ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Houghton Library of Harvard University has purchased the complete journals of John Cheever, excerpts from which have been published by The New Yorker in a separate arrangement with the late writer s children, Susan and Ben Cheever. According to Rodney Dennis, curator of manuscripts in the Harvard College Library, the journals are so beautiful as to discourage people who read them from keeping journals of their own. The journals consist of some 30 volumes of singlespaced typewritten pages, composed over the course of Cheever’s adult life. The New Yorker plans to publish additional excerpts, but the journals in the Houghton Library are sealed for 10 years.

• The Library of Congress has acquired a collection consisting of approximately 5,000 pre- Revolutionary 78 rpm records manufactured in Russia, chiefly from 1899 to 1917. Fewer than 5% of the recordings are available anywhere else in the United States, and much of the material is extremely rare, even within the Soviet Union. The collection has come to the library over the last few years in installments from Joel Berger, who assembled it, beginning in the mid-1960s, from private sources, European collections, and visits to the Soviet Union. About 10,000 vocal performances are represented in the Berger Collection, including examples of opera, art songs, traditional and Gypsy romances, liturgical music, patriotic songs, and ethnic and popular materials. The collection includes the complete recordings of some of the greatest artists. In addition, there are 150 original and photocopied Russian music catalogs and more than 100 photographs and postcards of early Russian vocalists and musicians that Berger collected.

• University of Manitoba Archives in Win- nipeg has been selected by United Grain Growers Ltd. as a depository for its corporate archives. These papers are said to represent a tremendous contribution to the history of Canada, especially the Canadian prairies.

• Washington University in St. Louis has inherited the papers of the American poet May Swenson, who died in December 1989. The Libraries began collecting Swenson’s work in 1964 and hold a complete run of her publications and many of her poetry worksheets, other manuscripts, and correspondence, including an extensive sequence of letters with poet Elizabeth Bishop. The newly acquired material will complete the picture researchers will have of Swenson’s remarkable writing and publishing career. Swenson’s work was honored with numerous awards. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970 and became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1980.

Grants

• Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadel- phia, has received a grant of up to $147,876 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for a project to contribute approximately 30,000 name authority records to the Library of Congress Name Authority File. The project is being conducted by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries.

• AMIGOS Bibliographic Council, Inc., is using a $160,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a preservation service that will provide information, training, and consultation to libraries and archives in Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. AMIGOS’ new preservation service is expected to serve as a catalyst to subregional and state-based preservation planning initiatives in the southwest.

• Boston Library Consortium has received an LSCA grant of $119,000 to develop a telecommunications system linking computers in homes and offices with computers in the Boston Public Library, the State Library of Massachusetts, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis, MIT' Northeastern, Tufts, Wellesley College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Boston. In addition to online catalog information, a “table of contents” service will be available, alerting searchers to articles in about 10,000 journals in hundreds of subject areas.

• Duke University Library must match on a three-to-one basis a challenge grant of $100,000 from the J. Walter Thompson Company to create an endowment for the J. Walter Thompson Company Archives. In 1987, the advertising agency gave Duke the corporate archives and $100,000 to support the initial archival work to process the materials. It is, according to University Librarian Jerry D. Campbell, the single most complete and informative corporate record of the history of modem advertising and contains over 3 million items.

• Folger Shakespeare Library in Washing- ton received $25,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a retrospective exhibition of important recent acquisitions.

• Franklin Pierce College in Rindge. New Hampshire, has been awarded $380,000 from the Davis Educational Foundation for renovation of the library.

• Massehusetts Board of Library Commis- sioners, Nebraska Library Commission, and North Carolina Preservation Consortium have received the first NEH grants in a new category that supports the development of comprehensive statewide preservation plans.

• Miami University Libraries. Oxford. Ohio have been awarded $64,333 by the U.S. Department of Education under the Strengthening Research Library Resources Program, to fund the first year of a project to support the A.W. Kuchler Vegetation Map Collection. This collection of 2,000 maps and 500 books and booklets accurately represents every type of natural vegetation and covers every country of the world. After original cataloging records are created, they will be added simultaneously to OCLC and the local online catalog. At the end of the project, MARC records will be provided for the RLIN database. Alternative forms of access such as color microfiche and digital mapping are also being considered.

• New York Public Library has received $5 million from Dorothy and Lewis Cullman for the Performing Arts Research Center at Lincoln Center. The funds will support staff positions, endow the Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator for Theatre, and support hours for public service.

• Newberry Library. Chicago, has received $25,000 for its public-outreach concert series from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

• North Carolina State University. Raleigh. has received a U.S. Department of Education Title II-D grant of $107,017 to help make agricultural information more accessible and more up-to-date for researchers throughout the world. The grant will be used to expand a current research project with the National Agricultural Library to test the transmission of digitized documents. The project uses electronic scanning of documents to convert printed material into electronic images that can be transmitted by local and national networks.

• Shorter College. Rome. Georgia has re- ceived a grant of up to $42,855 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to preserve and make available historical records from northwest Georgia.

• Southeastern Library Network. Inc.. re- ceived over $1.25 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities to microfilm more than 18,000 brittle books and serials held by 12 institutions in six southeastern states.

• University of California Preservation Pro- gram has received a precedent-setting grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the training of preservation technicians on a systemwide basis. The training will focus on repair techniques for the circulating collections. Three different groups of five persons each will attend a three-session training program at UC Berkeley from October 1990 through May 1991. Each session lasts one week.

• University of Southern California. Los Angeles, has received $1 million from the Fletcher Jones Foundation to support construction of the new Teaching Library on the University Park campus. The grant will establish the Fletcher Jones Foundation New Technology Demonstration and Evaluation Center, a specialized research, development, testing and evaluation area to be located in the library.

• Virginia Commonwealth University.

Richmond has been awarded $100,000 to be shared by the University Library Services’ Special Collections and Archives Department and the Center for Educational Development and Resources at VCU. The Ford Foundation grant funds a two-year project to identify, acquire, and use archival materials that support the study of cultural diversity. A Multicultural Resources Database, comprised of brief information about persons and organizations in central Virginia, will be developed and made available to researchers. This database will also note holdings in organized archives such as those in the State Library and the Virginia Historical Society. Within the Richmond metropolitan area relevant personal papers and organizational records will be located and, if possible, accessioned or microfilmed.

• The College of William and Mary’s Earl Gregg Swem Library, Williamsburg, Virginia has received a $42,116 grant' from the U.S. Department of Education under its Strengthening Research Library Resources program. The yearlong grant is for cataloging the college’s manuscript collections. Access to more than 1,000 manuscript collections will become available in both the library’s online public access catalog and OCLC.

• The Winterthur Museum. Delaware has received $130,000 from the Pew Charitable Tmsts to establish a library conservation laboratory and expand the museum’s art conservation program to include library and archives preservation. The 3-year grant enables Winterthur to establish a hands- on training facility where students and interns can acquire the skills and training needed for a career in library conservation. The training will be incopo- rated into the Winterthur-University of Delaware Art Conservation Program, a 3-year course of study leading to an MS. In addition, internships will be available for individuals outside the program who want to pursue a career in library and archives conservation.

News notes

• The Library of Congress has extended two popular exhibits currently on display in the James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Avenue, S.E. “My Dear Wife: Letters from Members of Congress to Their Spouses, 1791—1944” will remain on view through March 30, 1991. Twenty- one members of Congress—and their wives—are featured in the exhibition of letters, drawn entirely from the collections of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. The other popular exhibition, “A World of Names,” which celebrates the centennial of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, will continue in the Madison Gallery through July 27, 1991. Using rare maps, explorers’ journals, musical scores, government reports and case files, books, posters, prints, photographs, and artifacts, “A World of Names” explores four main themes: the romance of names; the process by which names are applied to the landscape; conflicts in the selection of new names; and how names are standardized through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.

• Oregon State University, Corvallis has named Melvin R. George, director of libraries, the first holder of the Donald and Delpha Campbell Director of Libraries endowed chair at OSU. The chair has been established with $1.6 million designated by the OSU Foundation from a trust bequeathed by Donald N. and Delpha M. Campbell of Montrose, California. Under a new program, the Oregon State Board of Higher Education will match $1.5 million of the gift for this endowed chair, creating a total endowment pool of more than $3 million. Part of the annual earnings from the endowment will be used to pay the director s salary, while other funds will be available to use in expanding collections and staff and acquiring new technology.

• Rosary College Graduate School of Li- brary and Information Science presented the first Sr. Anne Schaudenecker Memorial Lecture on December 7. Robert Maloy, former director of the Smithsonian Institute Libraries and current director of the Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, spoke on “Seeking Continuities: Humanities and Librarianship.” The program was in memory of Sister Schaudenecker, known to many as Sister Reynold- ine, who died December 7,1989. She taught at the Rosary GSLIS for many years, before her retirement in 1972, and also served as editor of the Catholic Library Association Booklist.

• At the State University of New York at Buffalo, members of the Law Library staff are implementing a service excellence strategy learned in a workshop on “Knowing the Mission, Planning, and Organization” sponsored by the University at Buffalo personnel department. The entire staff decided to implement an “action plan” to investigate thoroughly the functional relationships between departments within the library. Based on a paradigm from the workshop, the plan involved every member of the staff and created an opportunity for increased communication among all levels of staff throughout the library. Each department developed a plan with the following elements: 1) Identify 3 aspects of service that are currently working well between your department and the department. 2) Identify 6 ways in which you can positively reinforce these. 3) Identify 3 aspects of service which are not currently working well between your department and the department. 4) Identify 6 ways in which you can affect these positively. The efforts of each department were followed by staff meetings, where problems were discussed and strategies for improvement were developed. The results were tangible, focusing most importantly on a sustained increase in communication between departments. Some specific results are: 1) Development of enhanced training programs for librarians and student assistants. 2) Development and presentation of a legal research course for law students, in which many staff members participate. 3) Establishment of a formal system for notifying circulation about missing books. 4) A subscription to the Buffalo News for the staff lounge. 5) More frequent full staff meetings. 6) Occasional social events open to all library staff. 7) Staff suggestion book.

• At Texas A & M University, Galveston, public services librarian Diane Watson has learned that having a star guest makes it easier to get media coverage. Diane started out with the guest list for commencement exercises and then consulted administrators, department heads, university employees who had lived in the community for a long time, and media representatives for suggestions about whom to invite. Diane feels that contributing to the guest list made people feel they were participating in planning the reception and made them more supportive of the event. Some of the guests from the community knew Alan Shepard and asked him to attend the reception.

Diane is shown here with her star guest, Admiral Alan Shepard, former astronaut and the first American in space, at a reception to honor Texas A & M faculty for their publications and projects.

• At the University of Arizona, Tucson, infor- mation literacy is off and running. Reference librarian Lois Olsrud can prove it. The athletic department at UA invited Lois to accompany the football team as their guest (all expenses paid) when the players flew to Oregon State for a game last fall. Lois reports that on the flight the players had to take exams that had questions like: “What is your route on 69 Blaze Dart?” and “What does ‘F’ do on Ram 130 ↔ 60?” Presumably the answers to these inquiries cannot be found in the UA Libraries, but head football coach Dick Tomey brings his players to the library the second day after they arrive in town. As part of their first week of training, the coach comes with them for library orientation. Lois and another librarian divide the players into “offense” and “defense” and give each team a tour of the library and bibliographic instruction.

• The University of California, Berkeley’s Chinese Chapter and Foundation of the Alumni Association made no small plans for its benefit in November. The gala event at I. Magnin on Union Square in San Francisco featured a dinner buffet and dancing, an exhibit of treasures from the UCB’s East Asiatic Library, international holiday fashions, and a raffle drawing for prizes that included round trip tickets to Hong Kong. Proceeds from the benefit will go to campus programs and activities including scholarships and the East Asiatic Library.

• The Friends of the University of Kansas Po- etry Collection will continue this month their third season of readings by major American poets whose work is somewhat outside the mainstream. A program on January 31 will feature Robert Peters of Huntington Beach, California. Peters is best known for his series of long “persona poems,” in which he has dramatized the lives and inner conflicts of persons as diverse as King Ludwig of Bavaria, Mother Ann Lee, Arctic explorer Elisha Kane, Cornish pastor Robert Hawker, and Erzebet Bathory, the “Blood Countess” of Hungary.

• At the University of Illinois, Urbana, the Mothers and the Dads collaborated to raise $15,000 for a state of the art career center for the undergraduate library. The two organizations sold $5.00 chances to win a year’s worth of instate tuition, free instate tuition for a semester, or a pair of university sweatshirts. The money will be used to acquire furniture, video equipment, hardware and software, to be selected with input from the university’s Career Development and Placement Office, which will hold career seminars in the library outside regular office hours.