ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The Library of Congress recently has acquired from the Centro Nacional de Microfilm in Madrid positive microfilms of the Madrid, Spain, newspaper El Socialista for the period March 12, 1886—March 28, 1939. The complete microfilm holdings consist of fifty-seven reels of positive film, which will be available in the library’s newspaper and current periodical reading room.

El Socialistawas founded as a weekly in Madrid on March 12, 1886, only seven years after the creation of the party itself and two years before the socialist trade union organization, Union General de Trabajadores (UGT), was established. El Socialista always played a pivotal role in the Spanish Socialist movement. Its editor for most of the period until 1920 was Pablo Iglesias of the Spanish Socialist Party. All of the other prominent men of early socialism also had active parts as editors including Jaime Vera, Garciá Quejdo, and Gómez Latorre. After the turn of the century, it also began receiving contributions from such distinguished intellectuals as Clariñ (Leopoldo Alas), Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y Gasset.

In 1913, as Spanish Socialism grew into a mass movement, El Socialista was converted into a daily and served as the focal point for the widespread and variegated socialist regional press that arose. As factionalism began to affect the movement after the First World War, and especially after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931, control of El Socialista became a major source of conflict between radicals and reformists. The latter managed to retain control, however, even during the crisis period of 1935-36, when Large Caballero and Indalecio Prieto struggled for hegemony. Publication of El Socialista in Madrid ceased with the fall of the city to the forces of General Franco on March 29, 1939.

Acquisitions of the complete microfilm holdings of El Socialista was recommended by a group of United States historians specializing in modern Spanish history.

• The personal, day-to-day thoughts of Laura Benét, poet, novelist, and biographer, who also happens to be the sister of Stephen Vincent Benét and William Rose Benét, come to life in a group of diaries in the Brooklyn College Manuscripts Collection.

Housed in the Brooklyn College Library, the diaries provide a glimpse into the life of a writer who has written more than twenty books of poetry and fiction and biographies of such figures as Thackeray, Coleridge, Stanley the explorer, and Emily Dickinson. Her latest book, published this year, is a memoir of childhood, When William Rose, Stephen Vincent and, I Were Young.

Both Miss Benét and William Rose were born in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, as part of a military family, Stephen Vincent coming along later when their father was transferred to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Both her brothers had distinguished writing careers as poets and novelists, William Rose winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 and Stephen Vincent winning in 1929.

After graduating from Vassar, Miss Benét worked as a social worker and as a newspaper reporter before family tradition prevailed and she began to devote herself to her own work. Her first book of poetry, Noah’s Dove, was published in 1929.

The diaries in the Brooklyn College collection cover the years 1944-55 and contain such typical entries as comments on the weather, opinions of books and plays, and remarks on important news of the day. She also records, especially in the early diaries, royalty payments and daily expenses and notes the passing on of friends and famous figures.

• Like today’s professionals, Haydn, Verdi, Lincoln, and Longfellow used calling cards, too. They date back more than 200 years.

A collection of 650 of the small printed cards, most signed by their famous presenters, has been given to Columbia University and is on display there. Among them are some of the world’s best-known personalities—presidents, first ladies, and celebrities in music, literature, and politics, including the four notables above.

It is the gift of Frederick C. Schang, retired president and chairman of Columbia Artists Management and a 1915 graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Most of the cards either are autographed or contain handwritten notes. Among notable items in the collection are cards of Puccini, Berlioz, Wagner, Tschaikovsky, Chopin, Goethe, Twain, Joyce, Freud, Edison, Einstein, De Gaulle, and Jenny Lind.

The presidential cards begin with that of Thomas Jefferson; the most recent is that of Gerald Ford before he became president. Cards of first ladies begin with Martha Washington and end with an autographed card of Rosalynn Carter.

On one of Verdi’s cards, he signs himself “Le Grand Falstaff.” Puccini scrawled a bar from “La Boheme” on one of his cards in the collection; and Freud, in 1907, wrote on the back of one of his cards that a certain law student “needs psychotherapy badly, even without special symptoms.”

Schang notes that cards are a relatively recent social phenomenon that flourished beginning in the early 18th century. Their use until early this century was regulated by strict and frequently complex rales. At one time, he states, it was required that a woman caller leave one card for each member of her sex in the family visited; if the visitor was married, she left the same number of her husband’s cards.

Folding a corner of a card had precise significance, according to Schang. Folding the upper right-hand corner denoted a social call; upper left-hand, congratulations; lower right- hand, goodbye; and lower left-hand, condolence.

The collection is an ongoing one, Schang said. Every year, he adds cards he has collected in the previous twelve months. For 1978, he has already acquired cards of Aaron Burr and Noah Webster.

GRANTS

• The University of Rochester has been awarded a $333,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the purchase of books and manuscripts in the humanities.

The NEH grant was made possible by the Frank E. Gannett Newspaper Foundation’s 1976 gift to the university of $1 million for library endowment. The grant will provide approximately one dollar for every three dollars of the foundation’s gift, which was the largest gift for library endowment ever received by the University of Rochester.

President Robert L. Sproull said the university will use the NEH grant to acquire “additional materials in the humanities essential to undergraduate and graduate teaching and research in nineteenth-century American history, art, and literature.”

The grant will enable the university to acquire important materials in nineteenth-century studies that are not available in western New York, Sproull said, and will benefit not only students and faculty at the University of Rochester but scholars at other institutions with which the university is affiliated through regional associations. These include the Five Associated University Libraries, composed of the University of Rochester, Cornell, Syracuse, and the state universities at Buffalo and Binghamton; the Rochester Area Colleges, an association of fourteen area colleges whose faculties have user privileges at the UR Library; and the Rochester Regional Research Libraries Council, a cooperative library system that supplies the research needs of faculty and students, business and industrial management personnel, professional persons, and independent scholars in a five-county area.

The Gannett Foundation, with headquarters in Rochester, was established by the late founder of the Gannett group of newspapers. It contributes primarily to educational, civic, charitable, cultural, and health causes in communities nationwide served by Gannett newspapers, including the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and the Rochester Times-Union.

• The Council on Library Resources, Inc. (CLR) has awarded funds to the libraries of the University of Wisconsin, Parkside ($21,350) and Drew University ($18,845) to enable their staffs to carry out broadly based programs of self-study directed toward improving library services and operations.

In performing the study, the libraries will utilize a draft manual resulting from procedures developed in a 1976 pilot project at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), the first phase of the council’s Academic Library Development Program (ALDP). During the second phase, several institutions of various sizes and characters will work with the evolving model program. The Carnegie-Mellon University Library was selected earlier this year as the first participant in this phase. It is expected that a refinement of the manual and its suggested procedures may result from these further applications.

CLR initiated the ALDP in 1975 in the belief that small and mid-sized academic libraries could benefit from looking closely at how they are meeting the needs of the campus community and at what could be done to improve library services and increase library use. Large research libraries that are members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) may work toward similar goals through the Management Review and Analysis Program, formulated with CLR assistance by the ARL Office of University Library Management Studies (OMS).

P. Grady Morein of the School of Library Science, North Carolina Central University, is the ALDP project director. Duane Webster, OMS director, will assist Morein and the staffs of the participating libraries throughout the course of the study.

• A file of ex-slave narratives, collected by the W.P.A. Federal Writers Project between 1936-41 and housed in the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song, will be organized, cataloged, and annotated in a collaborative research project by faculty at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and Southern Illinois University. A $125,800 National Science Foundation grant has been awarded to O. Marvene Couch (UDC) and Herman R. Lantz of Southern Illinois University, both of whom have been working with portions of the material independently.

Of the approximately 15,000 to 20,000 original manuscripts, representing the results of interviews with former slaves and the children of slaves, the library has microfilmed about 2,000 narratives that were deposited in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. However, the bulk of the material is unorganized and uncataloged, therefore making them inaccessible to scholars. In addition, extensive interviews originating from the state of Louisiana never reached the library and have been located at the Louisiana State Library in Baton Rouge. Narratives of ex-slaves and children of slaves from all the southern states and border states such as Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are thought to be included in the collection.

Couch has devised a system for organizing and cataloging the narratives, and from July 1972 to April 1974, with the assistance of undergraduate students, she organized, cataloged, and wrote annotated bibliographies for all the narratives from the state of Alabama. A substantial effort has also been made to organize the materials from the states of Texas, Arkansas, and South Carolina.

In the meantime, Lantz had been examining the feasibility of using the W.P.A. narratives contained on microfilm to examine marriage and family life among slaves. During the course of his study, he found many narratives to be incomplete and other to be edited, which led him to suspect that some narratives on microfilm were not the original versions. Searching turned up the original manuscripts in the Archive of Folk Song.

The collaboration of these two scholars is expected to produce an invaluable resource to help clarify controversial issues surrounding the reassessment of the impact of slavery. There will be an attempt to ascertain the authenticity of the narratives and to devise a way of comparing different versions of the same interview. A report will be prepared on the entire project, which will serve as a guide for future scholarship. Contact: Information Office, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540; (202) 426- 5108.

MEETINGS & WORKSHOPS

January 6:The Pratt Institute Graduate School of Library and Information Science will offer a workshop on Project Management in LiBraries and Information Systems. The workshop is designed for library and information systems administrators; middle management-level individuals; and those involved in acquisitions, marketing, and evaluation of library and information systems. For further details see the November issue of C&RL News.

January9-13: A five-day intensive course on Practical Applications of Marketing Techniques to Library and Information Services, cosponsored by the Corporation of Professional Librarians of Quebec/Corporation des Bibliothécaires Professioneis du Quebec (CPLQ/CBPQ), the Faculty of Management of McGill University, and the Graduate School of Library Science of McGill University, will be held in Montreal.

The course is open to all professionals interested in applying modern marketing techniques to library and information services. The program will include classes on the theory of social marketing and how it applies to libraries; small group discussions of relevant case studies; guest lectures on the marketing programs of three library-related organizations; and project teams to develop sample marketing plans for specific services.

Classes will be conducted in English, but separate French and English case discussions and project teams are provided for.

The cost, excluding accommodation, is $295, including four lunches. There is a discount of $50 for members of the CPLQ/CBPQ. For further information, contact Professor Vivian Sessions, Director, Graduate School of Library Science of McGill University, 3459 McTavish St., Montreal, Canada H3A 1Y1; (514) 392-5947.

January14, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26: The Pratt Institute Graduate School of Library and Information Science will once again offer two institutes on On-Line Terminal Searching. For further details see the November issue of C&RL News.

January20-25: The Sixth Annual Conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America will be held in New York City at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. For more information, contact ARLIS/NA, P.O. Box 3692, Glendale, CA 91201.

February 26-March 3:Kent State University Libraries announces the continuation of its series of Intensive Workshops On OCLC. Additional workshops will be held in 1978: April 23-28, and June 4-9. For further details see the November issue of C&RL News.

April7: The School of Library and Information Science, State University of New York at Albany, will offer a workshop entitled Anglo- American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition: A Preview. Directed by Professor Gordon Stevenson, the workshop will discuss problems related to major rule changes expected and their implications for the structure of current catalogs, and will survey a limited number of specific rule changes that should have an important impact on library catalogs. The staff will include Michael Gorman, director of technical services and professor of library science, University of Illinois; Paul Kebabian, director of libraries, University of Vermont; and Helen Schmierer, assistant systems librarian and library systems analyst, University of Chicago.

For further information contact Gordon Stevenson, School of Library and Information Science, SUNY at Albany, Albany, NY 12222; (518 ) 457-8577.

April17-19: The Second Annual National Information Conference & Exposition (NICE II) will be held at the Sheraton-Park Hotel, Washington, D.C.

“Achieving Organizational Objectives: The Role of the Information Manager” is the theme for NICE II, a conference designed for information managers in industry, government, and education.

An advisory committee of information managers, corporate executives, government information specialists, and educators has outlined the program of NICE II to offer up-to-date, expert information and management tools to the more than 1,300 information managers expected to attend the meeting.

For additional information, contact Information Industry Association, 4720 Montgomery Lane, #904, Bethesda, MD 20014; (301) 654- 4150.

April27-28: Federal document and information accessibility will be the topic for the Second Annual Institute on Federal Information Policy at the American University.

Sponsored by the university’s School of Government and Public Information, the institute will address such issues as policy development, pricing, medium, technology, abstracting, indexing, and dissemination of federal documents and information. These will be of special interest to representatives of trade and professional associations, librarians, government editors, and information specialists.

The two-day meeting, to be held on the American University campus, will be directed by Lowell H. Hattery. Questions about the conference should be directed to Dr. Lowell H. Hattery, College of Public Affairs, The American University, Washington, DC 20016; (202) 686-2513.

MISCELLANY

•In August 1977 Earl E. Wassom, director of library services, announced the closing of the card catalog at Western Kentucky University, replacing it with twenty microfiche reader stations. Each station is composed of a carrel, fiche reader, and a COM catalog.

Each COM catalog is divided into two sections: author-title, and subject. Each entry contains full bibliographic information plus a sixdigit computer control number that links the patron with the on-line circulation system.

The computer output microfiche catalog (48x) was produced on 597 microfiche containing 1 million entries or 1.3 million catalog cards. Monthly cumulative supplements are produced.

Richard A. Jones, staff assistant for library systems, is planning to implement the expansion of the present twenty stations to fifty by the spring of 1978 and to adapt 78x reduction ratio, which will decrease the number of microfiche units in a catalog from 597 to 224.

• Alfred University,Alfred, New York, has awarded a $340,000 contract to the C. Pfeil Construction Company of Hornell for a library expansion project on the school’s central campus.

Foundation work on the two-story, 8,000- square-foot brick addition to Alfred’s Herrick Memorial Library was begun last week. A university spokesperson said construction was expected to be completed in the spring.

A short corridor will connect the box-shaped library annex to the main building. The addition will be used to house the library’s extensive periodicals collection and to provide individual study rooms for students.

Under terms of the contract, part of the main library will be remodeled to include a special collections room and stack space for an additional 50,000 volumes.

The split-level Herrick Library, built twenty years ago at a cost of $500,000, is now nearing its design capacity of 150,000 volumes and is also running out of adequate study space, university officials said.

The university’s board of trustees approved the expansion project in 1975. But M. Richard Rose, Alfred’s president, said last year he would not proceed with construction until actual funding was in hand.

Financing was achieved a few weeks ago when the university successfully completed a year-long drive to raise $2 million for “urgent campus needs,” including the Herrick addition.

Architects for the new structure were Cannon Associates’ of Grand Island, New York.

• Freshman English teachers and librarians at the University of Arizona (UA) have joined in an effort to equip new students with that necessary skill for finishing college: how to use a university library.

The activity—a “Library Skills Program”— was started because educators at UA were concerned over incoming students who were not aware of the scope of library information resources available to them.

Some students had not mastered even “the most basic reference tools (needed) to retrieve information in any subject field,” said Shelley Phipps, UA orientation librarian.

While Phipps studies this year at Duke University in a library management internship program, Ruth Dickstein, acting orientation librarian, is implementing the library skills program at the university.

Dickstein said library orientation specialists administer to more than 2,500 students an inlibrary slide and tape presentation on the importance of information resources in the educational process.

The program uses a self-guided, self-paced workbook of basic reference assignments and includes individualized follow-up guidance for students who work through a search strategy for a paper topic of their choice, she said.

All freshman English composition students must complete the skills program as an integral part of the documented research paper they are required to prepare for the course.

A major reason for establishing the program was an increasing belief of faculty in all fields that students will make use of library resources to complete class assignments. Teachers expect students to expand their knowledge beyond the context of classroom lectures and assigned texts, Phipps said.

In designing UA’s library skills program, Phipps wrote that “the teaching of the skills needed for independent self-education are central to the concept of higher education today, especially in light of the rapid growth and increasing complexity of information, and the everchanging nature of knowledge within any one subject discipline.”

Dickstein said the program workbook is based on similar ones used at Pennsylvania State University and the universities of Wisconsin and California at Los Angeles.

The workbook contains about a dozen assignments, she said, covering such features as the basic library layout and classification systems, card catalog, encyclopedias, periodical and newspaper indexes, and statistical sources.

A section of the workbook is also devoted to a guided search strategy that helps the student locate information on the topic chosen for his or her documented paper for the freshman English course.

More than 2,500 students are involved in the program this fall, and an additional 1,500 are expected to complete the program by the end of the 1978 summer session, Dickstein said.

• The Colorado State Board of Education approved the Colorado Library Network Plan at its June 2 meeting.

The goal for the Colorado Library Network is to develop and support an organization of libraries of various types to share library resources and information for the benefit of the people of Colorado.

Key activities to implement the proposal include building a computer data base to locate books in the various public, academic, school, and governmental libraries. By using the up- to-date information on the location of materials, librarians can borrow materials they do not have from other libraries. The plan also calls for providing expanded reference service, including use of computerized literature searches for citizens throughout the state.

It also recommends that both the Denver Public Library and the library at the University of Colorado at Boulder receive state funding to lend their materials to other libraries in the state.

Other recommendations include maintaining state funds for payment for lending, a state library program that reimburses libraries for lending their materials to other libraries. Improved communications systems among the libraries in the state, including use of computer terminals, telephones, and a courier service, also are cited.

Important components in the networking configuration are the seven regional library service systems that are headquartered in Pueblo, Denver, Greeley, Colorado Springs, Durango, Montrose, and New Castle.

• The Stanford University Libraries BALLOTS Center has added the prestigious Los Angeles County Law Library to its network. (BALLOTS = Bibliographic Automation of Large Library Operations using the Timesharing System.)

Other California law libraries whose holdings are available to subscribers include two of the largest—Stanford and University of California at Berkeley, plus recent acquisitions University of California, Davis; McGeorge School of Law; and Golden Gate University School of Law.

“The addition of Los Angeles County Law Library to the BALLOTS system will provide lawyers, law librarians, and law library patrons with a powerful on-line access tool to law library holdings,” said Henry Epstein, director of BALLOTS. “Access to the cataloging records of these libraries is as close as a telephone.”

• After three months of operating both the “old” manual acquisition system and the “new” computerized acquisition-in-process control system (called, after the name of its principal product, the “Catalog Supplement System”), the General Library of the University of California, Berkeley, is now relying on the computerized system as its basic means for financial and bibliographic control of order and in-process records.

Almost all purchase orders and exchange requests sent to suppliers in the last three months have been produced by the computer. However, the library’s official records remained those produced by the manual system. Beginning July 1, the official records were those produced by the computer system, and, with few exceptions, manual records will no longer be produced.

One principal objective of the computerized system is to provide increased public access to material in the library, as well as increased availability of information about material that the library has on order and in process. To this end, all on-order and in-process material, as well as items recently cataloged, are listed (under author and title and series) on the weekly microfiche Catalog Supplement. A recent week’s Catalog Supplement listed more than 52,000 items under more than 120,000 entries. ■ ■