ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Boston Collegehas recently acquired the personal papers and library of Rex Stout, celebrated mystery writer and creator of detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin. Valued at $150,000, the collection includes more than 1,000 books, manuscripts, unpublished poems, photographs, and correspondence. The materials were donated by Stout’s wife and daughters.

• Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library has been presented with one of the best preserved and most complete archives of an international business firm. The collection contains more than 32, (XX) items documenting the rise of William Russell Grace’s shipping business and other materials relating to his career as mayor of New York (1880-82, 1885-86). The W.R. Grace & Co. documents cover the period from the 1860s to the 1920s, three decades before the company diversified into chemical manufacturing.

The collection includes records and correspondence relating to all aspects of the shipping business in New York and South America, mining interests in Peru and Chile, and transportation in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. In addition to family memorabilia and photographs, there are materials concerning New York politics, banking and insurance, real estate interests and Catholic charities, and letters from notables such as Chester A. Arthur, John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, John Hay, and J. Pierpont Morgan.

• The Music Division of the Library of Congress has received a substantial collection of material documenting the career of American soprano Dorothea Dix Lawrence, who died in 1979 in Plainfield, New Jersey. The gift was presented by her son, Morgan Lawrence. Included in the collection are copies of Lawrence’s published books and articles, photographs, clippings, recital programs, and music scores that she used in recital, often including her own adaptations that illustrate the range of her interests. Lawrence made her operatic debut in 1929, but her major focus soon became American folksong and songs by American composers.

• The Michigan State University library has now completed its collection of the public works of Humphrey Repton (1752-1818) with the acquisition of his Designs for the Pavilion at Brighton (London, 1808). Repton was one of the most renowned British landscape designers, responsible for improving the grounds of many estates belonging to the landed gentry of England.

• The University of Washington libraries have received 16 years of files of locally produced newsfilm from station KOMO-TV in Seattle. Under a formal agreement, the libraries will maintain archival holdings of Pacific Northwest events recorded by the ABC-affiliated station from 1954 through ten years prior to the present year. Additional deposits of film will be made annually beginning in 1981.

GRANTS

• The Boston Area Music Libraries, a group of sixteen institutions, have been awarded a research resources grant of $29,550 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the continuation of its Boston Composers Project. The grant will be administered by the Libraries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jay K. Lucker, director.

The primary objective of the project is to compile and prepare for publication a detailed and comprehensive list of published and unpublished scores and sound recordings of approximately 200 Boston area composers. Each library has been assigned responsibility for the composers which are their specialties.

• The Center for Research Libraries has been awarded a grant of $1 million by the Ford Foundation to augment its building program fund. The grant will be used to expand CRL’s current facility located in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago adjacent to the University of Chicago campus. In recent years, programs for new acquisitions of research materials and storage of infrequently used materials donated by members of the center were limited due to crowded facilities. The expanded building program is designed to remove such limitations.

• The Columbia University School of Library Service has received a $30,000 bequest from the estate of Ida Rosen, the income from which is to be used to support a student prize in music librarianship at the school. Rosen, who died in 1977, was for many years phonorecord librarian at Princeton University Library. Presentation of the first Ida Rosen prize was made at Columbia’s Harkness Theatre in October.

• The Rose Memorial Library of Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, and the Drew University Graduate School have been awarded an $8,(XX) grant from the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities. The fund will be used to assess the intellectual importance of over 2,000 items in the library’s special collections area and to develop multi-media public presentations by young scholars on the theme, “Times of Change,

Times of Stress: A Comparison of the 16th and 20th Centuries.”

In October, Drew University held a groundbreaking ceremony for a $12.5 million library/ar- chives center. The project, privately financed and scheduled for completion in the spring of 1982, will result in two new structures and renovation of the 42-year-old Rose Memorial Library. One of the new buildings will house the national archives of the United Methodist Church and the library’s large Methodist collection, while the other will contain the university’s Media Resource Center and additional stack space.

• The Research Libraries of the New York Public Library have been awarded a new matching grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The federal aid will amount to $1.6 million if the library raises $3.2 million in private gifts to its Research Libraries. At a ceremony on the library steps October 7 Barbara Tuchman, author and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, thanked NEH for the grant.

• The Special Collections Department of Temple University library, Philadelphia, has been awarded funds by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to conduct a nationwide study of the handling of newspaper photographs as historical resources. The department is the repository for the historical photoprint and negative collections of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News papers, which total over three million items.

Major newspaper photograph collections will be surveyed for methods of acquisition, appraisal, arrangement, description, and use, and the professional and technical literature will be reviewed and analyzed. At the end of the project in 1981 recommendations and goals for nationally applicable policies will be presented to the commission.

• The Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, has been awarded a grant by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for consultants to assist in designing a joint project with the Orthodox Church in America to reunify their archives and make them available to scholars. The long-range goal is to arrange, describe, preserve, and microfilm these documents, which represent a unique resource for the study of the Orthodox faith in America and for the early history of Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and other Orthodox peoples. Part of the archives are located at the church’s headquarters in Oyster Cove Bay, Long Island, and the remainder is with the IHRC in St. Paul.

NEWS NOTES

• The Trustees of the California State University and Colleges approved naming the Library of California State University, Fresno, the Henry Madden Library. This decision culminates a project commenced in August, 1978, when the professional library staff voted unanimously to propose that the library be named for Madden, who was university librarian there from 1949 to 1979 and was responsible for much of its growth.

• The Board of Trustees of the Catholic University of America has approved the recommendation of the university’s Academic Senate that the Graduate Department of Library and Information Science be raised to the status of a school. The new School of Library and Information Science will officially begin operation on January 1, 1981. The current chair of the department, Elizabeth W. Stone, has been designated to assume the duties of the dean of the school.

• Harvard University’s Nathan Marsh Pusey Library has won an “Award for Excellence in Architecture” from the New England Regional Council of the American Institute ol Architects. One jury comment described the building as a “simple solution to a complex problem on a difficult site.” Merle Westlake, project architect for Pusey, received the award on behalf of Hugh Stubbins and Associates, Inc., and the Harvard College Library.

• Memphis State University'sJohn Willard Brister Library has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The building was constructed in 1927.

• NELINET, Newton, Massachusetts, will begin work leading to online, computer-based catalogs and circulation systems as the first steps toward a computer-based technical program for New England libraries. NELINET’s board of directors authorized the network to work closely with OCLC to establish an appropriate communications system that will meet library networking needs in New England as local systems are established.

Online catalogs will be developed on a time- shared basis in the beginning, but in a way that allows individual or clusters of libraries to move their systems to local computers as needs, budgets, and local technical capability dictate. Circulation systems will be provided by NELINET as a distributor of existing turnkey system packages. As part of its services, NELINET will provide extensive support including training, ongoing service support, tape processing, data conversion, technical orientation, and financial arrangements.

John Linford, the network’s executive director, said that he expects production support for member libraries will be available by October, 1981.

• The New York Public Library’s new Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was dedicated in Harlem on September 28 at ceremonies outside the building. Coretta King, author, lecturer, and widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke eloquently on the need for the collection in the community. The new center was built and furnished with $3.7 million in federal funds provided under the Public Works Employment Act of 1976. Àfrican-American architectural history inspired the design of the central rooms. The second floor Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives section has walls paneled in sapele wood from Nigeria. In addition to over 75,000 monographs, the center is also a repository for 10,000 phonodiscs and 2,000 tapes covering African and West Indian folk music, early blues, and jazz, and many rare documents, including Latin verse bv African poet Juan Latino printed in Spain in 1573.

• Temple University Library, Philadelphia, joined the Research Libraries Group as a full member in October. Joseph Boisse, director of the Temple library, said that the Law Library and Health Sciences Library were included in the Central Library’s membership. The Temple University libraries house approximately 1.6 million volumes, including outstanding special collections in contemporary culture and urban archives.

• The Robert Wentworth Rogers Collection of 18th-Century Literature has been established by the Library Friends of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library in honor of Rogers’ acquisitions efforts as dean, now emeritus, of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The collec- tion contains many rare editions of works by Pope, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Boswell, as well as examples of the popular literature, newspapers, almanacs, and political tracts that were typical of the century. Many of the volumes are on view in a special Bare Book Room exhibit prepared by Rogers and Professors George Hendrick and Scott Bennett.

• The University of Maryland’s College of Library and Information Services has established a U.S Information Center for the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). The center will serve as a central repository in the U.S. for UDC schedules and other material relevant to the use and development of the classification, and will act as a referral center for inquiries about all matters relating to the UDC. The center will work in close cooperation with the U.S National Committee for the International Federation for Documentation at the National Academy of Sciences- National Research Council and will be administered by an Advisory Group on the UDC.

• The University of Texas at Austin library has opened an exhibit entitled “Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts of Ancient Mexico” in the Rare Books Room of the Benson Latin American Collection. The exhibit traces the history of Mexican pictorial manuscripts (called codices) and shows the evolution of attempts to reproduce these intricate and colorful documents. Materials on display from the Benson Collection include original manuscripts, rare printed books, and examples of both early and recent reproductions of Mixtec codices. The original manuscripts date from the early fifteenth century, when the Mixtec art form was perfected. The exhibit will remain on view’ through January.

• Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, celebrated the completion of a $4.3 million library building expansion program on October 24. The renovation included a new energy-efficient underground stack area and a stair tower with a student lounge space constructed at the rear of the library and connecting all floors. A new archives and special collections area is lit by skylight, and the original atrium area has been reopened. ■■