ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Young

The Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc. receivedathree-year grant of $475,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to strengthen the teaching of information literacy. The members of the consortium are the College of Wooster, Denison University, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, and Ohio Wesleyan University. The focus of the grant is to build partnerships between librarians and faculty members and to integrate information literacy into courses across the curriculum. Grant funds will be used to support a professional development program for librarians to become leaders in teaching information literacy skills, a curriculum development program for faculty who will collaborate with librarians on curricular projects, the development of comprehensive resource materials, and faculty-librarian workshops to demonstrate effective approaches and encourage further collaboration. Ray English, director of libraries at Oberlin College, will direct the project.

Johns Hopkins University has received a $2million commitment from the Hodson Trust to endow the directorship of the Digital Knowledge Center—Milton S. Eisenhower Library’s information technology research and development department. The director will provide leadership for the center’s mandate to promote the application of technology to teaching and scholarly communication. The director will also develop collaborative initiatives with faculty and other technology units across the university and with external academic and corporate partnerships.

The Northeast Document ConservationCenter (NEDCC), in Andover, Massachusetts, has been awarded a grant of $59,150 from the Organizational Support Program for Cultural Organizations by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. This is the first of three years of funding, which will provide vital funds for NEDCC’s outreach services to Massachusetts cultural organizations. NEDCC provides outreach services to help museums, libraries, and historical organizations preserve cultural heritage collections.

Rutgers has received two grants totaling$127,502 from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Geographic Information System division. The grants will allow two Rutgers librarians, Linda Langschield and Ronald Jantz, to build the New Jersey Environmental Digital Library. This library will be a Web-based, full-text/image collection of reports, maps, theses, and multimedia reports on the state’s environment.

The New York Academy of Medicine hasbeen awarded a $435,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to be used over a two-year period. The grant will fund four projects designed to upgrade the library’s online catalog and to make records of the library’s holdings more accessible to the public. The grant will also be used to convert 125,000 monographic catalog entries to electronic form by OCLC, Inc., upgrade records for periodicals that already appear in the online catalog, and for a retrospective “authority control” project that will result in the standardization of all subject headings and author’s names.

Acquisitions

The 2,000-volume collection of the lateGeorge Levitine has been donated to the University of Maryland (UM) by his wife. While the Art Library will be the primary beneficiary of this 2,000-volume gift, Special Collections will receive several hundred valuable rare books. Levitine was professor emeritus and former head of the Art Department at the University of Maryland, Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), and member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1977-78). Under his leadership, UM’s art history and art programs gained national recognition. Levitine’s collection of emblem books became the centerpiece in his library.

George Levitine

The Levitine Collection is also rich in titles, mostly from France in the 18th and 19th centuries, concerning art, artists, cultural analysis, and the discussion of matters of tastes and esthetics. Levitine’s publications include numerous articles on Goya, emblems, and French art from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

The archive of British playwright ArnoldWesker has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Wesker is the author of 36 plays, 4 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, and other assorted writing. The archive includes original handwritten manuscripts and hand-corrected typescripts for all of Wesker’s plays, including a trilogy (Chicken Soup with Barley [1958], Roots [1959], and I’m Talking About Jerusalem [I960]), The Kitchen (1957), and Chips With Everything (1962). There is also a considerable amount of production materials, correspondence, personal accounts of income and expenditure, day diaries, invitation, TV and radio productions and interviews, and handwritten books of dreams.

An old psalter, with the Psalms especiallyarranged for devotional use each day of the week, found a new home at King’s College (affiliated with the University of Western Ontario). The manuscript probably originated in Flanders in the late 14th or early 15th century. The psalter is a millennium gift to the college from former Chief Librarian Elizabeth Russell and her successor and current Chief Librarian John Clouston. The manuscript is hand-lettered in Gothic script on vellum (calf skin), and consists of 197 leaves, many of which are beautifully illuminated with floral designs in gold leaf, red, light and dark blue, light and dark green, and rich violet.

The American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) Archive Collection has been relocated from the national headquarters in Reston, Virginia, to Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts. AAHPERD supports and assists those involved in physical education, leisure, fitness, dance, health promotion, education, and all specialties related to achieving a healthy lifestyle. The AAHPERD Archive Collection was established in 1960 by Mabel Lee, the first woman president of the Alliance and a leader in the physical education field. Lee’s papers, photos, sport clothing, and memorabilia (covering the period of 1899 to 1975) are a part of the archive. Due to the growth of the collection, it became necessary to find a research-oriented academic institution that was able to make all of the materials available by rapidly processing the current collection and maintaining its future integrity.

More than 700 volumes of classic Chinesebooks were donated to the University of Michigan (UM) by the family of Luen King Kao. Kao, who earned a bachelor’s degree from UM in 1912, was one of the first Chinese scholars sponsored through a government scholarship. Kao’s family gave this gift to UM’s Asia Library. The gift includes history, fiction, Chinese calligraphy, poetry, and rare Chinese translations of works by Western authors, such as Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Defoe, and Scott. One impressive piece from the collection is a 1695 first edition of the classic work “Chin p’ing mei,” which Weiying Wan, head of the Asia Library, describes as a “pioneering work of realistic literature depicting the social life of 17th-century China. For more information about the Kao Collection, visit the Asia Library’s Web site at http:// asia.lib.umich.edu/index.htm. ■

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: ayoung@ata.org.