Grants and Acquisitions

David Free

Acquisitions

The Library of Congress has acquired the papers of songwriter and composer Burt Bacharach. Bacharach’s songs are best known for influencing popular music starting in the late 1950s. This is the first collection acquired from a recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Songwriting duo Burt Bacharach and Hal David received the Gershwin Prize in 2012.

Bacharach was best known for his songwriting scores for various films and popular artists such as “Alfie,” “Arthur’s Theme,” “Close To You,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “This Guy’s in Love with You,” and “What the World Needs Now is Love,” to name a few. His work is recognized with three Academy Awards and eight Grammy Awards, including the 2008 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Burt Bacharach Papers came to the library as a generous gift from his wife Jane Bacharach. The rich collection includes thousands of musical scores and parts, such as Bacharach’s arrangement for “The Look of Love,” and dozens of musical sketches, including for “Alfie” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” The collection also includes 180 photographs, letters and telegrams, passports and more.

The Burt Bacharach Papers join dozens of other songwriter collections in the Library’s Music Division. These collections include the manuscripts and papers of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Billy Strayhorn, Leonard Bernstein, Henry Mancini, Leslie Bricusse, Harry Chapin, and Judy Collins.

Grants

The Michigan State University Libraries was recently awarded a Congressionally directed grant through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission in the amount of $1 million to support a unique digitization project that will ensure the preservation of early Michigan public television footage for years to come. The $1 million award will go toward highly specialized digital media preservation equipment as well as the creation of a dedicated media preservation lab, which will be used to restore and digitally preserve MSU Libraries’ historical media collections. This specific project will focus on the archive of early public television at MSU, which dates back more than 70 years to when WKAR-TV first aired on East Lansing’s television broadcasting channel 60 on January 15, 1954. WKAR-TV is the second oldest continuously operating public television station in the country, and the oldest east of the Mississippi River. It is a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member television station licensed to East Lansing and owned by Michigan State University under the WKAR Public Media umbrella.

A project team representing the Penn State University Libraries and Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology has received a two-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant totaling $104,771 to create and host a National Forum for Privacy Literacy Standards and Competencies. This national forum aims to address a primary responsibility of library workers who serve a variety of constituencies, including youth and family, K-12 schools, and higher education. In addition to its aim of developing consensus national standards and competencies for privacy literacy education in libraries across the K-20 educational spectrum, the project team plans to publish forum proceedings, a practitioner self-study guide, and an action handbook for implementing the standards and competencies. Project results will be open-licensed and freely accessible online.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) awarded the University of Cincinnati’s Archives and Rare Books Library a $109,349 grant to support a project to complete archival processing of the records of the Cincinnati Branch of the NAACP related to the 1974 Bronson v. Cincinnati Board of Education, the city’s most significant legal case in the fight for school desegregation. Filed in 1974, the Bronson case was not the first litigation to address segregation and discrimination in the Cincinnati Public Schools, but it was the first to create some accountability for the Cincinnati School Board. Housed in the Archives and Rare Books Library, the collection contains the Cincinnati Chapter of the NAACP’s records related to the case, including correspondence, court filings, background research on segregation in education in Cincinnati and Hamilton County, the conditions of schools, curriculum, and how the Cincinnati Public Schools addressed the decree that was agreed upon as a result of the case. The project began October 2024 and will last through September 2025.