Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University has received $1,408,474 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its mission to preserve and share the world’s handwritten heritage. The grant will fund a three-year project to catalog 53,000 digitized manuscripts and create an online database of authors and titles originating from under-represented or little-known literary traditions. Of the total amount, $1,208,474 is an outright grant, and $200,000 must be matched by funds raised by HMML. Across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe there are Christian and Islamic handwritten books and scrolls previously unknown, inaccessible, and endangered by weather, war, and civil unrest. HMML has been working for years to photograph and digitize them. The grant funds will be used to support the work of seven catalogers and metadata experts to make the manuscripts available online to scholars all over the world. All manuscripts cataloged under this project will be made accessible on HMML’s online “Reading Room” at https://www.vhmml.org/readingRoom/. The grant will also empower HMML to develop vHMML Data, a new database of author names and titles related to manuscript traditions not currently represented in standard reference tools, such as the Library of Congress database of authorities. vHMML Data will be freely accessible online for use by other libraries and projects.

California State University-Northridge (CSUN) alumnus Richard Nupoll has pledged $500,000 to the university for the creation of the first endowed librarian position in the California State University system. The Dr. Karin J. Duran and Richard Nupoll Education Librarian Endowment honors Nupoll’s late wife, Karin Duran, who worked as a librarian at CSUN’s Delmar T. Oviatt Library for more than 35 years. The Dr. Karin J. Duran and Richard Nupoll Education Librarian Endowment will support an endowed librarian position that will oversee collection development as the bibliographer for the Teacher Curriculum Center for multiple departments in the Michael D. Eisner College of Education and for related disciplines in other colleges at CSUN. The endowed librarian also will deliver information literacy instruction, research consultation, and outreach to students and faculty in the field of education and related disciplines that use the services of the Teacher Curriculum Center, which serves as a resource center for hands-on teaching materials for pre-kindergarten through grade 12 students.

Pepperdine Libraries has been awarded $19,815 for its project titled “Preserving the History of South Los Angeles: A Community Digitization Initiative.” Humanities For All Project Grant is a competitive grant program of California Humanities, which supports locally developed projects that respond to the needs, interests, and concerns of Californians, provide accessible learning experiences for the public, and promote understanding among the state’s diverse population. The grant will fund a project that documents, preserves, and shares the history of South Los Angeles, one of America’s most vibrant African American communities. The libraries and its partners— the California African American Museum, Figueroa Church of Christ, Southern California Library, and the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center at California State University-Northridge—will organize a series of community digitization events to catalog and preserve artifacts, documents, and memories of the African American experience in South Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1970s. The digitization events, which will begin in fall 2020, will be held in community spaces provided by program partners. Project members will scan artifacts and documents and record oral histories of South Los Angeles community members, many of whom are approaching advanced age. Participants will receive a digital copy of their scanned files, and a curated selection of these professionally digitized materials will be added to Pepperdine’s open-access portal accessible to students, scholars, and others interested in history, critical race studies, and social anthropology. A culminating event at CAAM in December 2021 will provide the means to present key findings and explore next steps with community members and other stakeholders.

Acquisitions

An archive of microtonal music has been acquired by Furman University. The collection includes the records of the New York-based American Festival for Microtonal Music (AFMM). Founded in 1981, AFMM has organized an annual series of concerts in New York and around the country of classical and modern music that employs alternate tuning structures or microtonal music tunings. The collection also includes the papers of AFMM founder and composer Johnnie Reinhard as well as music manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials relating to composers and musicians who were active in the microtonal world, such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, Mordecai Sandberg, Ivor Darreg, and La Monte Young. Together with the business records of the organization, the collection includes a substantial collection of live and commercial recordings of microtonal music, a reference library of rare microtonal books, and other materials that document the microtonal music world in New York and around the world, including a run of the New York modern/avant-garde music magazine Ear.The collection is available for research in the Department of Special Collections and Archives, with a major exhibition of the collection scheduled for 2021.

The archives of artist Ashley Bryan has been acquired by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Bryan’s archive came to the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Penn Libraries through the Ashley Bryan Center, which has represented and preserved the artist’s legacy since 2013. Bryan has made his home on Little Cranberry Island, just off the coast of Maine, for the last 50 years. During the past three decades he has written and illustrated more than 20 children’s books celebrating his African American heritage. Bryan is one of the pioneers introducing characters of color—whether African, Caribbean, or African American—into the realm of children’s books. His remarkable archive spans the period from his childhood in New York City to the present and includes extensive correspondence. The archive includes original drawings and manuscripts for Bryan’s many book projects, along with correspondence dating from his days as a student at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the early 1940s and fan mail from admirers around the globe. As the Penn Libraries announces the gift of the Ashley Bryan Archive, it also recognizes the publication by Simon & Schuster of Ashley Bryan’s latest book, Infinite Hope. This compelling memoir, beautifully illustrated and designed, recounts his experiences as an African American drafted into the segregated U.S. Armed Forces in 1943, including his firsthand account of serving as a stevedore on Omaha Beach after landing on D-Day+3, June 9, 1944. Bryan’s story is told through the combination of text, archival documents, contemporary photographs, and drawings he made while on and off duty, which capture both the horror and ennui of war.