. The 15-month grant will be used to improve bibliographic access to approximately 21,000 pre-1800 imprints through the national online union catalog operated by OCLC. Approximately 5,200 titles will be treated. In addition, the university has been awarded a $3,000 faculty/librarian research grant from the Council on Library Resources. Grant funds will be used for the study, “Investigating the Effects of Human Factors on the Outcome of a Library Computer Literacy Program,” a follow-up to the UMC Libraries’ H.W. Wilson Staff Development Award project on computer literacy. The new study will explore and document staff perceptions and attitudes toward computer technology after completing the computer literacy program.

•The University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Studies, Madison, has been awarded a $148,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study the role of literacy education of secondary school, community college, academic, public, state, and state institutional libraries. A nationwide survey coupled with nine exemplary program case studies form the basis of the study which will result in the development of a projected role for libraries in literacy education. The project report will be delivered to the DOE in June 1987.

News Note

•The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

School of Library and Information Science has signed a partnership agreement with Moi University’s newly established Faculty of Information Sciences at Eldoret, Kenya. The partnership agreement, which is the first to be signed between UW-Milwaukee and an African university, provides for faculty support to Moi University, student exchanges, and exchange of library materials. As part of the agreement, UWM-SLIS will assist with curriculum design and program development for the Faculty of Information Sciences and consult on library planning, automation, staffing, and staff training at MU. SLIS will also provide partial and full fellowships for Moi University faculty to complete their MLS at UWM. The SLIS will continue to send books and periodicals to Moi University to support instruction and research in the Faculty of Information Sciences. Moi University is the second university to be established in Kenya and is named after Daniel Arap Moi, the president of the Republic of Kenya.