ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

• Alfred University’s Herrick Memorial Library, Alfred, New York, has acquired for its Openhym Collection of Modern British Literature and Social History a rare surviving copy of the first publication, in 1917, of Virginia and Leonard Woolfs Hogarth Press. The 31-page volume, entitled Two Stories, was written, set in type, and printed on a hand press by the Woolfs in their Richmond, Surrey, home. Woodblock illustrations were supplied by Dora Carrington, and the print run was 150 copies.

The Openhym Collection also recently received for its letter archive representing 100 British authors, poets, and artists, a hand-written letter from Virginia Woolf to Siegfried Sassoon dated April 28, 1924; forty-two of Dora Carrington’s largely unpublished letters to novelist and editor David Garnett; and letters by 28 British authors—including T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster—to Ursula Roberts, a Rritish poet who used the pen name of Susan Miles and wrote to her colleagues mainly about a burgeoning British peace movement of the time.

• Colorado State University Libraries, Fort Collins, have received the papers and other career memorabilia of Carl Akers, longtime Denver broadcaster and commentator. Included in the collection are scripts, scrapbooks, correspondence, awards, and an Emmy won for a documentary on Great Sand Dunes National Park.

The Libraries also became the repository for the papers of the Colorado Chapter of the American Public Works Association. The collection includes 20 cubic feet of papers dating back to the chapter’s founding in 1962.

• Hanover College Library, Hanover, Indiana, has acquired the archives of Sen. William E. Jenner, a prominent figure in Indiana politics for over 15 years. The gift has been made by his widow, Mrs. Janet C. Jenner. The archives contain several thousand documents detailing Jenner’s political career including written and printed materials from his tenure in the U.S. Senate, and written and printed materials from his term as the chairman of the Indiana Republican State Central Committee. Other materials in the archives include texts of speeches and addresses; several tapes of radio addresses; a few television interviews recorded on 16 mm film; citations from several civic and honorary groups; originals of political cartoons and columns; and more than 200 photographs of Jenner with fellow politicians, foreign officials, athletes, and entertainers.

Jenner, who died in 1985, is best known for his 13 years in the U.S. Senate. During his tenure in Washington he served on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Rules and Administration Committee, the Finance Committee, the Joint Committee on Printing, and the Joint Committee on Immigration and Nationality Policy.

• Harvard Business School’s Baker Library has received its third annual donation of historic microfiche of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The collection is the gift of Disclosure Incorporated. This installment includes a collection of all public company documents filmed during 1968 as filed with the SEC, consisting of annual reports, 10-Ks, 8-Ks, and Nl-Qs. The silver halide microfiche masters of documents will be stored at Iron Mountain, Harvard University’s underground, climate-controlled archive in New York State. In addition, Harvard will make the microfiche accessible to scholars for research purposes.

• The Lehigh University Libraries, Bethlehem,Pennsylvania, have received the extensive personal papers of novelist, poet, translator, and investigative reporter Les Whitten, a 1950 magna cum laude graduate of the University. The Whitten Papers span the years 1928 to the present and include manuscripts, research notes, news articles, and clippings. Also included is correspondence with publishers and notables as diverse as John Lennon, Sen. Robert Dole, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; personal and family correspondence; books; tapes; film; photographs; and memorabilia.

Whitten followed a successful carrer with Radio Free Europe, the Washington Post, and the Hearst newspapers by joining Jack Anderson and the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” in 1969. He shared the byline with Anderson until 1978. His celebrated reports have covered major stories such as Watergate, Abscam, Iran-Contra, the nuclear test ban treaty, and the expose of the “Broken Treaties” Indian papers. Whitten has published eleven books including the novels The Alchemist, Conflict of Interest, and A Killing Pace; a biography, F. Lee Bailey; a book of poems, Washington Cycle; and a translation of Baudelaire’s poetry, The Abyss.

• The Rochester Institute of Technology, Roch-ester, New York, has acquired a 39-issue collection of Camera Work, one of the most important photography periodicals ever published. Noted photographer Alfred Steiglitz published the magazine from 1903 to 1917, and only 1,000 copies of each isuue were printed. Copies still in existence are considered collector’s items. The collection, a gift of the Kodak Company and part of the company’s historical files, is now stored in the Institute’s Archives and Special Collections Department.

•Texas A & M University’s Evans Library, Col- lege Station, has received a collection of letters and memorabilia relating to one Texas soldier’s participation in the “war to end all wars.” Milton J. Gaines of Dallas enlisted in the army on July 4, 1917, and served through the duration of the war as well as through several months of occupation in Germany. He was a member of Company A, 117th Supply Train, 42nd Division, popularly known as the “Rainbow Division,” made up entirely of volunteers from Texas and Oklahoma. He was discharged with the rank of corporal on May 15,1919. The collection includes letters Caines wrote home to his mother and letters written to Gaines by a friend. Typical of soldiers’ wartime correspondence, the letters reveal no real news of the war as military restrictions prohibited writing about such matters. Cut out and marked-through portions of the letters indicate Gaines broke the rules occasionally; most of the letters are marked approved by the censors, but in a few cases the censor’s approval appeared only on the envelopes. The letters do contain complaints about the politics of promotion in the military, requests for magazines and letters, and expressions of optimism in the ability of U.S. troops to defeat the Germans. Surprisingly, though, there are no complaints about food and only a few remarks about the weather.

In addition to the letters, the collection includes a large number of souvenirs of the war including American, German, and Rritish patches, buttons, pins, ribbons, and epaulets; Gaines’s dogtags; shrapnel and a minnie ball; a Rainbow Division ring; a handkerchief from Mineola, Long Island, New York, where the division was stationed briefly before being shipped to France; a small U.S. flag; a complete bound set of the reprint edition of Stars and Stripes; a seven-volume set entitled Source Records of the Great War; and a satirical printed document entitled “Last Will and Testament of Adolph Hitler, alias Adolph Schickelgruber.”

The Milton J. Gaines Papers were presented to the Archives by Mr. and Mrs. Henry C. Wendler; Mrs. Wendler is Gaines’s sister.

• The University of Maine at Orono’s Raymond H. Fogler Library has acquired a collection of literature on the spruce budworm from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The archive consists of more than 5,000 items including U.S. and Canadian federal agency reports, experiment station documents, proceedings of symposia, books, and journal articles. The collection served as the basis of an extensive bibliography entitled North American Coniferophagous Choustoneura: A Bibliography, published by the USDA in April 1988.

•Yale University’s Reinecke Rare Rook and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut, has acquired the papers of the Polish poet and essayist Aleksander Wat (1900-1967). The collection contains all of Wat’s extant papers including manuscripts, notebooks, diaries, photographs, documents, and a large file of correspondence with Polish and non-Polish writers. Described by a member of the Yale Slavic Department as “one of the most remarkable literary and political figures of twentieth-century Poland,” Wat was born in Warsaw to a Jewish family. He emerged on the cultural scene in 1920 as one of the founders of the Polish futurist and dadaist movement and soon became the acknowledged leader of the literary avant- garde in Poland. In 1926 he published a collection of philosophical tales, Bezrobotny Lucyfer (Lucifer Unemployed), in which he anticipated with a remarkable degree of foresight many of the problems of modern civilization.

In addition to Wat’s manuscripts and diaries, the collection includes tape recordings of his My Century conversations (1977); long series of letters from such representative members of the Polish emigre community as Milosz, Zygmunt Hertz, Jerzy Giedroyc, Josef Czapski, Gustav Herling- Grudzinski, and Konstanty Jelenski; and a set of the now very rare Miesiecznik Literacki (The Literary Monthly) which Wat founded in 1929 and edited until 1932 when the periodical was closed down by Polish authorities.

Grants

•The Association of Research Libraries, Wash- ington, D.C., has received a $145,167 grant from the Office of Preservation at the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of preservation planning in research libraries. The three-year grant will help provide training for six experienced preservation librarians to serve as consultants to libraries participating in the Office of Management Services (OMS) Preservation Planning Program. The Preservation Planning Program (PPP), originally developed with NEH funding in 1982, is a structured self-study process that enables libraries to implement workable, comprehensive three- to five-year plans for preservation. The new grant will also support the conduct of the PPP at ten ARL libraries using teams of newly-trained consultants and experienced OMS staff. A third component of the grant will fund the evaluation of the PPP by Margaret Child, assistant director for research services at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

•The Brandeis University, Waltham, Massa- chusetts, Special Collections Department has been awarded a $100,000 Title II-C grant by the U.S. Department of Education to enable it to increase national awareness of and access to the resources of the Vito Volterra collection of monographs, periodicals, and offprints recently donated to the library. Vito Volterra (1860-1940), the noted Italian mathematician, scientist, and humanist, amassed a collection of about 5,000 monographs dating from the 15th through 20th centuries, 300 titles of scientific journals, and 17,000 offprints. The collection includes works pertaining to pure science, the beginnings of mathematical biology, the development and application of mathematics in the past one hundred years, and documentary evidence on the sociology and networking of the international scientific community between 1880 and 1940. The grant will enable the Library to catalog the offprint collection into a microcomputer- based database that will be available to researchers in print and electronic forms. It will also enable the Library to continue to catalog the monographs and serials in the collection and enter the data into the OCLC database.

• The Columbia University, New York, Schoolof Library Service has received a $17,500 grant from the H. W. Wilson Foundation to microfilm 32 titles indexed in the Bibliography of Library Economy by H.G.T. Cannon (Chicago: ALA, 1927), the immediate predecessor to Library Literature. A total of 236 volumes will be filmed over the course of two years.

• The Houston Area Research Library Consor-tium (HARLiC), Texas, has been awarded a $100,000 HEA Title II-D grant by the U.S. Department of Education to develop a CD-ROM catalog of the Consortium’s combined collections of books, journals, and other materials. Mareive, Inc. of San Antonio will produce the catalog. The implementation of a union catalog will enable the HARLiC libraries to provide access to more than nine million items and to share these resources more effectively through improved interlibrary loan and coordinated collection development activities. The catalog will contain approximately 2.1 million bibliographic records on multiple CD- ROMS. It is anticipated that the catalog will be delivered and installed shortly before the beginning of the 1989 fall semester.

• Indiana University Libraries, Rloomington, have received a $2.9 million start-up grant from the Lilly Endowment in order to tie all of their library collections into a single, statewide computer network. The Libraries received $1.6 million from the state in July to fund preliminary equipment and planning. In the next 9 to 18 months, the libraries at Indiana’s six public universities, encompassing some 15 sites, will computerize their circulation procedures and a significant portion of their card catalogs and periodical collections. Participating libraries have all agreed to adopt a single computer system (NOTIS) and to share access to their library collections. The Endowment grant will also fund the high-tech computer equipment/programs, and telecommunications links required to tie all of the libraries together into a unified statewide network.

The Indiana University Libraries have also received a collection development grant by the Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C. The grant, to be managed by Murlin Croucher, Slavic, Uralic, and Altaic area specialist, will be used to purchase materials from Turkey in Turkish folklore, language, culture, and Ottoman Empire studies.

• The Network of Alabama Academic Libraries(NAAL), Montgomery, has been awarded a Title II-D HEA grant to install a document delivery network. The grant will provide funds to purchase telefacsimile equipment and partially support communications costs for the first year of operation. The Network will link 30 OCLC/SOLINET libraries that are in NAAL general and cooperative members. In addition to the academic libraries, other libraries in the network include two federal libraries, two state libraries, and the state’s largest public library.

• The Pittsburgh Regional Library Center,Pennsylvania, has received a $21,737 College Library Technology and Cooperation Grant to provide microcomputer training to members in higher education institutions in West Virginia. The grant assumes a one-third cost-sharing arrangement on the part of the receiving institution, and the grant money may be used for all related expenses necessary for resource sharing or the implementation of new technologies. The Pittsburgh Regional Library Center is a not-for-profit membership organization comprised of libraries and information centers located in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and western Maryland. The training program began October 1.

• The University of Michigan Library, Ann Ar-bor, has received a $1.4 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to begin, with Utlas International, the retrospective conversion of approximately 1.2 million titles to machine-readable form over an 18-month period. University matching funds will provide additional support. SAZTEC International is participating in the project as a subcontractor to Utlas to handle all document preparation, microfilming, search key creation, and original record creation. In addition to mainstream research collections, library records will be converted for transliterated versions of many nonwestern language materials, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean titles. Some special collections are planned for conversion, though non-book materials and musical scores have been excluded from this project.

Under the terms of the agreement, Utlas and SAZTEC will provide complete retrospective conversion services. The Library’s shelf list cards have been microfilmed on-site for use in the conversion process, and search keys with specific local data elements added are being prepared by SAZTEC for matching against the Utlas database. After the search is carried out by Utlas, SAZTEC will provide original entry services for any unmatched record, and all records will undergo authority control before loading to the Library’s system. The records will be delivered to the Library in bi-monthly shipments of 200,000 records, joining the 900,000 records already in the local NOTIS system. By 1990 researchers at the University will be able to locate records for nearly 100 percent of the Library’s collections.

•The University of Tennessee’s Knoxville Li- brary and Vanderbilt University Library, Nashville, have been awarded a $108,417 Title II-D HEA grant from the Department of Education to allow for expanded, technology-based resource sharing between the two institutions. Funds will be used to improve bibliographic access to collections, deliver requested materials more efficiently, and begin a program of cooperative collection development in science and technology. Each library will have on-site access to the other’s online catalog and documents will be telefaxed between the two libraries. Computer generated serials holdings lists will also be used to compare and strengthen collections.

News notes

• Bowling Green State University Libraries, Ohio, and the Library Science Program at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, have entered into a contractual agreement for a Research Trai- neeship. Under this arrangement, an MLS student from Wayne State will work at the BGSU Libraries as a half-time employee for a twelve-month period while pursuing the MLS degree. The first occupant of the Traineeship is Mary Wrighten, a first semester library science student from Monroe, Michigan. During the first year of the traineeship, Wrighten will divide her time between the Science Library and the main library’s Reference Department. Upon completing her degree, she will have two years of practical, professional experience and a broader appreciation for the field of academic librarianship. The two institutions have indicated that the program will continue with future MLS students.

•The National Endowment for the Humani- ties, Washington, D.C., preservation budget has nearly tripled for this fiscal year (which began October 1) in a move that will allow the Endowment to launch the first phase of a nationwide program designed to address the problems posed by the deterioration of millions of books and other printed research resources. The appropriation bill for fiscal year 1989 increases the NEH’s Office for Preservation budget from $4.5 million to $12.33 million. Under the program, a major portion of the funds will be awarded for projects to microfilm brittle books and other library materials printed on acid paper that has deteriorated to the point of crumbling. It has been estimated that as many as 77 million of the 300 million volumes in university and research libraries in the United States are in varying stages of deterioration that will result in their turning to dust by the year 2000. Of those 77 million volumes, it has been estimated that 11 million need immediate attention and of those, some 3 million of the most important volumes of our nation’s heritage should be saved.

• Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York, and IBM have agreed to work on a joint project that will help librarians manage and automate libraries better. Polytechnic University will act as a national demonstration site for IBM’s DOBIS/ Leuven, an integrated easy-to-use online computerized library and document management system that integrates major library functions such as searching, acquisitions, cataloging, and materials borrowing. The two-and-a-half year joint effort will be aimed at enhancing the DOBIS/Leuven system, developing courses and materials, and creating a software program that helps users install the system. IBM is supplying hardware and software valued at $1.9 million.

•The United States Institute of Peace, Wash- ington, D.C., has selected 11 Fellows in its Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace. The awards were made in two categories— Distinguished Fellows and Peace Fellows—after a year-long international competition that marked a major expansion of the program. Those named include former foreign ministers and senior United States government officials, scholars, and other professionals with diverse backgrounds in international affairs. Fellows will work for one year or more on a variety of projects adding to existing knowledge on international conflict and methods for achieving peace.