ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

ACQUISITIONS

• Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, has received a five-volume facsimile set of 566 periodicals published between 1821 and 1831 and covering the first decade of independence for much of northern South America, a period in which Simon Bolivar played such a prominent role.

The periodicals, known as “Gaceta de Colombia” (Journal of Colombia), are a gift from the Republic of Colombia and were presented to Cornell by Virgilio Barco, Colombia’s ambassador to the United States. The set was prepared under the auspices of the Banco de la Republica de Colombia and contains an extensive index.

• The University of HoustonDowntown College’s W. I. Dykes Library has acquired a special energy collection and established a new Energy Information Service Department. The collection consists of about 1,500 volumes of books, thirty periodical titles, pamphlets, government documents, and newspaper and magazine clippings dating from the 1940s. The collection was originally owned by a nonprofit, nonpolitical organization called EREF (Energy Research and Education Foundation), which was founded in 1969.

• The University of Oklahoma’s History of Science Collection has acquired some 800 additional volumes including: Archimedes, Aque pon- derantium, Pisauri, 1588; Bartholomaeus Angli- cus, De proprietatibus rerum, Argentine, 1485; Claude Bernard, Lecons sur les propriétés des tis- sus vivant, Paris, 1866; Christoph Calvius, Algebra, Romae, 1608; Thomas Digges, Alae seu scalae mathematicae, Londini, 1573; Giovanni Gallucci, Della fabrica et uso di diversi stromenti, Venetia,

1597; Edmond Halley, Catalogus stellarum aus- tralium, Londini, 1679; Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis, Romae, 1650; Marin Mersenne, Questiones celeberrimae in Genesim, Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1623; and Robert Recorde, The Whetstone of Witte, London, 1557.

GRANTS

• Elmira College,Elmira, New York, is the recipient of a $12,230 grant from the Frank E. Gannett Newspaper Foundation for a program to microfilm unpublished Mark Twain documents at the University of California, Berkeley (Mark Twain Papers), Vassar College, and the Mark Twain Memorial at Hartford, Connecticut. The microfilm collection will include letters from Mark Twain and his family written from Elmira and letters received by the Clemens family from Elmirans in the more than forty years of the family’s close association with Elmira, New York.

• Lehigh University has been awarded a $150,000 gift from the ALCOA Foundation to help underwrite the construction costs of an addition to the Mart Science and Engineering Library.

NEWS NOTES

• The University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, is at work on a project to catalog 14,000 rare titles, published between 1850 and 1930, from its Howey collection on the history of economic thought. Richard S. Howey, professor emeritus of economics at the University, assembled the collection. “His (Howey’s) constant attention seems to me to have resulted in a collection of post-1850 literature unmatched elsewhere,” says Kenneth E. Carpenter, curator of Harvard University’s Kress Library of Business and Economics. The University of Kansas Libraries will make the titles known to scholars and available through interlibrary loan as they are entered in the OCLC data base. The two-year cataloging project is supported by a Title II-C grant from the U.S. Office of Education.

• The Lirrary of Congress (LC) is working with five research libraries to produce a cooperative name authority file. Each of the five libraries will submit to the Library of Congress name authorities for works in special subject areas. The University of Texas, for example, will submit authority headings for Latin American materials. The five cooperating institutions are the Government Printing Office, the Texas State Library, Northwestern University, The University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. ■■