ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

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Acquisitions

• Emory University’s Pitts Theology Library,

Atlanta, Georgia, has received a gift from Richard C. and Martha Kessler of rare and first editions of Lutherana. The gift consists of 49 Reformation works plus support for additional acquisitions and programs to be developed over the next six years. Included is a first edition of Luther’s September Testament of 1522, of which only 40 copies are known to exist.

• Ohio State University, Columbus, and George

Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, have jointly acquired the collection of American Theater professional Robert Breen. The donation by Robert and Wilva Breen includes extensive material on his activities as an actor, as the first executive director of the American National Theatre and Academy, and as director of the famed production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess which toured internationally with a cast that included Leontyne Price, William Warfield, and Cab Calloway. The collection includes correspondence, photographs, press releases, clippings, posters, theater groundplans, scene designs, music scores, films, and even Porgy’s cart. George Mason’s Institute on the Federal Theatre Project and New Deal Culture will administer the ANTA and Breen’s early papers while Ohio State’s Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Library will administer the post-ANTA material, which includes the Porgy and Bess archive, material from the Harold Arlen show Free and Easy, and other projects. The institutions will cooperate in conducting oral and video histories, organizing symposia and traveling exhibits, and in making the collection available to scholars.

• The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has acquired the literary papers of John Williams, recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his novel Augustus. The donation includes correspondence, notes, worksheets, publishers’ proofs, and related material. Williams’ other novels include Nothing But the Night (1948), Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and Stoner (1965). His poetry has been published in numerous periodicals and has been widely anthologized; two published volumes are The Broken Landscape (1949) and The Necessary Lie (1965). Williams, who spent his academic career at the University of Denver (1954-1985) is the founder of the Denver Quarterly and has held fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, among others.

• The University of Wisconsin, Madison, recently acquired the archive of poet Carl Rakosi, who was educated there and who returned as writer-in-residence during 1969-1970. Rakosi is the last living member of the “objectivist” poets of the 1930s; his Collected Poems have recently been published. The archive contains eighty folders of letters, notes, unpublished pieces, worksheets, typescripts, book reviews, translations and other materials, and about 20 cassettes and other tapes of interviews and readings.

Grants

• Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, is one of eight academic institutions in the city to share in a new network, Fenway Libraries Online, Inc. The Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners has contributed $720,226 in LSCA Title III funds for the system, together with a $400,000 equipment grant from Digital Equipment Corporation toward the acquisition of a VAX 8350 computer system and $25,000 from the Charles Hayden Foundation. The system will include an automated catalog and library circulation, serials control, and acquisitions systems, and will provide users with access to a combined collection of more than 900,000 volumes. A special feature will be dial-up access from any telephone. The FLO network also includes Emmanuel College, Massachusetts College of Art, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences, the Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Conservatory, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Wheelock College. Wentworth will house the central site equipment and a small staff.

• The New York State Archives, Albany, has received a $191,250 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to arrange, describe, and microfilm more than 600 cubic feet of records that document the settlement and dvelopment of the state of New York. The grant will be matched with funds from the State Challenge Grant program. Most of the records date from 1760 to 1860, a period of rapid westward movement, population increase, and commercial expansion. Included in the microfilming project are survey routes of the Erie Canal and other canals constructed during the period, and plans that describe in detail canal locks, bridges, basins, mill races and weigh stations. Also scheduled for preservation are petitions and appeals to the State canal board from thousands of individuals and firms along canal routes concerning leasing of water rights and other canal property; sale of lands; reimbursement for claims; and permission to erect docks, culverts, and other structures. Selected records of the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Court of Chancery, and the Court of Errors, important state courts of the period, will also be preserved, along with records relating to land sales and settlement, some of which date from the colonial period. The project is expected to take 2 years.

• New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Manhattan, has received a $50,000 state appropriation to continue preservation work. Efforts to process the archives of the Transport Workers Union, the United Federation of Teachers, the Union Label Trades, and the New York State AFL-CIO archives have been underway for two years. The funds will also help establish a planning commission to lay the groundwork for a statewide labor documentation project.

Bobst Library has received a $350,000 endowment from the estate of Lillian Barry for the purchase of materials for the general collections.

• Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, has received a Title II-C grant of $119,784 to convert the remaining titles in its Africana collection to machine-readable form. About 30,000 records remain unconverted, most of which represent items not found elsewhere in the United States. They will be created on the NOTIS system over a 15-month period that began in October 1987.

• Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, has received a $130,000 Title II-C grant to catalog

•The University of California, Berkeley, has received an NEH grant of nearly $500,000 to support the preservation of European language and literature materials and to preserve some 22,000 badly deteriorated volumes. The university will match the grant, one of 14 NEH grants awarded for a total of more than $3.2 million.

• The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will use part of a $2,079,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation (see C&RL News, December 1987, p. 723) to establish an electronic network that will link its holdings to five public libraries in the state. Michigan will use the funds to purchase Telefax equipment and microcomputers as part of a planned five-year project known as M-Link. The remainder of the funds, part of a grant exceeding $4.7 million to five academic libraries in the state, will be used for retrospective conversion. The other institutions are Michigan State University, Wayne State University, the Detroit Public Library, and the Library of Michigan in Lansing.

• The University of Vermont, Burlington, has received a Title II-C grant of $90,000 for the identification, acquisition and cataloging of Canadian documents on acid rain. The funds will strengthen ongoing research conducted into the problem by the Colleges of Medicine, Agriculture and Life Sciences, the School of Natural Resources and the U.S Forestry Station in Burlington. A selection of documents will be forwarded to the National Agricultural Library to be scanned, digitized and mastered onto CD-ROM disks for distribution to 42 land-grant libraries as a full-text database on acid rain.

• The University of Wisconsin System has been awarded a $3,000 grant from the Council on Library Resources to develop, distribute and analyze a questionnaire regarding the information needs and information-seeking practices of scholars in Women’s Studies. The questionnaire will be designed by women’s studies librarians at the Madison and Milwaukee campuses; their findings will help improve library-generated reference publications in the discipline.

• Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, has received a $100,000 fund from George A. Masterton, retired Wayne State librarian, in memory of his late wife. Income from the endowment will support the Mary Dickey Masterton Award, a manuscript prize for outstanding women authors who publish with the Wayne State University

Press. The fund has already provided support for two publications; only manuscripts in the humanities and social sciences are eligible.

• Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, has received a $500,000 NEH matching grant to preserve some 23,000 volumes and serial items items relating to European history.

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