Grants and Acquisitions

David Free

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) has received a $1.34 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to launch the next phase of its transformative PALSave: PALNI Affordable Learning Program. The four-year initiative, titled “Strengthening the PALSave Affordable Learning Program for Greater Impact,” will build on the program’s proven success in reducing textbook costs; expanding access to learning materials; and empowering faculty across Indiana’s private higher education sector to adopt, adapt, and create open educational resources.

The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill University Libraries’ On the Books initiative is expanding its scope and exploring how artificial intelligence can make it easier to find and use materials from the archives. A $765,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation will support three case studies using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve access to materials related to groups historically underrepresented in institutional collections. Previous grants from the Foundation allowed the University Libraries to investigate text mining and machine learning to identify discriminatory language in historical statutes.

Acquisitions

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Library has acquired the papers of Sandy Gooch, an entrepreneur whose vision transformed the way many Americans prepare, eat, and shop for food and health care products. As founder of Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Food Markets—the first natural foods supermarket chain in the United States—she adhered to strict requirements for freshness and quality, leading food-industry vendors to coin the term Goochable. After being hospitalized in the mid-1970s for a life-threatening allergic reaction to an antibiotic, Gooch discovered that chemical additives in sodas and foods exacerbated her condition. Motivated by this knowledge, Gooch left her job to open her first market in 1977 in an old A&P grocery store space in West Los Angeles.

By 1993, Mrs. Gooch’s, which offered a range of quality, nutritious foods while advocating for healthy lifestyles, had expanded to seven stores and was one of the highest-grossing natural products markets in the world with annual sales of more than $90 million. In September 1993, Gooch sold her company to Whole Foods Market for $60 million, merging the nation’s two biggest natural foods supermarket chains. The Sandy Gooch Papers, to be housed in UCLA Library Special Collections, document the founding and growth of Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Food Markets, as well as the founder’s life’s work. The gift from Gooch and her husband, Harry Lederman, includes business records, product information, advertising, decor materials, photographs, and videos that record the importance of the natural foods chain.

The Library of Congress has acquired rare music and lyric sketches from composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, best known for their collaboration on the score of the iconic film The Wizard of Oz in 1939. The film opened in theaters eighty-six years ago on August 25, 1939, and was inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1989. The new acquisition includes thirty-five manuscript items from Arlen and Harburg’s creative work, including the first handwritten drafts of music and lyrics from some of the most beloved songs from The Wizard of Oz. The collection also includes draft song lists and correspondence from the director of the film, Mervyn Leroy. The star of the collection: the only lyric sketch for “Over the Rainbow” known to exist. “Some day I’ll wish upon a star 1 wake 1 find the darkness far behind me,” Harburg scrawled in pencil on a scrap of yellow legal paper.

The Library of Congress also recently acquired a historical collection of amateur photographic prints from the Photographic Section of the Academy of Science and Art of Pittsburgh, one of the nation’s oldest continuously operating photography clubs. The collection includes approximately 700 prints that were exhibited in the organization’s salons held annually from 1914 through 1980, along with a full run of salon catalogs. Although many works are by Pittsburgh-based photographers, the collection includes nationally and internationally recognized figures such as Hiromu Kira, Harry K. Shigeta, William Mortensen, A. Aubrey Bodine, José Ortiz Echagüe, Rudolf Koppitz, and Leonard Missone. Of note are 181 prints by Charles K. Archer, former section president from 1927 to 1939, most created using the labor-intensive bromoil process, an expressive photo technique that allows artists to manipulate the pigment application and emphasize the aesthetic and emotional qualities of a print.