ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Young

The University of North Carolina atChapel Hill (UNC) has received a $3.4 million gift from the late businessman Thomas Jack Lynch of Winston-Salem. Lynch worked at a trucking company, managed an apartment complex, and invested in stocks and real estate. Lynch divided most of his estate among UNC, Campbell University, Wake Forest University, and Hillsdale College. UNC will use the money from the estate to create an endowment. Investment income will be spent on such activities as preserving 19th-century North Carolina books and pamphlets, digitizing or microfilming crumbling books, binding volumes, copying photographic negatives, and re-recording audio and videotapes.

The University of California SantaCruz (UCSC) has received a $20,000 endowment from the Kingfisher Flat Foundation of Santa Cruz as a tribute to poet and printer William Everson (1912-94). Everson joined the Dominican brotherhood in 1951 and for two decades penned his poetry under the name Brother Antoninus. When he shed his monk’s robes in 1969, Everson moved to Santa Cruz, where he remained until his death. He taught poetry at UCSC between 1969 and 1978. Everson also served as master printer of the Lime Kiln Press, which was housed in the UCSC Library. The Kingfisher Flat Foundation is a nonprofit organization charged with overseeing Everson’s literary estate and his legacy.

Angelo State University has received a$1 million gift from brothers Edward H. and Houston H. Harte to relocate and expand the Porter Henderson Library’s West Texas Collection, including the additions of the Center for the Study of Southwestern Culture and History and the Elmer Kelton Reading Room. The Hartes asked that the collection be named for longtime San Angelo pediatrician and civic leader Ralph Chase. The collection includes approximately 2,300 reels of microfilm, 12,800 monographs, and a large array of historical documents, manuscripts, and photographs.

UCLA's Louise M. Darling BiomedicalLibrary has received a pledge of $25,000 from Infotrieve, an independent document delivery company. The Infotrieve Collection Endowment will be used for the acquisition or licensing of academic, health, and life sciences journals in all formats (print, digital, multimedia) in the biomedical sciences.

The University of Tennessee (UT) inKnoxville was awarded a two-year supplement of $253,000 to the Tennessee Newspaper Project (TNP) by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This brings total funding for the period to $597,122. The supplemental funding will allow staff working in middle and east Tennessee to catalog 2,000 newspaper titles in state repositories. TNP is part of the NEH-funded U.S. Newspaper Program created in 1982 as a cooperative effort to archive and preserve newspapers published from the 18th century to the present. When the cataloging phase of the project ends in 2004, the staff will have cataloged some 11,000 titles and will then turn their attention to the next phase— microfilming selected newspapers published within Tennessee.

The University of Iowa (Ul) Librarieswon a $73,300 grant in the Library of Congress/ Ameritech National Digital Library Competition to digitize a collection of paper records relating to Chautauqua performances in the United States. Circuit Chautauqua, which first became popular in 1904, was an offspring of the lyceum movement and of the Chautauqua assemblies held at Lake Chautauqua, New York, in the late 1800s. The goal of circuit Chautauqua was to deliver educational, spiritual, and cultural stimulation to rural and small-town America. The grant will allow UI to digitize the content of the collection and display them in graphic representations and searchable texts to viewers on the Web.

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

Yale will be able to expand its Librarian-in-Residence program, which brings minority libraries to the New Haven library for a two- year term, thanks to a $220,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The four-year grant will result in the presence of two residents at Yale concurrently, increasing the effectiveness of the program by helping the diversity of the staff reflect and reinforce the diversity of the readers.

Acquisitions

The papers of Benjamin Hooks havebeen acquired by the McWherter Library of the University of Memphis. These materials document Hooks’ involvement in local and national politics and service, from his early days as a lawyer working to overthrow Jim Crow practices in Memphis to his tenure as head of the NAACP, his service as a federal judge, and as the first African American member of the Federal Communications Commission.

Jerry Spinelli‚ Newbery Award-winningchildren’s book author, donated his collection of personal papers, including manuscripts totaling eight linear feet of material, to his alma mater— Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. The materials will become part of the college’s special collections.

The National Black Writers Conferencehas donated its nonprint materials from four conferences (1986,1988,1991, and 1996) to the special collection of the Medgar Evers College Library, CUNY. Among the areas covered: responsibility of black writers to the community; images of the black folk in American literature; black literature in the ’90s; and new directions of black literature in the 21st century. Access to their bibliographic records can be made through the OCLC and CUNY databases. Organization, cataloging, and processing of the materials were made possible through a grant from the Reed Foundation, Inc.

LIFE photographer David DouglasDuncan’s archive was acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The archive captures the career of this award- winning photographer, containing over 60 years of photographs, negatives, correspondence, albums, manuscripts, equipment, and personal memorabilia. Duncan has been highly acclaimed for his poignant images of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Bob Hope will donate over the nextfew years personal papers ‚ radio and television broadcasts, scripts, joke files, films, and other materials from his career to the Library of Congress. The processing and preservation of the collection will be supported by a gift from Hope. The gift will also endow the Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment, a permanent display of rotating items from the Bob Hope Collection and other collections related to American entertainment.

The W. D. Smith, Inc. CommercialPhotography negatives dating from the early 1940s through 1989 have been acquired by the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. The W. D. Smith Company of Fort Worth was the city’s leading commercial photography firm during the last half of this century. The collection includes approximately 190,000 negatives, both black- and-white and color, which document the growth and development of Fort Worth, Tarrant County, and the North Texas region.

Japanese scholar and critic Maeda Ai'spersonal library has been acquired by Cornell University. The acquisition was made possible by $400,000 in gifts from alumni, friends, faculty, and faculty emeriti. The Maeda Collection consists of approximately 13,000 volumes, including early postwar publications and early Japanese translations of European literature. Although most of the material encompasses japanese literature and literary history and criticism, there are numerous volumes on all aspects of Japanese cultural anthropology, social history, and popular culture. The collection includes 3,000 volumes of pre-20th-century works with folded, stitch- bound leaves in traditional format. Perhaps the rarest and most valuable items in the collection are the diaries of the late 19th- century scholar and journalist Narushima Ryuhoku. ■