ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Acquisitions

•Columbia University, New York City, has reeeived the papers of detective fiction hero Ellery Queen, widely regarded as the American father of the genre. Ellery Queen was actually two people— Brooklyn-born cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee—who entered a mystery novel contest in 1928 that required the use of a pseudonym. The collection of more than 25,000 items spans more than 50 years and traces Queen’s career through popular novels, radio and television series and anthologies, bibliographies and other reference works. Included are extensive files of correspondence, outlines and drafts; hand- and typewritten manuscripts; photographs and books. One feature is the only surviving manuscript of the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery‚ and the notes, outlines and corrected manuscripts of the last, A Fine and Private Place. The manuscripts show the effects of Dannay and Lee’s disagreements and clashing personalities, which were said to have improved their writing. Correspondents include William Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Mil- lay, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich. The collection is the donation of Richard and Douglas Dannay, sons of Frederic. A public exhibition of selected materials opened in March at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

•The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., has received an extensive collection of anarchist books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts and memorabilia from Paul Avrich, distinguished professor of history at Queens College in New York and a leading historian of radicalism. The collection is particularly rich in 20th-century American and European publications, and includes works by Er- rico Malatesta, Mikhail Bakunin, Rudolf Rocker, Petr Kropotkin, Alexander Berkman, and Emma Goldman. Many editions issued in translation aimed at various European and ethnic communities are included. Also present are records of organizations such as the Libertarian Books Club of New York and the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community of Michigan, both of which were founded to promote radical principles. A feature of the collection are ephemeral pamphlets by American radical Goldman (1869-1940) such as Love Among the Free and Trotsky Protests too Much, as well as Japanese and French translations of her autobiography, Living My Life.

•St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York,has received the papers of Owen D. Young (1874-1962), former chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the founder of the Radio Corporation of America. Young was a member of the class of 1894 and a longtime university trustee. The papers document Young’s involvement in national business and politics over five decades, including the post-World War I reparation period, which saw him as the key figure in the Dawes Plan of 1924; and the Young Plan of 1929 with its provisions for the still-existing Bank of International Settlements. The collection consists of 488 linear feet of material, including business and personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, speeches, and other material. It is the gift of the Van Hornesville Community Corporation and Richard Young.

•Texas A&M University, College Station, hasreceived more than 1,000 items of Texana, including a large collection of materials concerning Germ an-Americans in Texas. Also included are books by J. Frank Dobie and other Texas writers, early maps and newspapers, scrapbooks, issues of the Texas Almanac and Southwestern Historical Quarterly, early college yearbooks and items from both the state’s centennial and sesquicentennial celebrations. The material was donated by Louis A. Hartung, a 1929 graduate.

A 1967 Texas A&M graduate, Robert W. Barnett of Houston, has donated the diary of his great-great-grandfather John W. Anderson, a Confederate soldier in the Army of Virginia during the Civil War. Containing handwritten recollections—many written after the war’s end—as well as Confederate money, riddles and stamps, the diary was published in 1867.

♦The University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, has received a facsimile copy of Emperor Ch’ien-lung’s personal Digest of the Great Encyclopedia of the Four Treasuries, an 18th- century masterpiece of Chinese scholarship originally meant for his eyes alone. The 500-volume collection of China’s most important books is the gift of Frederick F. Chien, Taiwan’s Coordination Council for North American Affairs’ representative to the United States, whose father, Shih-liang Chien, was a distinguished chemist and Illinois graduate. Commissioned in 1773, the Great Encyclopedia, collecting works of the “four treasuries”—the classics, history, philosophy, and literature—was later ordered abridged by the 70- year old emperor, who feared he would not live to see it completed. The hand-written 500-volume digest appeared in 1778; and the 1,500-volume edition in 1783. The Digest is superior to the full encyclopedia in its beautiful calligraphy and inking, and in the absence of censorship—though many works unfavorable to the Ch’ing dynasty were altered or deleted.

• The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been selected by the American Institute of Physics as a depository for the Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, one of nine such throughout the world. Included in the archives are microfilm copies, on 301 reels, of the transcripts of many of the surviving pioneers of the development of quantum physics as well as their correspondence from the turn of the century through the 1930s. The material will be housed in the Special Collections Department.

• The University of Texas at Arlington's Special Collections Department has received on loan the map collection of Lewis and Virginia Buttery of Lampasas, Texas. The Butterys intend to donate portions of the collection at regular intervals. Consisting of approximately 450 maps and charts and 40 atlases, the collection contains items from various places around the world, documenting Mr. Buttery’s interest in cartography since the mid- 1930s.

• The University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been given an unpublished collection of correspondence from author and playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) to Sally Begley. The group of 65 letters, 8 postcards and 10 telegrams dating from the last 30 years of Wilder’s life includes one of his most important letters, a two-page discussion on the ethics of being an artist.

Madison has also acquired a 10,000-page edition of the records of Military Justice in Brazil during the military regime of 1964-1985. The material documents the repression carried out against a wide spectrum of Brazilians including students, clergy, journalists, workers, and politicians. The American version is titled Torture in Brazil. It will be housed as part of the library’s Latin American collection.

Grants

• Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, has received a grant of $750,000 from the Pew Charitable Trusts to expand its campus computer network, CWRUNET, and link it to other institutions. Once all university departments are connected, CWRUNET will be linked to University Circle institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Garden Center of Greater Cleveland. A final step will involve linking

CWRUNET with the Northeastern Ohio Major Academic and Research Libraries Consortium, which includes Cleveland State University, Kent State University, Oberlin College, and the University of Akron, among others.

•Drexel University’s Thomas Childers, professor in the College of Information Studies, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received a $132,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology and Innovation to study the effectiveness of public libraries in the United States. The study will concentrate on examining the perceptions of people influential in making decisions about public libraries, such as trustees, government officials, professional staff, and users. Childers, with Nancy Van House of the University of California, Berkeley, will conduct the year-long study through interviews and nationwide questionnaires.

• The Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York, has received $455,156 in funds from a Title II-C grant to the Associated Music Libraries Group for entry of bibliographic records onto OCLC and RLIN. Eastman is concentrating on processing records of some 9,200 titles of chamber music for three to five instruments. The project is being hosted on behalf of the music libraries at Eastman and Indiana University in OCLC, and Harvard University, Stanford University, and Yale University in RLIN, and will continue through the end of the year.

• Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has completed a two-year campaign to raise $1 million to establish a curatorship of printing and graphic arts in the College Library. More than 200 pledges and gifts from individuals, corporations and foundations have been received for the curatorship, named in honor of Philip Hofer (1898-1984), who in 1938 founded the first university department in the United States devoted to the history and practice of printing, type design, calligraphy, papermaking and book illustration. The endowed chair is also the first of its kind.

• Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, has received an LSCA Title III-C grant of $43,000 to improve access to Northern Virginia serials holdings using the Blue Ridge Union List of Serials. A project to create an up-to-date union list of serials that can be easily and cost-effectively upgraded will be developed. The holdings of 24 Northern Virginia libraries will be included.

• The Society of American Archivists, Chicago, has received a grant of $56,000 ($5,000 matching) from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to publish a series of seven new manuals entitled Archival Fundamentals. Topics to be covered include archives in society, acquisitions and appraisal, arrangement and description, preservation management, reference and access, administration of archival repositories, and a glossary of archival terms.

•The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, has received a grant of $52,402 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to establish an archives program, establish control and provide access to the Black Hills Mining Industrial Archives Collections, and to prepare finding aids to the collections.

•The University of California, Davis, has received a $25,000 endowment from Michael Harrison of Fair Oaks, California, to augment the work of the Conservation and Preservation Department. Income from the endowment will be used for ongoing programs in binding, conservation treatment, and microfilming.

•The University of Waterloo, Ontario, has received a grant of $3,900 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to purchase a collection of 149 books on the history of Spanish, Latin and South American dance. Included are rare scholarly texts printed in South America such as the Manual de Danzas Nativas (Buenos Aires, 1954), Danzas de Los Concheros en San Miguel de Allende (Mexico, 1941), and a number of general works. The Spanish antecedents of Latin and South American dance are represented by other titles including Spanish Dancing (New York, 1948), Las Fiestas Populäres Barcelonesas (Barcelona, 1944), and Matos' Danzas Populäres de España (Madrid, 1957). Related materials on music, festivals and folklore are also present.

•The Virginia State Library and Archives, Richmond, has received an LSCA Title III-C grant of $48,700 to establish a document delivery service using facsimile transmission. The project is designed to enhance resource sharing among ten academic and public libraries throughout the state.

•Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, has received a $325,000 challenge grant from the Steele-Reese Foundation of New York, to be used primarily for book acquisitions. Under the terms of the grant, Whitman will raise $875,000 in matching funds. The college recently completed a $50 million general fundraising effort which included expansion of a number of its academic programs, particularly Asian studies and geology. Plans are underway to improve and expand the reference collection, to repair and preserve existing collections, and to automate the catalog and circulation systems.

•William Paterson College, Wayne, New Jersey, has received three grants totalling $53,835 to develop and test computer programs which will provide students with greater access to scholarly information. The grants were awarded by the State Computers in Curricula Grant Program of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education. The first grant is for the development of a CD-ROM- based end-user program involving the Psychlit, ERIC, and Books in Print databases. The second grant is for development of an online periodical directory of WPC collections. A third will provide additional computer terminals for library patrons.

TAPPI Paper Preservation Symposium in October

The Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI) will sponsor the 1988 Paper Preservation Symposium on October 19-21 at the Capitol Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The Symposium has three primary goals:

1) To open up communications between archivists, librarians and professionals in the pulp, paper, and graphics art industries.

2) To exchange technical knowledge that can help librarians make their books last longer and papermakers produce more suitable products.

3) To disseminate the best available information on preservation problems and solutions so that deteriorating collections may be saved.

Presentations will be non-technical, with a minimum of jargon. The proceedings of the symposium, available in early 1989, might be used by policy planners at the highest university, library, and government levels to establish new programs and provide funding for preservation work.

Congressman Major R. Owens (New York) and Senator Mark O. Hatfield (Oregon) will present the concerns of archives, libraries, historical societies, and museums. Congressman George E. Brown Jr. (California) will discuss the scientific and technical assistance that the Federal government can provide.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, U.S. Archivist Don W. Wilson, National Library of Medicine director Donald A.B. Lindberg, and the Government Printing Office’s Public Printer, Ralph E. Kennickell Jr. ‚ are scheduled as speakers. Internationally recognized research scientists and manufacturing personnel from the industries that TAPPI represents will set out the science and technology of paper manufacture and use. Discussions following the lectures will allow participants to express individual viewpoints and concerns.

Sessions will be held on the following topics:

•the usability of research library collections;

•paper in archives, libraries, and museums worldwide;

•production of paper for libraries;

•national preservation programs at the Library of Congress and National Archives;

•TAPPI, its organization and resources;

•paper testing and characteristics of paper;

•storage environment and its consequences;

•paper chemistry in non-technical terms;

•causes of paper deterioration;

•the usability of archive and historical society collections;

•preservation technologies;

•alkaline papers;

•deacidification technologies;

•strengthening deteriorated paper; and

•practical choices in collection preservation,

Representatives from the Library of Congress Preservation Office, the National Archives and National Library of Canada, the Bavarian State Library, Wei To Associates, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, and the Swedish Pulp and Paper Institute, will appear on a panel to discuss deacidification and paper strengthening techniques.

TAPPI, with 28,000 members in 75 countries, is an international organization dedicated to advancing technology in the pulp, paper, packaging, converting, and allied industries. It sponsors many educational meetings each year and makes available the knowledge of its members for use in the preservation of cultural materials.

For further information on the Symposium, contact Wayne Gross, Conference Coordinator, TAPPI, 15 Technology Park, P.O. Box 105113, Atlanta, GA 30348; (404) 446-1400, x232.