ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, hasbeen selected to house the National Track and Field Hall of Fame Library Collection. The collection will be maintained in a special section of the Rare Books Room as a cooperative project between Butler and the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. Included are the official report of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics; a 1936 Berlin Olympics program, among others; early Millrose Games programs, early issues of Spalding’s Athletic Library,and books on coaching techniques and equipment changes over the years. The University, with a long track and field tradition, was the site of the former Butler Relays.

•Ehwa Woman’s University, Seoul, Korea, recently acquired an important collection of Koreana dating from 1563 to the early 20th century and consisting of nearly 5,000 volumes. The books feature early printings (by woodblock) of Korean literature, early Korean views of the world, and Western accounts of Korea in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rare works include Kyung Sei Chung’s Collection of Woobok’s Works (1562–1633), 32 volumes printed by woodblock; the collected works of Ram Chung (1569–1641), also printed by woodblock; and Shi Yearl Song’s Works on Words and Behaviour. Western works include Basil Hall’s Voyage to Corea (1820). The collection was donated bv Carl Ferris Overfield Miller, a former resident of Pennsylvania now residing in Korea.

•The Emerson College Archives, Boston, have acquired a collection of articles by Elinor Hughes, drama and film critic for the Boston Herald from 1927 to 1966 and the first woman critic for a Boston evening newspaper. The collection dates from 1927 to 1950 and includes 37 bound scrapbooks of reviews, feature stories and interviews with stage and film stars. Hughes also presented the college with an 1893 volume of articles on American burlesque and actors of the New York stage, which features original playbills and lithographs dating back to 1840.

•The Pennsylvania State University Libraries,University Park, have received the gift of 2,600 musical recordings from the late Clarence I. Noll, dean emeritus of the College of Science and professor of chemistry until his retirement in 1971. The recordings are devoted chiefly to jazz with an emphasis on the big band era.

•Texas A&M University, College Station, recently received a collection of approximately 500 volumes of English Romantic works, the donation of former University of Texas at Austin professor Willis Pratt. The collection focuses in particular on Lord Byron (1788–1824), and on Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and contains many 19th- and 20th-century editions of their works, as well as the David Masson edition of De Quincey and an 1810 edition of Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama.A particular highlight is two bound volumes, dated 1822–23, of The Liberal, a periodical founded by Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, who, with critic William Hazlitt, were its principal contributors.

•The University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, have opened for research the papers of J. William Fulbright, former Democratic Senator from Arkansas. The collection documents the public career of the Senator, whose career spanned the years 1942–1974, the last 15 years of which were spent as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The papers consist of more than 1,300 linear feet of constituent, official and personal correspondence, memoranda, legislative bills, speeches and other records. Featured is material relating to the origin and administration of the Fulbright program of academic exchange for students, teachers, professors and researchers. Now in its fortieth year, the Fulbright program was introduced shortly after World War II, when funds from the sale of surplus U.S. war properties abroad were made available for educational exchanges. The Fulbright exchange files complement the recently acquired historical collection of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs donated by the U.S. Information Agency. The Council for International Exchange of Scholars and the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs have also designated Arkansas as the permanent repository of their records. Both are directly involved in the administration of exchange programs and services.

•The University of California, Los Angeles, Biomedical Library’s History and Special Collections Division has received eighteen unique photographs of the laboratories and procedures of pioneer physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936). The photos are the gift of Dr. Mary A.B. Brazier, professor emerita of anatomy. Through an anonymous donation, the Division was also able to purchase the very rare first edition of Andreas Vesalius’ Epitome of 1543.

•The University of California, Santa Cruz, has received a donation of more than 15,000 letters, transcripts, tapes and films from the estate of the late social scientist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980). Bateson, a former UC regent and UCSC faculty member, received widespread recognition for his “double bind” theory of schizophrenia as well as for accomplishments in many other fields including anthropology and literature. The archive contains virtually all surviving Bateson materials from the late 1940s to 1980. Of particular interest is extensive correspondence with such figures as Margaret Mead, R.D. Laing, Claude Levi-Strauss, John Lilly, and Rollo May. A 350-page guide and 1,000-page index by Bateson scholar Rodney E. Donaldson have been specially created for the collection.

●The University of Puerto Rico, School of Architecture Library, Rio Piedras, has acquired the architectural drawings collection of the Toro & Ferrer firm, credited with introducing the International Style in Puerto Rico. Included are representations of more than 200 projects in Puerto Rico and abroad. The school has also acquired the Hunter Randolph Collection of landscape drawings and a large collection of drawings by Prairie School architect Antonin Nechodoma.

•The University of Virginias Alderman Library recently acquired a near-complete run of the rare Parisian right-wing newspaper Le Franciste. Started in 1933 and censored under the Popular Front regime in 1936, it resumed publication in 1940 under the leadership of Marcel Bucard, then chief of the Francist Party, and was published (with a brief interruption by German order) until its demise in 1944.

• West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, acquired a large collection of Abraham Lincoln memorabilia at an October 10 Founders Day celebration. The more than 2,000 books, photographs and documents were collected by the late Dr. Charles Aubrey Jones, a public servant and Wesleyan graduate. Among the items are extremely rare Republican Party pamphlets from the wartime presidential election campaign of 1864, a soldier’s promotional order signed by Lincoln in 1861, and photographs of Lincoln meeting with Union officers after the Battle of Antietam.

Grants

• The Academy of Natural Sciences Library, Philadelphia, has been awarded a grant of $10,000 from the Fels Foundation to support a conservation project involving some 250,000 manuscripts of importance to the history of the natural sciences in America. The documents will be placed in acid-free containers and stored under climate-controlled conditions.

• Bowling Green State University, Ohio, hasbeen awarded a $76,713 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog 12,000 popular music recordings made between 1950 and 1970 and to add them to the OCLC database. The grant is the second Bowling Green has received since 1985 to catalog its holdings of more than 400,000 recordings of popular music. Nearly 100,000 major label releases have been cataloged to date, with classification by theme, such as Hawaiian music and truck driving songs, as well as by artist and title. The latest grant will be used to begin cataloging minor and budget label releases.

• Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Indiana Consortium for International Programs have been awarded a two-year $50,000 grant by the United States Information Agency for librarian exchanges with the University of Malawi, in southeast Africa. University of Malawi library dean Steve Mwiyeriwa toured libraries in the United States for three weeks last month, visiting the Bloomington campus and the Library of Congress following an earlier visit to the four campuses of the University of Malawi by Indiana library dean Elaine Sloan. Three-month exchanges of librarians are planned to begin shortly.

• Stanford University Libraries and the University of Maryland-College Park Libraries in conjunction with the University of Delaware Library, the New York State Library, and Texas A&M University Library have been awarded HEA Title II-C grants to catalog Segments One and Two of the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature. This microfilm collection includes all books published through 1850 held by the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature at the University of London and the Kress Library of Business and Economics at Harvard University, and consists of approximately 60,000 titles. Stanford will catalog imprints from Segment One and its supplement, covering the period from approximately 1460 to 1800, over a period of five years. The catalog will consist of full AACR2 records with full subject access and will be input on RLIN and SOCRATES, the local online catalog. Authority work will be done within the framework of Stanford’s participation in the NACO program. When the project is completed, machine-readable tapes of bibliographic records in full MARC formats will be made available to OCLC and WLN.

The University of Maryland-College Park will catalog imprints from Segment Two, dating from approximately 1801 to 1850, over a period of 27 months. As a NACO participant, UMCP will be mainly responsible for providing name authority records to the program and preparing them for use by the other three participating libraries in creating cataloging records for OCLC. The records will be available to other libraries as a set once the project is complete. Progress reports on both projects are planned for the ALA Midwinter and Annual Conferences.

• Syracuse University’s Bird Library and Schoolof Education have received a four-year grant of $3,716,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan. The funds will be used to establish an electronic access system for Syracuse’s extensive collections on the origins and growth of the adult education movement. Using optical digital disks, a team of University educators and information science specialists will index and store some 650 linear feet of material, including the archives of many associations active in the field of adult education.

• The University of California, Riverside, Library Collection Development Department has received two research grants totalling $15,370 from statewide and local librarian association funds. The grants are to test the widely-held theory that in-house use of library materials follows the same pattern of use as circulation. The project directors hypothesize that in-house use of serials, and of monographs in certain subjects, is significantly different from their circulated use; and that in-house patterns of use may have changed in recent years due to photocopying practices. These factors could have a major impact on collection development policies and practices nationwide. The project will take one and a half years and will examine a representative sample of each classification in the entire UC-Riverside collection.

• The University of Scranton’s Alumni Memorial Library/Media Resources Center, Pennsylvania, has received a grant of $495,000 from the Pew Memorial Trust to install a computerized public access system. The Geac equipment will be linked to ASCII public access terminals and to IBM PC multi-purpose staff terminals.

• The University of Texas at Austin has received a total of more than $14,000 in gifts and a pledge to establish the A.F. Skinner Chemistry Library Endowment. The fund is named in honor of the late

Aubrey E. Skinner, Chemistry Librarian at UT-Austin for 34 years prior to his death in 1985.

News Notes

• The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, formally added the seven millionth volume to its collections at an October 8 ceremony. Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (“Journey to the Holy Land”) by Bernhard von Breydenbach was acquired by the U. of I. Library Friends through a gift from alumnus and longtime Library Friend John E. Velde Jr. of Omaha, Nebraska. The first travel book ever published, the Peregrinatio was also the first to have fold-out illustrations—among them the first map of Palestine ever published—and the first book containing illustrations specifically made to accompany the text. The author was a German nobleman and dean of the cathedral at Mainz who set out in 1483 on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, taking a large retinue that included Erhardus Reuwich, a recognized woodblock designer. The volume includes seven illustrations of the cities visited en route, including a panoramic view of Venice that folds out to more than five feet long and is completely recognizable to the modern traveller.

• Wayne State University, Detroit, will be thesite of the new Michigan Center for the Book, approved recently by the Center’s executive council. Chacona Johnson of Wayne State will be the Michigan Center’s first coordinator. The Michigan Center will be the seventh state or regional branch to become affiliated with the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. ■ ■

Harvard incunabula described

James E. Walsh, keeper of printed books at Harvard’s Houghton Library, has begun work that will lead to a printed catalog of 15th-century books in the Harvard University Library. Houghton Library has the largest number of such incunabula at Harvard, but there are also sizable collections in the Harvard Law School and the Countway Library, with smaller collections in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the Baker Library, and elsewhere. The Harvard collection of incunabula is the third largest in the country (exceeded only by the Library of Congress and the Huntington Library) and comprises approximately 3,500 titles. Since some titles are present in more than one copy, the total number of volumes to be described will probably exceed 4,000. It is estimated that the project will take five years.

If a full-scale description of a title already exists in a standard catalog, the new catalog entry will be abbreviated. Walsh will, however, present detailed accounts of provenance and binding, areas not emphasized in other catalogs of incunabula. The resulting catalog will be the largest detailed record of such a collection in the United States.— HUL Notes, October 16, 1986. ■■