ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

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News from the field

Acquisitions

•The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., will acquire the personal papers of internationally known businessman, philanthropist and citizen diplomat Armand Hammer (b. 1898), chairman of the board of Occidental Petroleum Corporation. The Hammer collection will include correspondence and personal papers documenting Hammer’s remarkable career, from his early years in Moscow as a physician and representative of American businesses to a second career as a petrochemical entrepreneur, patron of the arts, and champion of cancer research. A special feature will be the numerous films, recordings, and other audiovisual material, some never before seen by historians, documenting Hammer’s contacts with world leaders from Lenin to Reagan. The Library plans a special exhibit from the Hammer Collections on the occasion of his 90th birthday, May 21, 1988. During his lifetime and for an interval thereafter the papers may be consulted only with the permission of Hammer or those authorized to act on his behalf.

•North Carolina State University, Raleigh, has received a collection of 1,500 mystery novels covering the period 1920-1950. The volumes are the gift of professor emeritus Jack Levine, a mathematician and expert in cryptography.

•Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts, has acquired the historical records of The Horn Book, the first magazine published with a concern entirely for children’s books and reading. The records include correspondence, illustrations, manuscripts, photographs, scrapbooks and printed materials dating from 1916. The Horn Book was the creation of Bertha Mahoney Miller, a 1902 Simmons graduate who started a children’s bookshop in Boston and eventually sent travelling exhibits of children’s books around the region, developing a large mail-order business. Its correspondence files span generations of editors and include original letters from numerous authors including Beatrix Potter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Walter De La Mare.

•The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has received more than 3,900 volumes from the library of the late Alice Lindsay Tate of New York City as a memorial to her father, Robert Lindsay Tate. A descendant of a leading textile manufacturing family in Charlotte, Tate pursued an operatic career in various cities during the 1940s and ’50s, and established several collections at UNCC. Included in the present gift are English language materials on Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese literature, the religions of Asia (especially Tibet), and a number of books on Judaica and Hebraica. An additional 1,800 volumes on the occult, UFO phenomena, and archetypal symbols were directed to Johnson C. Smith University, also in Charlotte, in place of the now closed Boggs Academy, a Georgia high school. Additional photos and memorabilia of Tate’s career were included, along with 15 paintings by Russian-born artist Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich (1874-1947).

•The University of Rochester, New York, has acquired the complete papers of novelist, scholar and critic John Gardner (1933-1982). Filling 50 large storage boxes, the archive includes manuscripts and drafts of most of Gardner’s works, including The Sunlight Dialogues, Grendel, Mickels- son’s Ghosts, and On Moral Fiction, as well as family papers and correspondence with editors, other writers and admirers. The papers also include manuscripts for works not yet published as well as original paintings by Gardner, ephemera related to his teaching positions, and personal items like postcards, ticket stubs, grant applications, and letters from lawyers, accountants, hospitals, and the Internal Revenue Service. Gardner, who published eight novels, five collections of short stories, an epic poem, eleven scholarly and critical books, and two translations between 1960 and 1982, died in a motorcycle accident at 49.

•The University of Texas at Austin has receiveda collection of papers of Ben and Henry McCulloch, legendary brothers who were Texas Rangers, Indian fighters, veterans of the Mexican War, U.S. Army Marshals and Confederate Army brigadier generals. The papers were donated by Dr. O. Howard Frazier Jr., director of the thoracic surgery program at the UT Medical School. Spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, they will be of interest to researchers in Texas and Civil War history, and depict courtships and marriages, births and deaths, feuds and religious revivals and the daily affairs of life on a hardscrabble Central Texas farm. The collection contains 25 letters each from Ben and Henry McCulloch to their mother, Frances, and 70 other family letters; ten family photographs; a 67-page genealogical record of the McCulloch family; a broadside announcing the March 7, 1862, death of Ben in the Civil War and arrangements for his funeral; and other material related to his death. Ben McCulloch (1811-1862) commanded the Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas forces at the battle of Elk Horn, Arkansas, at the time he was killed; following the war his brother Henry (1816-1895) was superintendent of what became the Texas School for the Deaf.

•Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book andManuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut, has acquired the papers of Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz (b. 1911). A resident of the United States since 1960, Milosz has received many literary honors in recent years, including the Neustadt Prize for Literature in 1978 and the Nobel Prize for Literature. A witness to the horrors of World War II in Warsaw, Milosz worked as a cultural attache in Washington and in Paris in the postwar period before joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. He retired in 1981. The Milosz archive contains all of his extant postwar papers, including several unpublished books, some 80 unpublished essays, more than 100 poems that have never been printed, and scores of letters and translations. In addition, the papers include some 60 notebooks containing Milosz’s lecture notes, and nearly 300 photographs. Other notable items are Milosz’s holograph draft of his autobiography, Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm, 1959); manuscript versions of all his published essays since 1946; sketches for three unpublished novels; and manuscripts for nine unpublished stories. The manuscript versions of several poetry collections include original drawings by the author. The papers document Milosz’s activity as a translator as well: he has translated many of his own poems into English and French and into Polish works by William Blake, Robinson Jeffers, Thomas Merton, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and many other American, British, French, Spanish and Lithuanian poets. Among correspondence are letters from Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda and Thornton Wilder, as well as Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert and Aleksander Wat and novelists Witold Gombrowicz and Jerzy Andrzejewski. Milosz, whose latest American book, Unattainable Earth, appeared in 1982, has been engaged in retranslating the entire Bible into Polish.

Grants

•Fort Lewis College’s John F. Reed Library,Durango, Colorado, has received a $28,000 LSCA Title III grant to catalog 5,500 audiovisual titles and add them to the OCLC database. The holdings of five other public and school libraries in southwestern Colorado will also undergo retrospective conversion. All holdings will also be entered into the database of the MARMOT project, a Western Colorado network.

•Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded a Title II–C grant of $110,000 to continue microfilming its collections during 1987-1988. The grant is the tenth consecutive one awarded to Harvard since the program began in 1978. As before, the funds will enable the University Library to improve bibliographical control of its collection of master microfilm negatives and to film materials too rare or fragile to withstand heavy use or interlibrary lending. Film copies of everything reproduced will be available for interlibrary loan and will be sold at cost to other libraries; and records of master negatives will be prepared for input into OCLC, RLIN, and the National Union Catalog. Filming this year will focus on four Harvard libraries: in Baker Library, pre- 1968 10-K reports of the Securities and Exchange Commission on transportation, finance, and public utilities; in Andover-Harvard Theological Library, American Unitarian Association letter- books, 1830-1840, and records of the Society for Promoting Theological Education, from 1815; in Widener Library, a pilot project to film European newspapers, chiefly from Southwestern Europe; and in the University Archives, Harvard commencement parts (manuscripts for oral presentations given by selected students, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Roosevelt), and exhibitions, 1649 to date.

•Mills College, Oakland, California, has beenawarded a grant of $5,894,000—the largest foundation gift in its 135-year history—by the F.W. Olin Foundation, to build and equip a new library. The gift is also the largest ever made by the Foundation, headquartered in New York, as well as the first it has made to a Northern California institution and to a women’s college. The F.W. Olin Library will be designed by the San Francisco architectural firm of Esherick, Hornsey, Dodge and Davis. The interior designer will be Ben Weese of Chicago. With 45,000 square feet of space, the two-storey structure will provide room for 300,000 volumes and 280 study stations, electronic work stations, and rooms for video, seminars, and reading. The College’s Albert M. Bender collection of 11,000 rare books will be housed in a special collections area, a feature of the new building. Construction is scheduled to begin in the fall of 1988 and the new library is expected to be ready for use at the beginning of 1990.

•Pennsylvania State University, UniversityPark, has received $1 million from the Richard King Mellon Foundation of Pittsburgh. The funds have been added to the University’s Paterno Libraries Endowment, which provides for the improvement of collections. Established in 1984, the Endowment now totals more than $2 million. The Endowment has also received $65,000 from four donors representing Pennsylvania-based trucking firms, and a blue and white tractor–trailer to be used by the Libraries, donated by Mack Trucks, Inc., of Allentown.

•Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has raised more than $3.4 million for the renovation and expansion of the Schlesinger Library. The more than $2.9 million donated by alumnae, trustees, corporations, organizations, foundations and others by June 30 enabled the College to meet a $500,000 challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation. With renovation already underway, the library expects to officially reopen to greatly expanded quarters in the fall of 1988. New features will include a film and video area, a culinary collection wing, and new reading and conference rooms.

•The University of California, Riverside, has received a Title II–C grant of $155,000 to continue cataloging volumes of science fiction on OCLC. The grant is the second such made to the project. The Lloyd J. Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy is one of the largest in the world and contains titles dating to the 16th century.

News note

•The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has sold a significant portion of its rare and historical periodicals to a consortium of six Philadelphia area libraries. At a private sale in August, approximately 400 serial sets, many complete and dating to the 19th century, were acquired for approximately $200,000. Earlier this year, the consortium had unsuccessfully sought to buy the Institute’s unusual collection of manufacturing and trade catalogs, later sold to a British dealer. Organized in 1824, the Franklin Institute has sold off virtually its entire library, citing shifting institutional goals and an inability to care for the collection. It plans to offer some 9,000 remaining historical periodical sets for sale at public auction early next year. The Library Company of Philadelphia, a leading member of the consortium, acquired many of the Institute’s 19th-century photography journals at the August sale. The American Philosophical Society purchased about 70 sets related to electricity, physics, and the history of technology. ■ ■

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