ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

Columbia University was awarded$129,025 for a two-year project to rerecord 2,000 hours of at-risk recordings documenting Jewish experiences in Europe and New York, as well as local history, culture, and social developments in New York State during the 20th century. The recordings come from Columbia University, the State University of New York-Binghamton, and the University of Rochester. The library is also a participant in a second project awarded $81,000 and managed by the University of Rochester. The award, for the preservation of historic photographs 2003-2004, will address older photographic collections on unstable film bases and acidic photographic paper mounts. They will preserve and make accessible these valuable collections by generating copy negatives, contact print “reference” copies, and new archival masters as needed. Specifically, Columbia’s role in this project will be to preserve historical film negatives and prints from the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, the Samuel Gottscho Collection, and the Empire State Building Archive.

New Jersey State Library and RutgersUniversity have been awarded a $460,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to build “The New Jersey Digital Highway,” a portal to the state’s historical and cultural heritage materials. The grant will focus on accessing and using digitized collections of materials available in libraries, historical societies, museums, and archives around the state so that educators, students, and the public can have access to these materials online for their research and personal use. Rutgers University Libraries will build the portal and technical infrastructure to support and house the New Jersey Digital Highway. The first collection, which will be built by contributions from many institutions, is “The Changing Face of Newjersey: The Immigration Experience from Earliest Times to the Present. ”

SOLINET received a $50,000 grant fromthe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to extend the reach of its regional Preservation Field Services program. Preservation Field Services provides educational and informational services to libraries, archives, historical societies, and other organizations in the Southeast to improve the ability of institutions to preserve and provide access to their information resources for as long as they are needed and useful. During the grant, experts will work with SOLINET staff to develop tools and content that will speak effectively to uninformed communities about the benefits of preservation in an institutional context and will seek to identify additional opportunities for raising awareness, linking institutions to information, training, and other programs that can help improve preservation planning and practice. The impact and effectiveness of the outreach program will be measured over 24 months.

North Carolina State University (NCSU)Libraries has received a $270,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop InsideWood, an extensive, Internet-accessible wood anatomy research database. The funding for InsideWood covers work at both NCSU Libraries and the College of Natural Resources over a two-year time span. InsideWood will build on existing databases, specimen collections, and photographic images at NCSU and other institutions. NCSU holds 6,916 database records covering extant and fossil angiosperms, extant conifers, and hardwood fibers (these records are available on computer diskette but not over the Internet), 31,919 wood samples, 4,000 microscope slides, and 4,050 photomicrographs collected over the past 114 years. Project researchers will create a Web site with nonexclusive, open architecture to allow for long-term sustainability of the database for wood identification.

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

Acquisitions

The papers of former chief U.S. armscontrol negotiator Ambassador Paul C. Wamke have been acquired by Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library. Wamke, who died in October 2001 at the age of 81, served as the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. The papers contain considerable evidence of the development of Warnke’s thought related to SALT, ACDA, and other topics. In the texts of his many speeches and articles, found in this collection in both draft and final forms, the essential issues are presented in a manner to inform and convince the interested layperson.

Eric Moe, senior composer on the musicfaculty at the University of Pittsburgh (UP), has donated his music manuscripts to UP’s Theodore M. Finney Music Library. The collection includes sketches, fair-copies, and computer-generated holographs of the composer’s works from the late 1970s to the present, including No Time Like the Present (1996), a commission from Mariss Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Moe is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Rhonda and Walter Lakond Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Fromm Foundation, Meet- the-Composer USA, and Koussevitzky Foundation, among others. His Sonnets to Orpheus was featured on the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000. A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently codirects the Music on the Edge new music concert series at the University of Pittsburgh. Moe joined UP’s music faculty in 1989 as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 1999-

Civil rights attorney Alan Dershowitz hasdonated his papers to Brooklyn College. Dershowitz, a 1959 graduate of the college, was president of Executive Council and the Forensic Society and captain of the debate team. He received an honorary degree of

Doctor of Laws from the college in 2001. The collected papers comprise over 1,000 boxes of memos, manuscripts, letters, legal documents, clippings and artifacts. From his early days at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed full professor at age 28 (the youngest in the school’s history), Dershowitz’s archives contain the history of hundreds of legal, political, and social debates, including his work on the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the 2 Live Crew obscenity case, and the appeal of Claus von Bulow’s attempted murder conviction—a high-profile case that became the basis of the movie Reversal of Fortune. A significant amount of material in the collection deals with Jewish-American issues. Dershowitz’s 19th and most recent book, The Case For Israel, is a vigorous defense in classic legal fashion of Israel’s right to exist.

Asian American writer Frank Chin hasdonated his manuscripts, letters, unpublished scripts, and other papers to the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, based at the University of Califomia-Santa Barbara (UCSB). Chin, a graduate of UCSB, is the author of “The Chickencoop Chinaman,” the first play authored by an Asian American to be produced on a New York stage. He has also written other plays, novels, short stories, documentaries, and literary criticism. Chin is one of the founders of San Francisco’s highly acclaimed Asian American Theater Workshop, now the Asian American Theater Company, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary.

A collection of materials concerningJames Beard, internationally known cookbook author and culinary educator, has been donated to the Fales Collection at New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. The collection, donated by restaurant consultant Clark Wolf, a longtime friend of the late Beard, features letters to and articles by and about Beard, as well as photographs dating back to Beard’s childhood. According to Marvin Taylor, head of the Fales Collection, the letters were given to Wolf by Beard’s long-time personal assistant Emily Gilder, who had rescued them from the wastebasket between their desks. Gilder gave them to Wolf not long after Beard’s death in 1985 with instructions to “do the right thing when the time comes.” ■