ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

• Boston University's Twentieth Century rchives has acquired the papers of former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Faith Ryan Whittlesey. Whittlesey’s career as a public servant in local, state, and national government spanned a period of 25 years in all branches of government. Whittlesey graduated in 1963 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She worked in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office and was an assistant U.S. attorney before her election in 1972 to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. In 1981 Whittlesey was appointed ambassador to Switzerland by President Reagan and held that post until she was called to Washington to serve as assistant to the president for public liaison. In that position she was the only woman member of the senior White House staff. In 1985, she returned to Switzerland as ambassador where she remained until 1988.

• The Montana State University Libraries, Bozeman, have acquired a substantial body of papers and memorabilia of the late Senator Burton

K.Wheeler (1882-1975), Democrat from Montana between 1923 and 1947. The donations were made by Edward K. Wheeler, Elizabeth Wheeler Colman, Marion Wheeler Scott, Helene A. Wheeler and Edward Craney. The Charlotte and Edward Wheeler Foundation has provided an endowment to support the future acquisition of Wheeler materials. Notable among the materials received are a draft copy of Wheeler’s autobiography Yankee from the West, personal and political letter files, photographs, a 1952 television interview on 16mm film, original campaign posters, speeches opposing American involvement in European wars, records of Wheeler’s visit to postwar Europe in 1946, original political cartoons, senate office furnishings, and a bronze bust and oil portrait of Wheeler commissioned by the Works Progress Administration. As chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee and of the Indian Affairs Committee, Wheeler personally influenced such key New Deal legislation as the Public Utilities Holding Act of 1935 and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (the Wheeler-Howard Act). In 1937 he successfully led the bi-partisan opposition to President Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court.

• The University of Alberta Library, Edmonton, has received from Dr. Eric Schloss a large (8,500 items) and valuable book collection. The collection emphasizes Canadian, American, and British literature. As such, the collection is wideranging and will therefore be particularly useful for research. It is composed almost entirely of first editions, most of which are still in their original dust jackets. Many bear author’s signatures, inscriptions or other interesting notations. Almost all of the donation will be kept together as a rare books collection, but even those stored separately will be retrievable through the Library’s catalog, as part of The Schloss Collection.

• The University of Texas at Austin’s HarryRansom Humanities Research Center has acquired a major archive related to the literature of African nations. The Archive is from the Transcription Center, a privately financed organization that promoted interest in African and Afro-Caribbean culture through broadcast interviews with writers, art exhibits, theater productions, poetry readings, musical management, record and film production, and other activities. The center operated in London 1962 to 1978. Among the more than eight linear feet of materials in the collection are interview transcripts, photographs, press clippings, documents related to arts festivals and other cultural events, and correspondence with writers, artists and scholars. The items include a series of letters from Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. The Center also included a recording studio in which African and Afro-Caribbean writers and artists could make tapes for use by radio stations, mainly in Africa but also in the rest of the world. More than 12,000 minutes of the tape recordings are now housed at Indiana University, while many of the original scripts are included in the archive that has been acquired by University of Texas at Austin.

Grants

• Acadia University, Woliville, Nova Scotia, has been awarded a $28,335 Canadian grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to develop the Atlantic Baptist Collection. The funds have been used to add a wide collection of Baptist newspapers, together with extensive material on missions, from New England and the United Kingdom. Five hundred and fortyeight reels of microfilm were acquired from the American Theological Library Association and the Southern Baptist Convention.

• AMIGOS Bibliographic Council, Inc., Dallas, has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the amount of $160,000. The grant will support the development of a regional preservation service in the Southwest that will provide information, training and consultations to libraries and archives.

• The Association of Research Libraries has been awarded $30,000 by the H.W. Wilson Foundation for a project entitled Meeting the Challenges of a Culturally Diverse Environment. The project is intended to assist libraries in developing organizational and programmatic responses to major demographic shifts occurring in America. The funding is for the first six-month phase of the project which will include research on the current and future impact of cultural diversity on libraries, research on existing cultural diversity programs in both the public and private sectors, and development of a cultural diversity program design specifically for libraries. The project is being operated by ARL’s Office of Management Services with support from ARL’s Office of Research and Development.

• Georgia College, Milledgeville, has receiveda National Endowment for the Humanities grant to support the preservation of American author Flannery O’Connor’s manuscripts through photocopying and microfilming the collection and individually treating and encapsulating the manuscript drafts of her writings. The college has received an outright grant of $29,250 and a matching grant of $15,000.

• The Ohio State University Libraries, Co-lumbus, have received a two-year $134,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant is a continuation of an earlier two-year NEH award and will assist in the completion of a comprehensive computerized database of 14,000 titles of American fiction from 1901 through 1925. The project’s goal is to make available a comprehensive bibliographic resource which is not only accurate in it’s content and structure, but adaptable for future additions and modifications, and can be made available at low cost.

• The University of Alberta has received agrant of $35,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under its Specialized Research Collections Program. The money will be used to purchase the microfiche versions of REDUC documents, the Latin American equivalent of ERIC, and its indexes.

• The University of Chicago has been ap-proved for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The university will receive $1,393,039 for the preservation on microfilm of 10,150 brittle volumes from the Crerar History of Technology Collection at the University of Chicago library.

• The University of Illinois, Urbana, has beenawarded $487,717 in grant funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The money will support the microfilming of 4,500 deteriorating volumes in German, Brazilian, and Argentine literature.

• The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor hasreceived a $977,358 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to support the preservation microfilming of approximately 15,050 volumes in Michigan’s collections that document the history of the social sciences and the history of Slavic and Eastern European countries.

• The University of Nevada, Reno Library hasreceived a gift of $100,000 from Nazir Ansari, a professor in the Department of Managerial Sciences. The money is earmarked for the support and enhancement of the map library. The plan is to create a perpetual endowment and allow the income to be available to purchase maps, equipment, furniture, or any other desired enhancement over and above the regular funding available to that library.

• The University of Texas at Austin has receivedtwo National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling $85,452. A grant of $67,753 was awarded to support the cataloging of the Mexican American holdings in an international computerized database known as OCLC; list them in the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts as well as in a printed guide to be published by the University’s General Libraries; and enter them in the General Libraries’ computerized catalog called UTCAT. The remaining $17,699 will go toward the planning of a 1992 symposium on Mexican American fiction plus on-campus and traveling exhibitions using manuscripts, images, and recordings from the Mexican American archives. The symposium is to be sponsored by the Benson Latin American Collection and the University’s Texas Center for Writers.

• The Virgin Islands Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums, St. Thomas, has received a $30,324 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to support the preservation microfilming of 205 land transaction, probate, and court record books from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, that date from 1778 to 1958.