ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• The Historic New Orleans Collection in New Orleans has been given the papers of Mollie Moore Davis and Mary Evelyn Jahncke. Davis’s papers are rich in letters, manuscripts, and drawings, and reflect her talent for depicting everyday life in Louisiana in short stories, novels, and poetry. The inventory of her bric-a-brac, jewelry, lace, pictures, and silver provides a glimpse into the household of a prominent turn-of-the-century New Orleanian. Davis’s granddaughter, Mary Evelyn Jahncke (1906-1990), continued the family literary tradition with both her own endeavors and her association with local writers such as John Kingston Fineran, whose novel Out of Final Chaos was published posthumously through her efforts. Family correspondence details the business interests and civic activities of Fritz Jahncke, Pearl Davis Jahncke, and other family members. The Bureau of Governmental Research, National Federation of Day Nurseries, and Volunteer Port Security Force are a few of the organizations repre- sente'd in the correspondence.

• Kent State University Libraries. Ohio, has received the papers of first lady Dagmar Celeste, wife of outgoing governor Richard F. Celeste. During her husband’s eight-year term Mrs. Celeste has been an active partner in his administration and through her advocacy has brought attention to a variety of public policy issues including drug and alcohol use, child care, women's equity, mental health, and peace and conflict resolution. Among more than 80 boxes of material are Mrs. Celeste’s speeches, correspondence, campaign notes, research material, and policy proposals as well as audio and videotapes. The collection will serve as the foundation of an Ohio gubernatorial spouses’ collection, the first in the nation dedicated to governors’ spouses.

• The Library of Congress acquired more than 1.5 million manuscript items in 1989, described in a recently published report: Library of Congress Acquisitions: Manuscript Division, 1989. The Cold War, the exploration of the North Pole, the development of the modern conservative movement in the U.S., and the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant are some of the topics documented by the acquisitions. A paperback copy of the 68-page report, illustrated with photographs from the collections, is available free from the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC 20540.

• Trinity College in Hartford. Connecticut. will house the archival and rare book collection of Hartford’s Mark Twain Memorial on a long-term loan basis, beginning in May. The Twain library holdings will be cataloged in Trinity’s electronic reference system. The collection comprises more than 5,000 items: first editions of all of Twain’s books, many inscribed with his own marginal notations; 650 letters written or signed by Twain; hundreds of letters to and from members of the Clemens family; and an extensive collection of secondary 19th-century works on the literature and decorative arts of that period.

• The University of California. Berkeley. has been given the literary manuscripts and papers of husband and wife John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Included are notes, manuscripts, and corrected and uncorrected galley proofs, showing all the major works of both writers in various stages of composition. UCB’s Bancroft Library has also recently acquired the papers of Pierre Simon LaP- lace (1749-1827), one of Europe’s premier astronomers and mathematicians in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

• The University of Connecticut Library’s Literary and Cultural Archives, Storrs, has acquired the papers of New York poet, journalist, and baseball writer Joel Oppenheimer. Occupying 90 linear feet, the papers include Oppenheimer’s manuscripts, correspondence, corrected copies of his publications, and clipping and ephemera files from about 1950 to his death in 1988. Oppenheimer was a student of Charles Olson from 1950 to 1953 at the experimental arts school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and is frequently associated with the group of innovative writers known as the Black Mountain Poets, which includes Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Oppenheimer published 18 books of poetry in addition to fiction, drama, essays, and The Wrong Season, a baseball book on the 1972 season of the New York Mets. He was a regular contributor to The Village Voice from 1969 to 1984, and was the first director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. The Literary Archives at the University of Connecticut in Storrs is the leading center for the study of Charles Olson and the Black Mountain Poets.

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• University of North Carolina at Asheville has received a major collection of rare books and other documents related to the westward expansion of colonial America. The collection has been named the Kelly Lynn Harrison Memorial Collection in Colonial and Revolutionary War History, in memory of the granddaughter of the donor, Myles Murray of Sanibel, Florida. Included in the collection, which is valued at over $250,000, are a rare 1770 text titled "The Present State of the European Settlements on the Mississippi” and a rare 1793 text titled “A Topographical Description of the Western Territories of North America,” which has one of the earliest descriptions of Daniel Boone and his exploits. About 15% of the collection documents the Scotch-Irish migration which heavily influenced the English-speaking settlement of western North Carolina. Original 18th-century texts from Scotland are included.

• The University of Southern California. Los Angeles, is now home to two collections containing rare photographs and documents detailing the history of Los Angeles—the Title Insurance Photographic Collection and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce Collection. They will be machine cataloged over the next three years using the History Database computer program, MARC format field definitions, and Library of Congress subject headings. The extensive cataloging project was made possible by a grant of $101,835 from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. The USC Regional History Center and the Los Angeles City Historical Society will use the resulting computerized catalog as part of a project to build a regional history information network and to create a regional union catalog of resources on Southern California history. Participating organizations will lend descriptions of their materials to the database. The project will also offer a series of short courses on the computer cataloging and retrieval of historical materials.

Grants

• The Association of Research Libraries has been awarded $30,000 by the H.W. Wilson Foundation for a project on “Meeting the Challenges of a Culturally Diverse Environment.” The funding is for an initial six-month phase, to focus on research on the current and future impact of cultural diversity in libraries, research on existing cultural diversity programs in both the public and the private sectors, and development of a cultural diversity program designed specifically for libraries. On both philosophical and pragmatic grounds, the project will emphasize developing tolerance, understanding, and respect for differences, rather than attempt to define and impose a standard set of ideologies, which could contribute to stereotyping.

• The Center for Research Libraries inChicago has received two grants for projects to convert records for monographs into machine readable form: $95,080 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and $241,270 from the U.S. Department of Education. The project funded by the HEA II-C grant involves approximately 19,125 records in cyrillic alphabet, chiefly for monographs in the humanities, social sciences, and science published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR between 1723 and 1970.

• The Claremont Colleges Libraries. Califor-nia, are currently implementing two major grant programs. In association with the School of Theology at Claremont and Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Gardens, the libraries have been awarded $214,675 by the Department of Education under its Title II-D College Library Technology and Cooperation program. The grant is for converting 90,000 records into both OCLC and the Claremont Colleges Libraries' online catalog. In addition, the libraries are involved in implementing a new $500,000 challenge grant from the Knight Foundation recently received by Pomona College and Claremont McKenna College. A significant portion of this grant will be used to acquire and network electronic databases and to teach faculty and students to use the new technology. Working with faculty and computer center staff, library staff will be responsible for organizing a series of “electronic workshops” to be held over the next two years at the Claremont Colleges (Pomona, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and the Claremont Graduate School).

• Cornell University in Ithaca. New York. won a $750,000 NEH challenge grant to support endowment of new faculty positions in pre-modem Chinese and Japanese literature, the construction and equipment of the Asian Periodical Room and Media Center, the integration of Asian collections, and conversion of records into machine-readable format.

• Earlham Collegein Richmond. Indiana, hasbeen awarded $80,000 by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., for an evaluation of the college’s experiment with Dialog over one year, during which Dialog Information Services has donated free access to the system. The evaluation will have four phases. First, outside consultants will work with the Earlham library staff and several key faculty members to determine the questions, and the procedures for answering them, that the study will address in its second phase. Then data will be gathered from hundreds of Dialog users as well as nonusers. With questionnaires, interviews, and observations, investigators hope for answers to such questions as how faculty, researchers, and institutions change when their access to information changes. In the third phase, evaluators will analyze the data and begin writing the reports that will tell the education community what has been learned at Earlham. Finally, reports will be disseminated to education journals, professional associations, and possibly EDUCOM. Eventually, Earlham will offer workshops on its institutional experiences for other college faculty members and librarians. “This study could have enormous implications in shaping the teaching techniques and tools for higher education in the 21st century,” according to Evan Färber, Earlham’s head librarian.

• Hampshire Collegein Amherst. Massachusetts, is recipient of a $285,000 NEH challenge grant to support endowment of faculty development and library acquisitions in the humanities.

• Hope Collegein Holland. Michigan, hasbeen awarded a $600,000 challenge grant by NEH to support endowment of a position for a humanities librarian and increased acquisitions in the humanities.

• The Library Company of Philadelphiahasbeen awarded an NEH challenge grant of $375,000 to support the expansion and modification of its building and the endowment of staff positions. It will match these federal funds with $1.5 million to be raised from individuals, corporations, and foundations for a total campaign goal of $1,875,000.

• The Pacific Northwest Canadian Studies Consortium,whose membership includes 20 colleges and universities in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington with a commitment to Canadian Studies, has been awarded a $55,000 (Can.) grant by the Canadian Department of External Affairs. The grant will support the purchase of the Pre-1900 Canadiana microfiche collection of University Microfilms International, a major research collection of pre-20th century monographs and pamphlets published in or about Canada. The 13 subject collections which comprise Pre-1900 Canadiana will be housed in the nine libraries participating in the cooperative purchase: University of Alaska-Anchorage, Boise State University, University of Idaho, Lewis and Clark College, Gonzaga University, Eastern Washington University, Western Washington University, Washington State University, and the University of Washington.

• Research Libraries Grouphas receivedtwo NEH grants. A grant of $200,000 is for converting approximately 7,000 cataloging records of selected archival and manuscript materials to machine-readable form. The resulting citations will be accessible online through RLIN in its archives and manuscripts (AMC) file. The project, which began in September, is expected to take one year. The records have been chosen for their importance to humanistic and scholarly research and are from 10 RLG institutions: American Antiquarian Society, Cornell University, Emory University, the Hagley Museum and Library, Louisiana State University, the Historical Society of Wisconsin, the U niversity of Minnesota, the U niversity of Pennsylvania, the Virginia State Library, and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A second NEH grant, for $190,000, is for converting approximately 32,500 bibliographic records of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) vernacular materials to machine-readable form, and updating approximately 45,000 romanized East Asian records that are already in machine-readable form, to include vernacular scripts. The resulting citations will be accessible online through RLIN. This project is expected to take two years.

• The University of Maryland at College ParkLibraries’ Special Collections Division has received a $135,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize a three- day conference honoring the one-hundredth anniversary of the American author Katherine Anne Porter, whose papers form part of the Special Collections holdings of literary manuscripts. The conference, entitled “Katherine Anne Porter at One Hundred: New Perspectives,” is scheduled for May 9-11, 1991, and is to be held on the College Park Campus, in Maryland. The Maryland Humanities Council has funded an additional $2,750, to help support a traveling exhibition that will be displayed in eight local public libraries in neighbouring counties during the three months preceding the conference.

• University of North Carolinaat Chapel Hillwill receive a $750,000 challenge grant from NEH for the Academic Affairs Library, to support endowment of acquisitions in Latin-American, Soviet, Eastern European, African, African-Ameri- can, and Women’s Studies, as well as Southern literature and history; and to address needs in special collections and preservation programs. The class of 1991 recently announced it would raise $350,000 for the Academic Affairs Library as its class gift to the university.

• Wheaton Collegein Norton, Massachusetts.has an NEH challenge grant of $450,000 to support strengthening the library’s humanities collections through immediate acquisitions and endowment of further acquisitions and of a half-time staff position.

News notes

• Columbia University’s Columbiana archive provided a rare photograph that was crucial in identifying the remains of Pierre Toussaint before they could be interred last December in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The photo, an early example of a “wet plate,” was taken by former Columbia president Nathaniel Fish Moore before Toussaint’s death in 1853 at the age of 87. Toussaint could become the first black American saint of the Roman Catholic Church. According to historical documents, he was taken from his native Haiti to New York in 1787 by his owner, John Berard du Pithon, who soon died, leaving his family in poverty. Toussaint secretly supported the family for 20 years with money he earned as a hairdresser. He was freed by du Pithon’s widow when she was dying. Having carved a niche in fashionable society as a hairdresser, the former slave bought freedom for other slaves, took in orphans, raised money for poor churches, nursed the sick during epidemics, faithfully attended Mass, and routinely dispensed charity. Positive identification of his bones was required before they could be interred beneath the high altar at St. Patrick’s.

• The New York Public Library will displaysome of the world’s most spectacular examples of zoological art April 20—August 24,1991. Featured are colored and uncolored woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, and original watercolor drawings produced from 1500 to 1900, before the advent of photomechanical printing methods. The works by renowned artists represent the highest standards of printmaldng as well as scientific accuracy and visual beauty. Curated by Miriam T. Gross of the General Research Division, the exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from Bulgari with The Vincent Astor Foundation. In conjunction with the show, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., will publish The Animal Illustrated 1550-1900: From the Collections of The New York Public Library.

• Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library, Dallas, has mounted an exhibit commemorating the bicentenary of John Wesley’s death. Faithful unto Death—Wesley’s Last Years and Legacy illustrates some events and issues that characterized Methodism during the decade that brackets Wesley’s death, 1785 to 1795. A centerpiece of the exhibit, which continues until May 18, is a hitherto unpublished Bridwell Library manuscript by Henry Moore, Wesley’s contemporary, describing some of the controversies subsequent to the founder’s death. The first edition of this document is included in an illustrated catalog of the exhibit which is available from the Bridwell Library.

• Stanford UniversityBusiness School’sJackson Library, reopened its main floor collection winter term with full public access for the first time since the Loma Prieta earthquake. The first floor of the collection, including current newspapers and periodicals, and access to several databases, has been refurbished as part of $5.2 million in earthquake retrofitting to the main Business School building that included new shelving for almost the entire library.

• Tulane University Library.New Orleans.sponsored a Lafcadio Hearn weekend last fall as part of the campus celebration of Japan Festival '90. Rare Books Librarian Sylvia V. Metzinger lectured on “Lafcadio Hearn: Wanderer,” and an exhibit in Special Collections displayed Hearn’s first editions, some manuscripts, and photographs illustrating his life. An exhibit catalog has been prepared which not only records the items on display but also contains a biography of Hearn and a history of the Hearn Collection at Tulane.

• The University of VirginiaLibrary. Charlot-tesville, has mounted “From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936,” in honor of the 125th anniversary of Kipling’s birth. Organized by Mildred K. Abraham, research librarian in the Special Collections Department, the exhibit will continue through March 29. It includes a selection of approximately 75 titles from a collection of over 450 Kipling works assembled by Bruce Merriman and given to the library in his honor by the estate of Helen P. Merriman. The exhibit was formally opened with a program sponsored by the Associates of the University of Virginia Library. Paul Cantor, professor of English at the University of Virginia, spoke on “Kipling’s Kim: The Cosmopolitan Vision.”

• The University of WyomingLibraries. Lar-amie, celebrated the acquisition of their millionth volume with a symbolic choice of text: Information Literacy: Revolution in the Library by Patricia Senn Breivik and E. Gordon Gee. A copy of the book was presented to award-winning author John Edgar Wideman by Keith Cottam, director of libraries, when Wideman spoke at the ceremony in Laramie commemorating the milestone.

• Wayne State University Libraryin Detroit.Michigan, will use an endowment from the estate of Millicent A. Wills to support the Urban Ethnic Collection, which was renamed in Wills’s honor at a dedication ceremony on November 15, 1990. The collection focuses on urban ethnic materials for young readers in support of a multicultural society. Millicent Wills, a Wayne alumna who was bom in Guyana, taught in Detroit public schools for 30 years. When she died in 1988 at the age of 87, her financial contributions to WSU approached $250,000.