ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Mary Ellen K. Davis

Texas Tech dedicates new library

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David McCullough’s address highlighted Texas Tech University’s dedication of its new $8.8 million Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library this fall. McCullough said, “Your collection of Southwest history will become very important. It’s going to bring students, scholars, and people who do the kind of work that I do to your campus. They are going to discover what’s happening here, and discover the pleasures and the stimulation of being in this community and in this state—and it’s going to be good for everybody.”

The new building, designed by Komatsu/ Rangel, Inc. of Forth Worth, provides almost 78,000 square feet of climate-controlled floor space and is home to the Southwest Collection, the Vietnam Archive, the Rare Books Collection, the University Archives, and the Hoblitzelle Conservation lab.

The fast-growing Vietnam Archives, established in 1989, include donations of books and papers from national figures including the late CIA director William Colby, state department official Douglas Pike, and the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition.

Texas Tech joins ARL

Texas Tech University has been admitted to membership in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) bringing to 121 the number of institutions that are members.

Dean of Libraries E. Dale Cluff said, “Membership in ARL is indicative not only of a university administration’s commitment to its library system but also its commitment to research and to advancing the body of knowledge. Texas Tech has shown that commitment and ARL membership is another milestone that denotes success in our ongoing quest for academic excellence.” ARL membership had been a goal of Guff’s since coming to the university in 1982.

Membership in ARL is extended to a university after it meets stringent standards that factor in doctoral degrees, expenditures for library services and materials, staffing, the number of books and journals, and the qualities of collections.

Texas Tech was invited to join ARL after a unanimous vote of the ARL Board and membership-at-large at the May annual meeting. Texas Tech is the first new library added to ARL in the past five years.

AAMES opens Web site

ACRL’s Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Section (AAMES) opened its homepage at http://www. niu.edu/depts/library/aames.html. The site, designed by Robert Ridinger of Northern University, includes information about the history of the section and upcoming programs. AAMES members who can supply missing information for the program timeline should contact Ridinger at c60rbr1@corn.cso.niu.edu. The site may also be reached from ACRL’s homepage at http:// www.ala.org/acrl.html.

Candidates for ALA President announced

Martin Gomez, executive director of the Brooklyn Public Library, and Sarah Long, director of the North Suburban Library System (an organization of 680 academic, public, school, and special libraries north of Chicago) have been nominated by ALA’s nominating committee to run for president of ALA for the 1999-2000 term.

Texas Tech University's new Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library houses the Southwest Collection, Rare Books Collection, the Vietnam Archive, and the University Archives.

ALA members will vote on the spring 1998 ballot. The candidate elected will serve as ALA-president-elect in 1998-99 becoming president the following year.

The March C&RL News will feature statements from both candidates.

Living the Future II in Arizona

The University of Arizona Library is sponsoring the “Living the Future II: Organizational Changes for Success” conference to be held April 21-24, 1998, in Tucson, Arizona. This is a follow-up to the 1996 “Living the Future: Organizational Change and Process Improvement” conference.

Meg Wheatley and Ernest B. Ingles will give the keynote address. Wheatley is known for her book Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organizations from an Orderly Universe, which is credited for changing the thinking about organizational structure.

Ingles has achieved prominence for his strategic planning initiatives; the planning and building of a Canadian university’s first remote storage and document supply facility; and his award-winning, cost-containment initiatives.

Papers and poster sessions will focus on partnerships, information literacy, new services and their impact on organizations, human resource issues, and organizational changes.

Registration and accommodation information may be found on the Web at http:// www.library.arizona.edu/conference/ltf2.htm.

Call for contributors

MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librahanshipis seeking con- tributors for its spring 1998 issue, which will have a special section on bibliographies, mediagraphies, and Web resource lists. Ideas include a bibliography on new technologies or instruction techniques; a media- graphy on a “hot topic”; or a Web list of av producer sites or cataloging issues. Compilations and research ar- ticles are due by March 16 and should be submitted via e-mail to Lori Widzinski, editor at widz@acsu.buffalo.edu. Details may be found at http://wings.buffalo.edu/ publications/ mcjml.

Marquette Univ. receives $10 million gift for new library

Marquette University received a $10 million gift to construct a new library from an anonymous alumnus and his family. The gift will be structured as a challenge grant requiring the university to seek additional donations to match the $10 million.

The library will be named in honor of the Rev. John P. Raynor who served as Marquette’s president for 25 years and who died in November at the age of 74. Days before his death, Raynor met with the donor and was told about the planned gift.

“[Raynor] believed, with his whole heart, that Marquette’s particular approach to the work of educating young men and women in the Jesuit tradition was a powerful force for good in the world. I am glad to be able to play a role in achieving a goal that pleased him very much: the creation of a new library to serve new generations of Marquette students,” said the anonymous donor.

Marquette’s current library was built in 1953 and expanded in 1971. The university recently completed a planning study to assess future library needs and the Board of Trustees endorsed the new construction option and voted unanimously to name the new library in Raynor’s honor.

“University libraries are more and more becoming not just repositories of materials but extensively utilized learning centers,” said Nicholas C. Burckel, Marquette’s director of libraries. “I see the new library serving as the intellectual commons for the campus. As student learning becomes more collaborative and less solitary, as faculty cross disciplinary boundaries in technology, our library will become even more central to Marquette’s teaching and research mission.”

Date set for “Learning to Teach” preconference

The ACRL Instruction Section's preconference “Learning to Teach” will be held on Friday, June 26, 1998, at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Details about the preconference were given in the January issue of C&RL News and may be found on the Web at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/ -mesora/ACRLIS/precon.html.

ACRL publishes promotion and tenure book

ACRL has published Criteriα for Promotion and Tenure in Academic Libraries, CLIP Note #26. Compiled by Virginia Vesper and Gloria Kelley, the CLIP Note ex- plores how fac- ulty status affects librarians’ pro- motion and ten- ure opportunities and the criteria at various institu- tions for defining librarians’ status. The publication includes tenure and promotion documents illustrating practices at both public and private institutions with examples covering unions, evaluation, and weighting of criteria. CLIP Note #26 (ISBN 0-8389-7928-9) is available for $28.50 (ACRL members $24.00) from ALA Order Fulfillment, 155 East Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 606ll; phone: 800-545-2433 (press 7); fax: 312-836-9958.

Build your leadership skills

Enhance your personal leadership skills by attending ACRL’s first leadership institute, “Building Your Leadership Toolkit.” The institute will be held at the Tremont Hotel in Boston, April 30-May 1, 1998.

Bob Wedgeworth, university librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Cliff Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, will give keynote addresses.

Advance register by April 8, 1998. Registration forms and additional information are available on the Web at: http://www.ala.org/ acrl.html.

Presenters sought for ACRL’s 9th National Conference

ACRL seeks presenters for its 9tlı National Conference, “Racing Toward Tomorrow,” to be held April 8-11, 1999, in Detroit.

A complete description of the conference theme, deadlines, and a program proposal form are included as an insert to the January issue of C&RL News and the entire call for participation is available on the Web at: http:// www.ala.org/ acrl/prendex.html.

JSTOR establishes journal conversion facility at Princeton

JSTOR, the nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technologies, plans to work with Princeton University Library to establish a production facility for converting paper journals to electronic form. This facility, which will supplement a similar operation at the University of Michigan, will double JSTOR’s capacity to gather journal runs, to organize them for scanning, and to load them onto JSTOR’s growing database of the complete runs of core scholarly journals. JSTOR is currently adding material at the rate of approximately 100,000 pages a month.