Grants & Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

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

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has given 78 awards totaling $22.7 million to support libraries across the country. The FY 2021 awards were made through National Leadership Grants for Libraries and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. National Leadership Grants for Libraries support projects that address significant challenges and opportunities facing the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance theory and practice with new tools, research findings, models, services, practices, or alliances that will be widely used.

California State-Los Angeles and the University of Southern California have been awarded a nearly $500,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial materials. Through the three-year Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, the universities will receive support for the digitization of cultural artifacts, rare books, and photography collections from their libraries. The project aims to preserve a diverse and visually compelling record of Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial cultures and many facets of the region’s complex history.

Acquisitons

The Library of Congress has acquired the M.C. Migel Memorial Rare Book Collection from the American Foundation for the Blind, comprised of more than 750 items dating from 1617 to the present, including books by and about Hellen Keller and other blind authors. The collection is a treasure trove of seminal books on blindness, maps, rare pamphlets and many volumes of poetry, biographies, and autobiographies. Among the rare finds in the collection are books that provide a historical perspective on changing social attitudes toward the blind and innovations in the treatment and education of the blind over the past 300 years. There are books by or about Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–76), considered the founder of education for the blind in the United States and whose activism included advocating for the abolition of slavery, prison reform, support for refugees from Crete, and caring for intellectually disabled children. The collection includes a copy of Howe’s Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind published in 1837 and written in raised roman type. Robert Irwin, the first director of the American Foundation for the Blind, began the collection in 1926 with a $1,000 grant approved by the board to create a definitive reference library for the blindness field. As the library donations grew from around the country, the foundation hired librarian Helga Lende to manage the collection. Lende expanded it by traveling to Europe and acquiring volumes in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Esperanto, Dutch, Polish, and Norwegian. The earliest book in the collection, published in France in 1617, concerns Louis Grotto, an Italian ambassador and orator who was blind, and is titled Les Harangues de Louys Grotto, Aveugle D’Hadrie Admirable en Eloquence (The Speeches of Louys Grotto, A Blind Man Famed for His Eloquence). The first landmark book in the library is Denis Diderot’s Lettre Sur Les Aveugles À l’Usage de Ceux Qui Voyent (A Letter Regarding the Blind for the Attention of Those Who See), published in 1749. Considered radical in its day, the book explores the effect of all five senses on the intellect and what happens when there is loss of sight. Works in the collection also highlight the expansion of tactile methods of reading beginning in the late 18th century. The Migel library includes the 1839 edition of Louis Braille’s book explaining his invention of a tactile six-dot reading and writing system rather than raised letters of the alphabet.