ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the field

ACQUISITIONS

• Emory University’sRobert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, has received the papers of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Claude Sitton, an alumnus and editor of the Raleigh News and Observer. The collection includes materials from his years as chief Southern correspondent for the New York Times (1958-1968), as well as correspondence and writings from his career in North Carolina. Coverage of civil rights activities figures prominently in his earlier papers.

•Michigan State University, East Lansing, has been given a collection of 83 boxes of clippings and ephemera on clothing and fashion by Ada Tucker Green, of Birmingham, Michigan. Included are items on fashion designers, Detroit area artists, miniatures and dolls, leaders in the Detroit area art and antiques world, the progress of women in the arts, catalogues of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Henry Ford Museum, travel guides, and hotel brochures.

•Texas A&M University, College Station, has acquired the papers and memorabilia of Johnnie Mae Hackworthe (1904-1980), founder of the conservative Children of God sect. She also campaigned unsuccessfully as a candidate for Governor of Texas, the U.S. Congress, and the Presidency. The collection will be useful to students of conservative Christianity, Texas politics, and the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient Railway of Texas, of which her husband was an official.

•The University of California, Berkeley, has purchased two major Russian collections. The first is the library of the English bookman, John S.G. Simmons, librarian of All Souls College, Oxford, and consists of more than 1,550 books, pamphlets, and periodicals dealing with Russian and East European book culture. Many of the pieces bear the autographs of the Soviet Union’s leading bookmen. Especially noteworthy are the holdings of Soviet periodicals and monographs published before 1935 and very rare small printings published after 1960.

The second collection is that of San Francisco collector A.N. Kniazeff, which consists of 182 individual items, all published in Harbin, Tien Tsin, Shanghai, and other centers of Russian emigration to the Far East. The collection is especially rich in Russian-language scholarly monographs and in dictionaries of Far Eastern languages.

•The University of Colorado, Boulder, Music Library has received a portfolio of sheet music which includes a copy of every piece of music published by the Tolbert R. Ingram Publishing Company. This compnay was active in Denver in the early 20th century and published popular music of all kinds, much of which deals with Colorado and Denver as subjects.

•The University of Iowa, Iowa City, has been given a large collection of materials on railroads by Iowan John P. Vander Maas. The gift consists of 40 document boxes of employee and public timetables from railroads throughout the world; train registers from West Liberty, Iowa, and Phillipsburg, Kansas; train orders; menus; street car transfers; and a miscellany of printed and manuscript items.

•The University of Michigan’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Ann Arbor, has acquired the Lois Orr papers relating to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. The papers consist of books, pamphlets, serials, documents, leaflets, posters, correspondence, and typescripts of her experiences as a socialist in the early days of the war.

•The University of Texas at Austin has recently acquired the papers of Argentine writer Julio Cortezar, author of Rayuela and Libro de Manuel, to add to its Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Included are manuscripts of one unpublished and three published novels.

UT-Austin has also received a collection focusing on the events, opinions, and impact of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Included in the 1,700-piece collection are books, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets tracing aspects of the assassination from the initial news coverage to the most recent theories on the perpetrator(s) of the crime. Numerous foreign publications reflect reactions as far away as Iceland and Korea, and offer special insight into the opinions of the foreign press and foreign leaders.

•Yale University has received a gift of over 100 rare Tibetan manuscripts and four 19th-century Tibetan religious paintings. The manuscripts are 13th-century copies of the religious teachings of the 8th-century teacher, Padma Sambhava.

GRANTS

•Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, has received a grant of $100,000 from the Gladys Brooks Foundation to support the purchase of library materials for the study of non-western cultures. The grant will establish an endowment to purchase a wide variety of recently published secondary sources—newspapers, monographs, and scholarly journals—as well as primary documents relevant to Colgate’s Asian studies program.

•Harvard College Library has been awarded a grant of $188,402 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission in support of a 2-year project to survey and create records concerning manuscript collections at Harvard and Radcliffe. The primary goal of the project is to make these collections more accessible to students and scholars through improved collection descriptions and increased name and subject access.

•The Northeast Document Conservation Center, Andover, Massachusetts, has been awarded a 3-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its field service program. The major activity is short-term, onsite consultation to small and medium-sized repositories in New England, New York, and New Jersey. Letters of application for a consultation and collection survey should be sent to Mildred O’Connell, Field Service Director, NEDCC, Abbot Hall, 24 School Street, Andover, MA 01810.

•Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina, has received a $34,176 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to facilitate the arrangement and description of the Shaw University Archives. The project will provide the framework and foundation for an ongoing archival program and will serve as a prototype for the establishment or upgrading of archival programs at similar institutions.

•Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, has received two grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission in support of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. First,

$15,000 has been provided to fund a 10-month fellowship for someone interested in historical editing to work with the Grant materials. Second, $43,234 will aid in the continuation of editorial work and publishing volumes in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant series.

•The University of Texas at Austin has been awarded a $180,998 Title II-C grant to catalog 10,0 monographs in the Benson Latin American Collection. Full bibliographic data on the books will be added to the OCLC database.

NEWS NOTES

•The Lirrary of Congress has opened a Social Science Reading Room on the fifth floor of its John Adams Building in an area formerly called the Thomas Jefferson Reading Room. The room now houses major print and selected microform reference collections in the fields of business, economics, political science, sociology, and education. The new reading room is the latest step towards the arrangement of the Library of Congress as a vast “multi-media encyclopedia,” in the words of librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin. This concept calls for the future orientation of the library’s services and collections around the Main Reading Room in the Jefferson Building, which would function as an index to the library’s resources.

•The University of Texas at Austin’s Humanities Research Center was renamed the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center by the UT System Board of Regents on December 9. The redesignation honors the former UT Austin president and chancellor of the UT System who was instrumental in establishing the center. In a related ceremony that also closed the University’s Centennial observance, the library celebrated the addition of its 5-millionth volume.