ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• The Arizona State University library has recently acquired a 12-volume set of Ming Dynasty rubbings executed by Wen Cheng-ming (1470-Í559). The collection, entitled T’ing-yün- kuan fa-t’ieh, depicts the styles of master calligraphers from the Eastern Chin Dynasty (303-379) to the work of one of Wen’s contemporaries, Chu Yün-ming (1450-1526). The work was purchased in Tokyo and is believed to be the only set in the United States.

• The Health Sciences Library of Columria University has established the June L. and Samuel T. Orton Collection with the donation of the Ortons’ extensive records and files. Samuel Orton, professor of neurology and neuropathology at Columbia, was a pioneer in the field of developmental learning disabilities, especially dyslexia. His wife provided for the collection in her will.

• Emory University’s Woodruff Library has purchased a collection of books and papers about communism that should make the library one of the nation’s leading research centers on the development of the Communist Party in the United States. Two Emory political science professors, Harvey Klehr and Thomas Remington, have received a grant totaling $12,000 to bring the former owner of the collection, Philip J. Jaffe, to Atlanta from New York City to assist in processing the materials.

Among the items are copies of rare magazines, private manuscripts, and the papers of such controversial figures as Anna Louise Strong, Agnes Smedley, Norman Bethune, and Koji Ariyoshi, an American serviceman tried in Hawaii under the Smith Act.

• The Lirrary of Congress has received from Hans P. and Hanni Kraus a unique collection relating to the life and explorations of Sir Francis Drake. The 60 items in the collection, which includes maps, manuscripts, printed books, medals, and portraits, provide important new insights into Drake’s explorationsand military accomplishments. One of the crowning pieces of the Kraus Collection is a letter written by Gerhard Mercator, one of the greatest sixteenth-century cartographers, to Abraham Ortelius in which Drake’s route around the world is conjectured.

• The Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin recently acquired the David O. Selznick archives. Selznick, who died in 1965, was the producer of such major films as Gone with the Wind, Duel in the Sun, A Farewell to Arms, and many others. His archives, which include 1,961 file boxes of correspondence and 38 four-drawer file cases of manuscript materials, drawings, and paintings, provide what is perhaps the most thorough, record available of the progress and achievements of a Hollywood studio.

GRANTS

• Alfred University has been awarded more than $12,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog a special collection of Nazi German materials. The Waid Collection, given to Herrick Library in 1963, was assembled in Germany after World War II by H. Warner Waid of Elmira, New York, a civilian employee of the State Department. The grant will be used to catalog the collection of approximately 700 books and related materials on Nazi Germany and to prepare a simple subject guide for distribution to other libraries.

• Cornell University has received a $3 million commitment from Harold D. Uris, a New York City investment builder and 1925 Cornell graduate, on behalf of the Uris Brothers Foundation. The gift will be used for an addition to the Uris Undergraduate Library.

• The Fisk University Library, Nashville, Tennessee, has been awarded $293,666 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for lectures, interpretive exhibits, and media programs on the life and culture of Black Americans and their cultural contributions to the United States.

• The Mountain Plains Lirrary Association, headquartered at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, has been awarded $259,375 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support seminars and discussions and to prepare a film, exhibits, and oral histories on the country school experience. Project activities will involve the public at 200 libraries in the eight mountain plains states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.

• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission has announced the receipt of a grant of $425,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in support of historical editing projects to publish the papers of five Founding Fathers: John Adams and his family, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. The grant is intended to give the editors and sponsoring institutions a three-year period in which to develop other bases of financial support. The Commission will administer the Mellon Foundation award, making separate grants on a formula basis to the five projects each year.

• The New England Document Conserva-

TION Center,Andover, Massachusetts, has received $125,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will enable the center to provide thirty to forty small and medium-sized New England libraries and archives with short-term, on-site consultation on the storage, handling, and care of historical collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials.

In addition, the center will publish a manual on determining a library’s conservation needs and hold a conference on cooperative library conservation efforts for professionals from all parts of the country.

The New England Document Conservation Center is the only regional conservation center in the nation.

• OCLC, Inc., has been awarded a $97,902 grant by the National Science Foundation to develop and test an algorithm for estimating the number of public computer terminals needed by a library to support an online public catalog. Library use will be measured and analyzed from four perspectives: catalog use, reference activity, circulation, and building occupancy. Library use data will be collected at The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, which has both online and card systems.

• Radcliffe College has received a $60,316 grant from the National Institute of Aging to transcribe and analyze interviews with elderly black women leaders. Researchers at the Henry A. Murray Research Center and the Schlesinger Library will process the interviews and study the coping strategies black women have developed for survival. The interviews, conducted as part of the Radcliffe College Black Women Oral History Project, which was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, will become part of the data collection at the Murray Center.

• The University of Southwestern Louisiana has been awarded a grant of $25,000 by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission which will be used to preserve an important collection of photographic negatives housed in the University Libraries. The Freeland Photographic Collection consists of over 18,000 glass plate negatives, 4,000 nitrate and 36,000 safety film negatives taken by the Eli Barnett Studio of Crowley, Louisiana, circa 1907-1972. As a result of the grant the negatives will be treated for removal of a fungus infestation that has collected on the plates.

• The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries has been awarded a $175,000 grant for the conversion of cataloging of Latin American Serial Publications into machine-readable form. This is the library’s third major consecutive grant under the Higher Education Act, Title II-C, Strengthening Research Library Resources Program. Eventually a printed catalog of these serials will be available to other libraries.

• A quarterly publication of the University of Wyoming Libraries, Conservation Administration News (CAN), has been awarded a $2,000, two- year grant for editorial assistance. The Council on Library Resources granted this sum to CAN despite the council’s usual policy against supporting serial publications.

This grant recognizes the important role the one-year-old newsletter plays in promoting nationwide library and archival preservation, according to Robert H. Patterson, UW Library director and CAN editor. Within the past few months CAN has become the news organ for several major preservation organizations, including the new ALA Preservation Section and the newly organized Western Conservation Congress. CAN has nearly 400 subscribers around the world.

NEWS NOTES

• Claremont Colleges’ Honnold Library is the first library to win the prestigious Cost Reduction and Incentive Award funded by the United States Steel Foundation and awarded by the National Association of College and Business Officers (NACUBO). The award was based on the library’s use of OCLC and the development of the “Claremont Total Library System,” an online system that supports the complete cycle of Claremont library procedures from the point a book is searched for ordering through cataloging. The system was first presented publicly on a program at the national EDUCOM Conference in San Diego in October 1979.

• The Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, anticipates completion of a two-story, 37,000-square-foot library for its faculty and 500 students in May 1981. Special features of this building will include provisions for a television studio for closed-circuit TV training programs.

• The Harold McCracken Research Library was dedicated on August 15 at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. The new library was named in honor of the center’s founding director, an author, explorer, and noted authority on western art. Over 12,000 books and microforms devoted to western art, history, firearms, and Plains Indian culture are housed in the library.

• North Dakota State University Library has completed the finishing touches on almost 60,000 square feet of remodeled space and 40,000 square feet of additional space. A library staff of 41 participated in the shift of the library’s 337,000 volumes, and the new building was dedicated May 23.

• The Research Libraries Group has announced the addition of three new institutions to their membership: Tulane University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the State University of New York at Binghamton. The latter institution is the first to enroll as an associate member.

• Union College Library, New York, uncovered thirteen mammoth-plate albumen prints by Carlton Watkins, a noted nineteenth-century American photographer, during a recent inventory of its special collections. The photographs were probably taken in the mid-to-late-1860s and show the Columbia River Yosemite National Park, and other areas of California.

• Universal Serials and Book Exchange (USBE), has announced two special foreign membership plans which were begun on a trial basis in September. The plans were developed to give members outside North America the opportunity to reduce the agency’s cost in serving members abroad. The first plan allows a foreign library that acquires about 1,000 USBE publications a year to enroll as a member by making a nonrefundable deposit of $3,000 for future acquisitions. Libraries which acquire fewer publications can enroll in groups of ten or more libraries through a central agency. The purchasing or processing center or network office makes a deposit of $5,000 for future orders from the group.

• The Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, has prepared an exhibit entitled “The Enemies of Books.” The exhibition features the work of such enemies as inherent vice, accidents, hostile environmental conditions (“such as the Kansas summer of 1980”), and biological enemies (“such as bookworms, mice, and men”). Human enemies include publishers, bookbinders, censors, booksellers, readers, and librarians. The exhibition will run through December.

• The University of Texas at Austin has

ACADEMIC/RESEARCH LIBRARIAN OF THE YEAR AWARD

The Association of College and Research Libraries invites nominations for the Academic or Research Librarian of the Year Award, presented jointly by ACRL and the Baker & Taylor Company. Anyone wishing to submit nominations should request a nomination form from the ACRL office, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611.

Recipients of the award since its inception in 1978 have been: Keyes D. Metcalf and Robert B. Downs (1978): Henriette D. Avram and Frederick G. Kilgour (1979); and Evan I. Farber (1980).

The Awards Committee selects persons to receive the award in accordance with the following guidelines:

Purpose:To recognize an individual member of the library profession who has made an outstanding national or international contribution to academic and research librarianship and library development.

CRITERIA:Individuals nominated should have demonstrated achievements in such areas as:

1. Service to the organized profession through ACRL and related organizations.

2. Significant and influential research on academic or research library service.

3. Publication of a body of scholarly and/or theoretical writing contributing to academic or research library development.

4. Planning and implementing a library program of such exemplary quality that it has served as a model for others.

5. Nominee does not have to meet all four criteria stated above.

Rules: The award shall be made each year at a time and place to be determined by the ACRL Board of Directors. Announcement of the award shall be made by the ACRL president at a time and place to be determined by the ACRL Board of Directors. If, in the opinion of the Award Committee, no worthy candidate is nominated in a given year, the award will not be made that year.

Nominations:Nominations for the award must be returned to the chairperson of the Academic/ Research Librarian of the Year Award Committee and must be postmarked no later than March 1, 1981. Nominations must be submitted in quin- tuplicate. Nominations must be complete on the application form. The presence of attachments will disqualify the nomination. Secondary letcters will not be considered in the Award Committee’s deliberations.

Nature of the Award:The Academic/Research Librarian of the Year Award shall consist of $2,000 and an appropriate citation.

The Awards Committee for 1981 consists of the following persons: David Kaser (chair), Graduate Library School, Indiana University, Bloomington; Barbara Collinsworth, Macomb County Community College, Warren, Michigan; Pearce S. Grove, Western Illinois University Libraries, Macomb, Illinois; Willis M. Hubbard, Hugh Stephens Library, Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri; and David H. Stam, New York Public Library. ■■

ARCHIVES GRANTS ANNOUNCED

The Rockefeller University sponsors grants-in- aid to support projects requiring substantial research in the holdings of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Grants ranging from $500 to $1,000 will be made to graduate students or advanced scholars for the year 1981. Applications for grants during 1981 should be made before December 31, 1980; recipients will be announced on or before March 31, 1981.

Inquiries about this program and the collections at the center should be addressed to: Director, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, North Tarrytown, NY 10591. ■■