Grant and Acquisitions
Architectural archives and research files of architect and historian Edgar Tafel, as well as a $100,000 gift to support the processing, preservation, and presentation of the collection, have been donated to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. The donation was made by the Edgar A. Tafel Living Trust as part of its mission to support architectural education. A native New Yorker, Tafel was one of the first students to study architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright as an apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship. He was one of three apprentices charged with designing and supervising the construction of Fallingwater, Wright’s masterpiece for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh. He also worked on the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, and Herbert F. Johnson’s residence, Wingspread. Tafel is best known for his addition to the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York and his master plan for the State University of New York-Geneseo. In all, Tafel designed 80 houses, 35 churches and other religious buildings, and three college campuses. Due to his close connection with Wright, Tafel was a well-known historian of Wright, authoring two books on the architect: Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright (1979) and About Wright: An Album of Recollections by Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright (1993). He lectured frequently on Wright and appeared in several documentaries on Fallingwater, notably Ken Love’s Fallingwater: The Apprentices (1996). In addition to the research files on Wright, the archives contain more than 250 rolls of drawings for Tafel’s own projects dating from the 1950s through the 1990s.
The personal archives of Noam Chomsky have been acquired by MIT’s Libraries. Chomsky is a noted linguist, political activist, and MIT professor emeritus. The collection spans a long and distinguished career, beginning when Chomsky joined MIT in 1955 in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, through his years as a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, then as MIT professor. Often referred to as “the father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky revolutionized the field of linguistics and paved the way for transformational grammar and universal grammar. His book Syntactic Structures (1957) was considered groundbreaking. He also made significant contributions to the fields of psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Over the years, Chomsky has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the MIT Killian Award for the academic year 1991 to 1992. Most recently, he won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2011. He has authored numerous works, including American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006), and Hopes and Prospects (2010).
The record books and ledger of internationally renowned artist George Bellows (1882–1925) have been acquired in partnership by Ohio State University Libraries (OSUL) and the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA). Bellows maintained meticulous records of his artistic production, including sales and exhibition showings and documentation of works that were destroyed. He augmented the record books with more than 200 thumbnail sketches of his original art. As the joint owners of the record books, the museum and the libraries will collaborate on programming, exhibition, and research availability of these resources. The Bellows documents will be available online through OSU’s Knowledge Bank, a digital repository.
The library of the late Pyrrhus J. Ruches and the Hellenic library of the late Steve A. Demakopoulos Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection in the University Library at California State University, Sacramento has acquired. For most of his career Ruches worked in New York as a journalist. He is the author of two books, Albania’s Captives (1965) and Albanian Historical Folksongs, 1716–1943: A Survey of Oral Epic Poetry from Southern Albania, with Original Texts (1967). Over the years he also published freelance articles in the Greek-American and Greek periodical press related to his interest in Northern Epirus and issues of the Greek minority in southern Albania. Among the roughly 1,800 items acquired from his library are books, pamphlets, journals, maps, and audiovisual materials in various languages reflecting his broad interests in the fields of Greek history, ethnography, folklore, cultural anthropology, and religion. Demakopoulos was an economist, computer scientist, and author whose Hellenic library contains approximately 3,400 volumes in the fields of Greek lexicography, literature, folklore, and music; a music collection consisting of sheet music, musical archives, and audio recordings; and related subject files. He contributed numerous articles and columns for newspapers such as the National Herald, Proini, Hellenic Chronicle, Greek Star, and various magazines. He is also the author of Do You Speak Greek? (2000), in which some of these articles are reprinted in an exploration of Greek language in use in everyday contexts. For further information about these collections, see http://library.csus.edu/tsakopoulos/collection.asp.
Electronic resources from ProQuest have acquired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The acquisition is the culmination of nearly two years of discussions between representatives from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the ProQuest. It was made possible through funding received from the library’s endowment accounts, the state-supported subject funds allocated for acquisitions, and the University’s Library/IT fee, a mandatory fee paid by all students at Illinois designed to support quality and access in Library and IT resources and services. This large-scale acquisition includes 46 electronic resources; one set of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) Records to enhance access to the Library’s Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, a source for the study of women’s history; 40 microfilm titles of scarcely held Slavic and Central Asian works; and seven other microfilm sets that focus on African American, Native American, Latin American, and Jewish studies. Many of the microforms represent items rarely held outside of one or two institutions in the world. Several of the products acquired will not be accessible until their development is complete in 2013; however, all of the microfilm and almost all of the electronic resources (accessible through the university library’s Web site) are available now. In addition to acquiring resources locally, the negotiation provided an opportunity for the university library to leverage its resources to receive favorable terms to complete a digitization project initiated several years ago. The university library began working with ProQuest to digitize ProQuest’s holdings of dissertations from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By the end of this extended project, the university library will have almost every dissertation from the mid-1950s to 1997 digitized and deposited into IDEALS, a digital repository for research and scholarship developed at Illinois.
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