Grants and Acquisitions

David Free

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana recently awarded a $15,000 Library Innovation Grant to Saint Mary’s College. This grant will support Cushwa-Leighton Library’s project “Open Questions: Scholarship in the Age of Open Access,” which will help faculty navigate Open Access publishing and build a sustainable culture of open scholarship. “Open Questions” responds to questions faculty regularly raise about Open Access publishing models, authors’ rights, repository policies, article processing charges, and the role of artificial intelligence in scholarly dissemination. Over the 2026–27 academic year, the project will appoint two faculty fellows, deliver three faculty workshops, and grow participation in the college’s Academic Repository.

Acquisitions

The Library of Congress has acquired the original artwork and related creative materials for two acclaimed graphic novels: Naked City, by award-winning artist Eric Drooker, and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, by journalist and cartoonist Josh Neufeld. Together the acquisitions enhance the library’s significant collections documenting the evolution of graphic storytelling, visual journalism, and contemporary American life. Acquiring Naked City is especially noteworthy because it completes the library’s holdings of the original artwork for Drooker’s celebrated “City Trilogy.” The library already preserves the artwork for the trilogy’s first two volumes, Flood and Blood Song, offering researchers and visitors an opportunity to study Drooker’s creative development and changes in graphic novel production across four decades. Published in 2024, Naked City follows a young female musician navigating life in New York City while pursuing artistic ambitions amid personal hardship and uncertainty. Like the earlier books in the trilogy, the city itself becomes a central character, offering a vivid portrait of urban life and creative communities.

The library also acquired original artwork and related materials for A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Neufeld’s groundbreaking graphic account of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and its aftermath. First published as a webcomic in 2007, the work combines journalism and graphic storytelling to document the experiences of New Orleans residents before, during, and after one of the most consequential natural disasters in modern American history. A.D. draws on extensive interviews and firsthand observations to tell what Neufeld describes as a “people’s history of Katrina,” offering a perspective that captured ground-level experiences of resilience, displacement, and recovery, often absent from official accounts. The acquisition provides researchers valuable insight into how visual narratives can document contemporary events and preserve community memory.

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has obtained the personal papers of Li Jianglin, a historian and renowned contemporary Tibetan scholar. Born into a Communist Chinese revolutionary family in 1956 in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, Li studied in the United States in the late 1980s, earning a master’s degree in Jewish history from Brandeis University and a master’s degree in librarianship from Queens College in New York. She began conducting independent research on Tibet in 2004. Over the following two decades, Li traveled often to India, Nepal, and ethnic Tibetan areas in the People’s Republic of China to undertake fieldwork. She also interviewed the Dalai Lama and other prestigious political and religious leaders in the Tibetan communities in exile on multiple occasions.

The Li Jianglin Papers include hundreds of hours of audio and video interviews, letters and correspondence with the Dalai Lama and other prominent Tibetan figures in China and in exile in India, research materials on the history and politics of Tibet, photographic images related to Li’s multiple field trips to Dharamsala and Tibetan refugee camps across the Indian subcontinent, and artifacts and souvenirs given by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.