ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Indiana University opens 12th Family Student Housing Library

Indiana University-Bloomington (IU) opened its I2th Halls of Residence Library on September 29. The Family Student Housing Library is unique because it serves both students and their families, including children of all ages. Magazines, newspapers, childrens books, videos, reference materials, paperbacks, and access to IU’s online catalog and Infotrac are provided by the library. The Family Housing Library was established through the efforts of the Family Student Council, the Halls of Residence, and Undergraduate Library Services staff. Funding for start-up costs, hourly wages, and materials was arranged by the students.

Chronicle of Higher Educationgoes online at USC

News stories and opinion articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education have been added to the University of Southern California’s (USC) online campus information system, VSCInfo. The USC -Chronicle project, announced last March, provides free online access to a full-text database on a campus system. Campus users will be able to read and search more than two years’ worth of information from the Chronicle using the familiar screens and menus of USC Info, the university’s proprietary software. USC plans to enhance the online Chronicle with several features from the newspaper’s printed version including: the Chronicle’s fact files, providing statistical data about enrollments, salaries, endowments, expenditures, etc., in a spreadsheet format; foundation grants; the gazette, a calendar of events in academe; and instructional and administrative software for higher education.

LSUS breaks ground for $10.2 million library

Louisiana State University in Shreveport (LSUS) held a groundbreaking ceremony on September 20 for a $10.2 million library building. The 119,000- square-foot building will feature a curved three- story full-height glass wall .Building should be completed within two-and-a-half years. With the move to the new building, LSUS will double its collection of some 200,000 volumes with the addition of the J.S. Noel Special Collection—also 200,000 volumes—collected by Shreveport businessman James S. Noel. About 30% of the books in the Noel Collection are old or rare and unusual, and some 4,000 books are more than 200 years old.

Cameron University Library celebrates Renaissance

Cameron University Library of Lawton, Oklahoma, held a Renaissance Open House, “Discovering New Worlds,” in September as part of the university’s year-long celebration of the Renaissance. Library staff members dressed in Renaissance costumes and gave demonstrations of the seven CD-ROM systems and the VTLS Computer Catalog. Cameron’s Renaissance celebration is intended to promote a new view of higher education and its place within the community.

Cameron University Library staff in full regalia. Back row (l to r): Victoria Swinney, Chieko Tedford, Cheryl Bums, Barbara Henderson, Lacreta Skrdle, Susie Cooke, and Barbara Pickthon; Kneeling in front (l to r): Max Burson and Robert Baca.

Describe your library’s innovative activities for C&RL News readers

C&RL Newswould like to feature in the “News from the Field” section creative activities, practical tips, programs, and management solutions implemented in your academic library. Brief descriptions of 150-300 words are sought. Share your new ideas for old problems and creative responses to new challenges with C&RL News readers. Descriptions of all types of ideas, activities, and programs are welcome; especially sought are descriptions of community outreach programs, adaptations of library automation, managing libraries with few resources, successful approaches to bibliographic instruction and information literacy, recruitment and retention activities, and cultural diversity activities. Send your descriptions (photos are also welcome) to: C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; fax: (312) 280-7663; bitnet: u38398@uicvm.

John F. Kennedy and Zora Neal Hurston were selected by ACRL’s New Publications Advisory Board for the latest additions to the Great Minds poster series. The posters, produced by ALA Graphics, are available for $5.00 each. To order call toll-free (1-800-545-2433, press 8) or send your order to ALA Graphics, ALA, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611.

Recipe for preserving sound recordings: bake at 122° for four hours

Archivists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill preserved some rapidly deteriorating sound recordings of some of North Carolina’s best folk musicians and storytellers by baking the tapes for four hours at 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The tapes had begun shedding their oxide coatings and were gumming up the tape players. After a number of unsuccessful strategies, archivist Mike Casey and sound engineer Jeff Brown tried a new technique.

They built a cardboard oven with a hair dryer as the heat source and baked the tapes to melt their binding systems. As the tapes cooled overnight, the binding systems reformed and stabilized the oxide coating long enough to rerecord the music, stories, and interviews. “We were 100% successful,” Casey said. “Two tapes [of 50] failed the first time, but we baked them again, and they worked fine then.”

Columbia University reaches 6 million

Columbia University Libraries recently acquired its six millionth book. Selected for the milestone was Iter Italicum, Volume Five, a work by Columbia professor emeritus Paul O. Kristeller, a scholar whose life work emphasizes library research.

Parents Fund benefits University of Illinois Library

Library services for undergraduates have been targeted as the thrust of the 1992 Parents Fund Drive at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Cre- atedin March 1991 by Chancellor Morton W. Weir, the fund seeks to provide additional resources to enrich the undergraduate experience. With funds generated to date, the Undergraduate Library received $25,000 to develop an interactive workstation that will offer students an orientation program using music, graphic images, narration, and text.

Trinity Christian College joins LIBRAS

Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, Illinois, joined LIBRAS, a consortium of northeastern Illinois liberal arts college libraries, bringing the number of members to 17. LIBRAS facilitates resource sharing, cooperative collection development, promotes continuing education, and the use of technology among its members.

Grants available from Bicentennial Swedish-American Exchange Fund

Qualified American citizens with well-developed projects in the field of politics, public administration, mass media, business and industry, working life, human environment, education, and culture are invited to apply for travel grants from the Bicentennial Swedish-American Exchange Fund. Grants of from SEK 10,000-20,000 will be made to support three-to-six-week study visits to Sweden. Applications are available with SASE from: Bicentennial Fund, Swedish Information Service, One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, NY 10017- 2201. Deadline: February 7, 1992.

Acquisitions

• Colorado State University Libraries (CSU) has received the first installment of posters from the Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibitions, held biannually in Fort Collins, to which some of the world’s finest poster artists contribute. CSU is establishing a poster study center to access, preserve, and disseminate information on the poster collection. CSU also acquired (without restrictions) six boxes of Gilbert G. Stamm’s papers. Stamm had a distinguished career in government service, working primarily with irrigation, reclamation and other water issues. He served as commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1973-77.

• The Harvard-Yenching Library acquired a Japanese microfilm collection of more than 15,000 reels. Valued at $1.042 million, the collection is a gift of the Nikko Securities Company of Tokyo and comprises 120,000 titles originally published in 160,000 volumes of books printed in the Meiji era (1868-1912). The titles are from the National Diet Library, the Japanese counterpart of the Library of Congress.

• The New York Public Library acquired the Vladimir Nabokov Archive for the Library’s Berg Collection. Nabokov (1899-1977) was an important 20th-century writer. The archives include manuscripts, corrected typescripts, proofs and galleys, 31 diaries, and correspondence.

• Oklahoma State University’s Edmon Low Library has received a large collection of urban aerial photographs from MPSI Systems, Inc. of Tulsa. MPSI, a provider of information services and computerized decision support systems, has agreed to continue donating photos from its American and foreign offices. The collection, valued in excess of $1,800,000, contains nearly 12,000 detailed photos of most major North American urban areas and many other cities worldwide.

• San Francisco State University has received from public television producers Richard Rector and Jules Power, videotapes of 660 half- hour programs of "Over Easy,” a popular program on aging which aired on PBS from 1977-82.

• University of California, Santa Cruz, acquired the archive of composer-conductor George Barati. The archive is the first comprehensive music archive acquired by the university and contains documents spanning 60 years including original manuscripts of the composer’s music, worksheets, drafts and fragments of works, commercial recordings and audiotapes, photographs, films, and correspondence.

• The University of North Texas Libraries’ Rare Book and Texana Collections have received the papers of pioneering Texas horticulturist Gilbert Onderdonk (1829-1920). Onderdonk, known as the “father of the Texas peach,” came to Texas in 1851 and founded the fruit industry of south Texas. The collection includes letters, typescripts, journals, notes, and ledgers of Onderdonk as well as the genealogically annotated Onderdonk family Bible (Amsterdam 1717).

• The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing was given original copies of two 19th- century publications by Florence Nightingale in honor of its dean Claire M. Fagin. The titles are Mortality of the British Army, at Home, at Home and Abroad, and During the Russian War as Compared with the Mortality of the Civil Population and Army Sanitary Administration and its Reform Under the Late Lord Herbert.

• The University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library has received 21 scrapbooks belonging to the late Irene Dunne. The materials—including correspondence, papers, and clippings covering the years 1935^7 and 1949-50 —were recently discovered in a trunk by the actress’s daughter while helping a writer research Dunne’s career. During her career, Dunne was nominated for five Academy Awards and appeared in such films as “Cimarron” and “I Remember Mama.”

• The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced the acquisition of 23 new manuscripts including an undated letter from Samuel Clemens to William Bowen, letters to Argentine conductor Juan Jose Castro, 12 letters from British novelist Robert Murray Gilchrist to James Nicol Dunn, and papers and correspondence of magazine fiction writer Margaret Cousin.

Grants and gifts

• Columbia University received $1.5 million from Toshiba Corporation to establish the Toshiba Library for Japanese Legal Research which will encourage a better understanding of the legal culture of Japan. The collection will include scholarly books, statutes, journals, and important treatises on Japanese law. It will build upon the extensive collection donated to Columbia in 1982 of the late Jiro Tanaka, a distinguished legal scholar and member of the Japanese Supreme Court.

• Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida, received $30,000 from the Saunders Foundation of Tampa, Florida, for the development of a com- puter-based catalog. Plans call for a Marcive CD- ROM catalog to be in place by January 1992. The college has committed funds for the complete retrospective conversion of the library’s bibliographic records to machine-readable form.

• Montana State University Libraries, Bozeman, received a Title II-D grant of $245,000 fromthe U.S. Department ofEducation to enhance dial-in service to remote users accessing the online catalog, CatLink. Expansion will include mounting of four new databases, installation of an 800 phone line, and document delivery. Expected to benefit from the expansion are Montana’s seven tribally controlled community colleges, county extension agents, extended nursing campuses, and high school students participating in the Young Scholars program.

Share your opinion with C&RL News readers

Do you feel strongly about a particular issue and want to share your thoughts with a wider audience than just your colleagues down the hall? Now you have the opportunity to share your thoughts with a national audience. C&RL News is looking for well- reasoned commentaries on issues of interest to academic and research librarians for its new column,"The Way I See It.” Essays should be between 500-750 words and should be sent to ‘The Way I See It,” C &RL News, ACRL, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL60611-2795; fax: 312-280-7663; e-mail: U38398@UICVM.

• North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have received a $267,170 grant from the U.S. Department of Education through the HEA Title II-C Strengthening Research Library Resources Program. The funds will be used to strengthen the institutions’ collections on the post- World War II South—a joint project called “Documenting the Contemporary South.”

• Northwestern University Library received $450,000 for the preservation of materials in its Transportation Library and Special Collections Department dealing with the history of railroad development and railway travel. The grant is part of a $1.8 million grant awarded by the National En- dowment for the Humanities (NEH) to the libraries of the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) for the preservation of more than 20,000 deteriorating books. The libraries of the CIC include those of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago.

• St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York, has received a $122,646 grant from the U.S. Department of Higher Education through the HEA Title II-D, College Library Technology and Cooperation Grants. The award represents 11% of the $ 1,093,000 to be expended by 1992 to automate the University’s three libraries.

• San Francisco State University was awarded a College Libraiy Technology and Cooperation Research and Demonstration Grant of $89,363 from the U.S. Department of Education to fund the project “Developing Core Library Skills Through Multimedia and Computer-Assisted Design.” SFSU also received a grant of $14,168 in federal LSCA funds through the California State Library to catalog in machine-readable form its Marguerite Archer Collection of Historic Children’s Books. The Archer Collection contains over 4,000 rare children’s books and first editions from the period 1780-1930 and approximately 20% of the titles represent works that will be new to the OCLC database.

• The Southeastern Wisconsin Information Technology Exchange (SWITCH), a regional consortium of private colleges, has received a $100,000 grant from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation to assist the consortium in implementing a multi-state library system network project.

• The University at Albany Libraries, State University of New York (SUNY), is sponsoring a one-year $92,676 cooperative grant project from the New York State Library (NYSL) to preserve on microfiche selected political pamphlets from the collections of five of New York State’s research libraries: SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamtom, Cornell University, and New York University are participating in the project. Funding for the project is provided by NYSL’s Division of Library Development as part of the New York State Program for the Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials.

• The University of New Mexico’s Centennial Science and Engineering Library was awarded $6,000 by the NASA Training Project. The grant will be used to buy libraiy materials supporting the classwork of undergraduates as well as materials that address scientific literacy and cultural diversity within science and engineering.

• The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill has benefited from a $490,000 gift from former Board of Governors member Walter R. Davis to buy books for the campus library. The money comes from accumulated earnings from endowments established by Davis in 1977 and 1980 and will restore some of the library’s purchasing power which has been eroded by four years of state budget cuts. Davis, a Texas oil man and North Carolina native said, “I want them to keep the library in first-class condition. It’s one thing that shouldn’t be neglected at all, a library.”

• The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, received $24,814 in funding from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for an 18-month project to introduce rural health processionals in Virginia to the sources of information available to them. Librarians will travel to rural sites to provide training in how to search a user-friendly computer system called GRATEFUL MED which links to the NLM’s MEDLINE. Through an electronic link called LOANSOME DOC, requests for journal articles identified in MEDLINE are routed to the Health Sciences Library to mail or fax back. ■ ■