ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Georgia State University,Atlanta, has acquired the works of Johnny Mercer (1910-1976), a Georgian whose songs topped the Hit Parade fourteen times and who received an Oscar on four occasions. The collection includes the original scores for some 1,500 published songs (such as “Moon River,” and “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”), hundreds of pictures and awards, and the autobiography Mercer was writing at the time of his death. The material will be housed in a special section of the rare books collection until the completion of a “Johnny Mercer Room” that will be part of a planned library expansion in a new building.

• Indiana State UniversityLibrary, Terre Haute, has received 524 nineteenth and twentieth century dictionaries for their Cordell Collection of Dictionaries. The volumes were donated by the G. and C. Merriam Company, Springfield, Massachusetts, and all of them were published by companies other than Merriam. The gift brings the number of dictionary volumes in the collection to nearly 10,000. Many of the volumes in the Merriam gift were collected around the turn of the century as exhibits in a series of legal actions initiated by the Merriam Company involving such issues as unfair trade practices and proprietary rights to the name Webster, which Merriam had acquired from Webster’s estate in 1844.

•The Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, recently made the largest purchase of early Canadian maps in Canadian history. The collection comprises 700 maps and atlases and 800 related books from the private Canadiana collection of the late Alexander MacDonald, a Toronto ophthalmologist who died in 1977. Virtually all of the major cartographers from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth century whose maps show Canada in any way are represented. Highlights include the 1562 state of the Forlani/Camocio map, which is the first printed map with the word “Canada”; a 1612 map showing Henry Hudson’s exploration of the bay which now bears his name; and the first state of Samuel de Champlain’s map of New France dated 1632.

•The special collections department of the University of New Mexico Library, Albuquerque, has received the political papers of the late Sen. Joseph Montoya (D-NM). The papers, which go back to the time Montoya served as state legislator, were given to UNM officials by members of the senator’s family, including his wife and daughter.

GRANTS

• The following institutions are some of the many recipients of grants under the HEA Title II-C Strengthening Research Library Resources Program:

American Museum of Natural History,New York—$166,539 to begin the preservation and cataloging of the photographic collection.

Cornell University,Ithaca, New York— $284,639 to continue the acquisition and cataloging of serials, dissertations, and archives and monographs for Southeast and East Asia.

Dartmouth College,Hanover, New Hampshire—$150,000 to preserve through microfilming and treatment the collection on polar studies.

University of Michigan,Ann Arbor—$300,000 for a joint project with Michigan State University and Wayne State University to create a serials database on OCLC and RLIN.

New York Public Library—$662,816 for a cooperative project with Columbia University and New York University to improve access and preserve materials in the fields of art and architecture.

University of South Carolina,Columbia— $172,000 to produce an online catalog of the complete collection of the “Fox Movietone Newsfilm” collection.

University of Washington,Seattle—$175,025 to preserve and provide access to rare materials in the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest collection, including explorer journals, photographs and pictorial materials, and archival recordings of Indian languages.

• Beaver College,Glenside, Pennsylvania, has been awarded a grant of $7,570 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the planning of human communication. The Atwood Library and the Philadelphia Miniversity will plan a series of learning experiences using humanistic perspectives on human communication to introduce adult learners to the humanities and to develop skills for life-long learning. The project will be aimed primarily at adult minority members of the north Philadelphia and northern suburban areas.

• Berea College,Kentucky, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $98,640 to organize and microfilm the records of the Settlement Institutions of Appalachia. Under the grant, those settlement school records having historical value will be microfilmed for inclusion in Berea’s Southern Appalachian archives. This microfilm will be available for those researching the region’s culture, values and changes since the late nineteenth century.

•The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, has been awarded a $122,809, HEA Title II-C grant under the Strengthening Research Library Resources Program. The funds will be used for the conversion of the center’s printed card catalog to microfiche. The project will result in an up-to-date integrated sequence of all center holdings, including monographs, serials, and newspapers.

•The Lehigh University Libraries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the Bethlehem Public Library have announced receipt of a $24,160 grant for a cooperative project called Libraries Online. The grant was awarded by the State Library of Pennsylvania. Libraries Online will allow the two libraries to provide expanded information services to the public and university communities through shared use of bibliographic databases.

•The University of New Mexico General Library, Albuquerque, has received a $48,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work with the UNM Latin American Institute and the UNM Press in producing an annotated guide to the library’s holdings pertaining to Mexico and Mesoamerica.

•The University of Texas at Austin has been awarded a $174,000, HEA Title II-C grant to preserve important Mexican research holdings in the General Libraries. Through the new project some 450 important, often unique Mexican periodicals and other Latin American serials selected from the Benson Latin American Collection will be preserved through microfilming. Other aspects of the project will include the establishment of a systematic acquisitions program for publications of state-owned corporations and major private firms, especially in Mexico, and the cataloging of those items in a national bibliographic database.

NEWS NOTE

• The University of Southern California’s Norris Medical Library, Los Angeles, began to participate in two Area Health Education Center (AHEC) projects September 1. In one project a Norris librarian is conducting a library/learning resources needs assessment of health facilities served by the San Gabriel Valley AHEC. Another project, in cooperation with the USC School of Medicine’s Development and Demonstration Center in Continuing Education for Health Professionals, Norris is providing a librarian to expand the National Library of Medicinefunded Self-Directed Learning Program. This program uses the educational strategies of contract learning, educational brokering, and educational networking for the continuing education of physicians.