ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

The Newsfilm Archive at the Universityof South Carolina has been awarded a $5,050 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. The grant will be used to preserve footage from the Movietonews Collection of a 1930 interview with W. P. Becker, a Civil War widow. Among her reminisces are a meeting with General Robert E. Lee in Charleston and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which precipitated the opening of the war.

Indiana University (IU) has received agrant of $425,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help expand its digital library of information about shared natural and societal resources known to public policy-makers as “the commons.” These resources include a diverse set of elements ranging from air, land, and water to genomic data, property rights, and the Internet. The grant will also allow IU researchers to initiate a study of scholarly communication as information commons.

Acquisitions

The journals of Michael McClure—poet,essayist, and playwright—have been acquired by the University of California-Berkeley. McClure, now 70, was on stage at The Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955 when Allen Ginsberg unleashed his first public reading of “Howl.” McClure has published 16 books of poetry, two novels, six books of essays, ten plays, and his essays have appeared in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. He has had feature roles in several films and has collaborated with musician Ray Manzarek, of the Doors and Jim Morrison fame, for live poetry readings set to music and to produce a jazzy performance video, “Love Lion.”

Marvin J. Miller, former head of theMajor League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), has donated his papers to New York University. The papers document his tenure at MLBPA, and include correspondence, legal papers, photographs, videos, and artifacts, such as commemorative bats and baseballs. Miller, known especially for establishing the concept of free agency that allows players to move from team to team, was elected head of MLBPA in 1966. Free agency resulted in a hundredfold increase in the highest salaries, but Miller also achieved for the players the right to arbitration, the right to veto trades for veteran players, a vastly improved pension plan, and the right to bargain collectively. In 1982, he stepped down as union head and has since captured his experiences in the book A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball.

Filmmaker James Ivory has donated alarge collection of his papers to the University of Oregon Libraries. Ivory, a 1951 graduate of the University of Oregon, began his filmmaking career in 1957 with the making of “Venice: Theme and Variations,” which was his master’s thesis project at the University of Southern California film school. In 1961, he formed a partnership with producer Ismail Merchant and novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala that led to the formation of the production company Merchant Ivory, which has released nearly 40 films earning 30 Academy Award nominations. Ivory’s two most famous films, “A Room with a View” (1985) and “Howards End” (1992), each won three Academy Awards. The 26 boxes of donated papers contain production files, screenplays, photographs, correspondence with actors and actresses, filmmaking notebooks, press kits, movie reviews, costume samples, and other film-related documents. Dating from 1947 to 1992, the material includes some of Ivory’s class papers from the University of Oregon, along with letters to his family and other personal correspondence. Ivory himself organized and identified the papers, providing handwritten notations explaining the significance of many of the documents. ■

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants8 Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: agalioway@ala.org.