Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

Ed. note: Send your grants and acquisitions to Ann-Christe Galloway, production editor, C&RL News, email: agalloway@ala.org.

The University of Arizona has received a $750,000, three-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to integrate library services into data-intensive research to produce open-access humanities scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The project, “Aligning Library Services with Data-Intensive Humanities Research: Modeling Support for Open Scholarship through Data Storytelling and Digital Publishing on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” will disburse grants to research teams at the University of Arizona through a competitive process. Funded projects will employ a portfolio of University Libraries services and expertise encompassing scholarly communication, open access, data management and curation, data science, text and data mining, GIS and distinctive archival collections on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Baylor University Libraries has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support the research of two Browning scholars. Philip Kelley and Edward Hagan, research fellows with Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library, will use the funds to edit and publish volumes 31 to 33 of The Brownings’ Correspondence, an annotated edition of all known letters written by and to Victorian poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Predicted to be a 40-volume edition, The Brownings’ Correspondence provides one of the largest and most comprehensive bodies of literary and social commentary on the 19th century. As a 19th-century research center, Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library is dedicated to the study of the lives and works of Victorian poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and houses the world’s largest collection of Browning material and other fine collections of rare 19th-century books, manuscripts and works of art. The goal of The Brownings’ Correspondence is to provide accurate and complete transcriptions of all known Browning letters—currently 11,693 letters have been located—and complement them with full annotations using a consistent editorial standard. Further, the project aims to make the correspondence widely available in print and online. When Kelley published the first volume of the correspondence in 1984, less than a third of all known letters had appeared in print, scattered in numerous publications, each with its own editorial standard. These publications were consulted and are referenced in the bibliographic notes that appear with each letter. Since 1979, the NEH has supported the Brownings’ Correspondence Project with 20 grants totaling $3.275 million.

Acquisitions

A second cuneiform tablet was acquired by the Stanford Libraries. The acquisition was in response to the high level of use of the first tablet held by the Libraries, a Sumerian cuneiform tablet from 2056 B.C.E. that was a gift of David C. Weber in 1990 (https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4083797). This tablet was studied by internationally renowned Assyriologist Stefan Maul, and more information about the tablet and even its translation can be found at http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/maul/cuneiform.html. The tablet (https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/13371266) was purchased by Rare Books Curator Benjamin Albritton in 2019.