ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Texas A&M University, College Station, hasacquired more than 700 Chinese-language volumes of literature, history, political science, art, travel, and science as a gift from the state education commission of China in honor of the university’s commitment to attracting and educating Chinese students. This is the first extensive gift of foreign-language materials presented to the university’s Sterling C. Evans Library.

•The University of British Columbia, Vancou- ver, has acquired the personal papers of B.C. author Jane Rule. The papers range from 1947 to 1984 and include notes, manuscripts, and correspondence relating to her published and unpublished novels and short stories; biographical and autobiographical material, college papers, teaching records, non-fiction manuscripts; and personal and professional correspondence. Rule has published many books including Desert of the Heart (1964), Contract with the World (1980), and Memory Board (1987).

•The University of California, Berkeley, has ac- quired the surviving papers of one of France’s top scientists at the time of the French Revolution, Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827). The 25 boxes of scientific and personal papers are the literary remains of a devastating fire in 1925 at the Laplace family’s Château de Mailloc in Normandy that consumed Laplace’s library and much of his correspondence. A noted astronomer, mathematician, and physicist, Laplace was also a minister under Napoleon Bonaparte and a founder of the Legion of Honor. His collection includes manuscripts of articles on astronomy, physics, and mathematics; corrected proofs of his treatise on astronomy, Exposition du Système du Monde; household receipts and business papers detailing Laplace’s purchases; passports, certificates of good citizenship and national guard service, and receipts for tax payments and “voluntary” contributions; extensive social correspondence by Laplace’s wife; and his son Emile’s service records, account books, and diaries.

•The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City,has received a copy of the first edition of William Harvey’s Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Treatise on the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals) published in 1628 in Frankfurt. As the first book to describe the flow of blood through the body in a circular fashion, the work is considered the first important book in the history of medicine. Only 58 copies are known to exist throughout the world.

♦The University of Massachusetts Library, Amherst, has acquired the 900-volume Portuguese collection of the late Susan C. Schneider, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The collection has numerous works covering many periods of Portuguese civilization and culture, but it focuses on two special periods: the 18th century (and the eminent statesman the Marquês de Pombal) and the contemporary period. It includes some 175 publications covering the last years of the Salazar government and the volatile period of transition to the present system; a few clandestine works appearing before the overthrow of the dictatorship; some publications of national liberation movements in the Portuguese African colonies; a number of manifestos, proceedings of meetings and other publications of political groups; and disseminations of workers’ organizations and women’s groups.

•The University of Texas at Arlington Librarieshave acquired a vast collection of valuable historical materials concerning Texas and the Southwest as a gift from Ted W. Mayborn of deCordova Bend Estates at Granbury, Texas. The donation is the first in a series of gifts to the library by Mayborn and has an appraised value of $140,000. Amassed over a period of 50 years, the collection is one of the largest Texana collections still in private hands. Items include more than 1,400 original maps; more than 800 individual newspapers from across the country reporting on major events in the history of Texas; several hundred pamphlets; biographies; personal diaries; early county histories; 250 lithographs from the 19th century; and research files on numerous topics.

Grants

•Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia,has received a grant of $42,921 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to acquire materials to strengthen its collection of Baptist materials. The funds have been used to acquire materials on the Protestant Reformation and on the Baptist tradition in North America.

•The Auburn University Library, Alabama,has been awarded a $112,577 Title II-C grant to catalog titles of works published in the Confederacy during the Civil War, and works published in France during the French Revolution. The Confederate Imprints collection of 6,188 items includes books and miscellaneous publications ranging from religious tracts and sermons to treasurer’s reports. The French Revolutionary Pamphlet collection includes 7,000 political, religious, cultural, and financial publications from between 1787 and 1800. The cataloging of these collections will make access to them easier statewide.

•The Green Mountain College Library,Poultney, Vermont, has been awarded a $5,000 grant from the George I. Alden Trust to enhance collection development in the humanities and social sciences.

•Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachu-setts, has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to enable the Visual Collection in the Fine Arts Library expand its unique exchange program for photographs of Oriental art. The award, to be expended over a three-year period, will fund the purchase of photographs of Oriental art in the United States and Europe to be exchanged for photographs from East Asian collections and will help support the work necessary to foster the exchanges. Harvard is one of the few institutions in the United States now carrying out such an exchange program with China, in part because the task requires specialized skills.

•The Johns Hopkins University Medical Li-brary, Baltimore, Maryland, has been awarded a $282,808 grant from the Council on Library Resources for its Laboratory for Applied Research in Academic Information. The overall objective of the Laboratory is to investigate and develop the means needed by the Hopkins faculty to create or acquire, store, distribute, and use biomedical knowledge in electronic form. The CLR funds will enable the University, over the next five to eight years, to develop its Laboratory into an academic division with research, service, and teaching responsibilities.

•The Ohio University Libraries, Athens, havebeen awarded a $3.75 million NEH challenge grant to fund the expansion of three programs: collection development, cataloging, and preservation. The amount of the award is $750,000, contingent upon the Libraries’ ability to raise at least $3 million in matching funds over a three-year period. About 63 % of the award will fund collection development in the humanities including acquisition of advanced research materials in philosophy, art, music, and 11 other areas; the acquisition of specialized library materials for new scholars; and assistance in reaching the $1 million goal for the Southeast Asia Collection Endowment. About 10% of the award will support cataloging of both new humanities materials and existing collections, and 27 % of the award will fund the newly established preservation program, including the establishment of a permanent preservation endowment and the brittle books program.

•The Parkland College Library, Champaign,Illinois, has been awarded an $11,989 NEH grant to support planning of an exhibition utilizing the D’Arcy Collection of advertising art to explore the role of print advertising in shaping social, economic, and cultural life in key historical periods from 1890 to 1970.

•Saint Martin’s College, Lacey, Washington,has been awarded a $100,000 grant from UST, Inc. to build a new library. The present library occupies small quarters in the school’s central administration building. Plans call for the construction of a new library nearby, in the central core of college property. UST, Inc., of Greenwich, Connecticut, is the parent company of two Washington wineries.

•Stockton State College, Pomona, New Jersey,has been awarded a $114,290 NEH grant to examine the subject of the varied and ongoing roles that women have filled in the military and in antiwar activities. The grant was awarded in conjunction with the Atlantic City and Atlantic County Public Libraries.

•The University of California, Davis, EastAsian Business and Development Research Archive has received a donation of over $40,000 worth of computer equipment from Acer Technologies Corporation of San Jose. The equipment will enable the Institute of Governmental Affairs, where the archive is housed, to expand the archive beyond its holdings of printed materials. With the equipment the archive will add computerized databases and gain access to Nikkei Telecom, a Japanese business news service, and MELVYL, the online catalog of the UC library system. The archive is the only facility in the United States, and one of only two in the world, that systematically collects information on Asian economies.

•The University of California, Los Angeles, hasreceived a $72,336 grant from the National Library of Medicine to develop the Index of Medieval Medical Images in North America. The index will be compiled to describe images with medical components in all medieval manuscripts currently held in North American collections (an estimated 55-60 manuscripts containing some 5,000-6,000 images).

The University has also been awarded an $80,000 NEH grant to support a traveling exhibition, with catalog and support literature, about the influence of the French Encyclopédie in the history of ideas and the international spread of “encyclopedism” from 1750 to 1950.

•The University of Hawaii at Manoa has re- ceived a $64,000 Title II-C grant to catalog and provide bibliographic access to the Tsuzaki/ Reinecke Creole and Pidgin Collection. This collection of linguistic and sociolinguistic materials, prose and poetry in the vernacular, is the result of years of collaborative work by Stanley Tsuzaki and John Reinecke. By December 1989 the library will publish a bibliographic finding aid with author, title, and subject access.

♦The University of Minnesota’s University Art Museum, Minneapolis, has been awarded a $163,482 NEH grant to support a traveling exhibition, with catalog, audiotape, and ancillary literature, about the metamorphosis of black culture and social identity between 1917 and 1937.

The University has also been awarded a $24,034 NEH grant to support planning of an exhibition with catalog, study guide, public forums, and videotape to explore popular myths about Christopher Columbus and how such myths have arisen.

♦The University of Texas at Austin has received a $5,000 grant from a Canadian studies library support program to increase their holdings of Canadian books. Two libraries at UT will share the award; the Law Library and the General Libraries will each receive $2,500. The contribution, made through the office of the Canadian consul general in Dallas, is for current Canada-related books, periodicals, and audio-visual materials published anywhere. The Law Library will use the funds to purchase a number of Canadian law books, while the General Libraries plan to purchase mainly monographs in the social sciences and humanities.

♦The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has been awarded a $380,000 NEH grant to support a traveling exhibition, four facsimile exhibitions, a catalog with essays, viewer’s guide, videotapes, newsletter, and ancillary literature about maps of the Columbian Encounter in the Americas.

News notes

•The Old Sturbridge Village Research LibrarySociety, Sturbridge, Massachusetts, has awarded the E. Harold Hugo Memorial Book Prize to the book, The Democratic Dilemma: Reform, Revival, and the Social Order in the Connecticut Valley of Vermont, 1790-1850, written by Randolph Roth. The award is given annually to the book(s) judged to make the most significant contribution to the understanding of the history and material culture of rural New England from 1790-1850. The winner receives $150, a certificate, a one-year subscription to the museum’s publication, The Old Sturbridge Visitor, and a five-year membership to the Old Sturbridge Village Research Library Society. Roth’s book uses a great variety of sources including tax and land records, population and election statistics, and period diaries to shape a social portrait of not one community, but of an entire geographic region.