ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Young

University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguezhas received a grant of $2 million under Title V-Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program, by the U.S. Department of Education. The grant will be used to improve clearinghouse capabilities for decision-making, strategic planning, and policy formation; enhance student training and research at sea; and improve the library skills of students by developing a stateof-the-art library research and instruction laboratory. The five-year grant is one of 39 awarded nationwide and one of six awarded in Puerto Rico.

University of Virginia has received a $10million gift from alumnus David A. Harrison III to establish an institute for the study of American history, literature, and culture. The David A. Harrison III Institute will draw on the library’s extensive holdings of American manuscripts, rare books, and documents and will encompass an exhibition gallery, study areas for visiting scholars, and a seminar room for lectures and classes. It will be housed in a new 65,000-square-foot facility, which will also contain the Albert H. Small Special Collections Library.

Columbia University, California DigitalLibrary, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are the winners of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition’s (SPARC) Scientific Communities Initiative (SCI) grant competition. The grants, worth a combined half-million dollars, are awarded to spur digital science publishing ventures based in academe. Columbia University Press’s Columbia Earthscape, the Digital Library’s eScholarship, and MIT’s CogNet will each receive substantial support from SCI. SCI’s goal is to stimulate and accelerate the creation of new nonprofit information communities for users in the fields of science, technology, or medicine.

University of Texas (UT) at Austin has beenawarded $300,000 by the Welch Foundation to support statewide access to chemical information resources. The General Libraries will use the funding to expand and enhance its collection of chemistry reference materials and provide statewide access to this information via document delivery and reference assistance. All materials acquired will be cataloged in UTCAT, UTNetCAT (the UT online catalog), and in OCLC.

Northwestern University has received a$10 million unrestricted lead gift earmarked for building the library’s collections from the Deering family through the Miami Corporation, the family’s investment company. The endowment, which will generate $400,000 for the library each year, allows the university library to strengthen and build new “collections of distinction” to join its holdings in such areas as Africana, transportation and 20thcentury music, as well as to enhance various areas of study. Collections immediately benefiting from the endowment include area and ethnic studies, life sciences, economics, and political science.

The Council on Library and InformationResources (CLIR) has been awarded a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of the Academic Image Exchange (AIE), a project of the Digital Library Federation and the College Art Association. Making images available electronically will benefit teaching and research in art history and architecture. AIE will enable scholars to share digital images (to which they own the rights) of works referenced in the major art history textbooks. It will offer students, teachers, and the broader public curriculum-based sets of monitor-sized digital images for their free and unrestricted educational, nonprofit use.

Penn State University received $51,000 aspart of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. The grant will help preserve the Luis Alberto Sánchez (1900-94) collection. Sánchez was a Peruvian statesman and scholar who was a major political and literary force in Peru for 40 years and taught at numerous major universities in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East. He was a pioneer member of the American Popular Revolutionary political party, which advocated social and political reform. Because of this affiliation, Sánchez was jailed and exiled from Peru in 1932 for 25 years. In 1963, he was elected to Peru’s senate and continued in a number of other government positions, including vice president (198590). The collection includes Sánchez’s personal correspondence and private library of 40,000 volumes.

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

Library staff examine boxes that comprise part of the Paul Bowles Archive.

Photo by Jack Buxbaum

Acquisitions

The papers of Kurt Vonnegut, acclaimedauthor of Slaughterhouse Five and Player Piano, have been acquired by the Lilly Library at Indiana University. The thousands of pages of Vonnegut’s literary papers also include typescripts, first editions, and about 50 rejection slips from the 1940s. “Vonnegut has become a literary icon for many,” says Lisa Browar, Lilly librarian. “In the 1970s, his short stories and novels captured the mood of a country disillusioned by the war in Southeast Asia. Today, he is acknowledged for his astonishing literary range and as a social critic whose wit and irreverence expose society’s frailties.” Vonnegut, a native of Indianapolis, was granted an honorary doctorate from Indiana University in 1973.

Kurt Vonnegut

The literary papers of Paul Bowles, theAmerican expatriate writer and composer, have been acquired by the University of Delaware Library, by arrangement with the author. The collection includes thousands of items including letters, manuscripts, revisions of manuscripts, translations, publishers’ reports, memorabilia, and numerous items housed for many years in the author’s home in Tangier, Morrocco. Since the 1940s Bowles has written numerous works of fiction, essays, translations, travel writing, poems, and other works. Among Bowles’s best-known fictional works are the novels The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let it Come Down (1952), The Spider’s House (1955); and his initial short story collection, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950). A film of The Sheltering Sky was made in 1991, starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich.

Award-winning poet Brendan Galvinmade a surprise gift of papers and documents to Hollins University. Galvin has published numerous books of poetry, including Hotel Malabar, Sky and Island Light and The Strength of a Named Thing. Galvin’s work has earned him many honors and awards, including the Iowa Poetry Prize for Hotel Malabar; a short listing for the Pulitzer Prize for Winter Oysters; the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation. The narration Galvin wrote for Massachusetts Story, a one-hour documentary on offshore oil drilling on Georges Bank, won both the First Prize for Documentary at the New England Film Festival and three Emmy nominations (1977-78). ■