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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, April 2004
Vol. 65, No. 4

by Ann-Christe Galloway

The University of Alabama’s  University Libraries, in partnership with the University
of Wisconsin-Madison’s General Library System, has received an IMLS grant of $226,653 to digitize publishers’ book bindings and develop a thesaurus and glossary of trade binding terminology. The three-year grant will permit the libraries to develop a digital encyclopedia documenting the history and artistry of decorative book bindings produced between 1815 and 1925. The Web-accessible database produced through the grant will include up to 10,000 images of 19th-century trade book bindings, including covers, spines, end papers, and title pages.

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNCCH) has received a gift of nearly
$1 million from the estate of Gladys Hall to establish the Albert and Gladys Coates Endowment Fund to benefit Wilson Library’s North Carolina Collection. Income from the Coates fund will support the research, writing, and publication of biographies of all former UNCCH presidents and chancellors and of Albert Coates, who, with Gladys as his wife and partner, founded the university’s Institute of Government (now School of Government) in 1931. Following publication of these biographies, interest earned from the endowment will be used to provide funds for research, exhibits, Web projects, and speakers on state-related topics.

The University of Iowa (UI) Libraries, the UI School of Library and Information Science, Iowa State University Library, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries have received a $392,347 IMLS grant as part of its Recruiting and Education Librarians for the 21st Century Program. Focused on addressing the traditional shortage of academic librarians with backgrounds in the sciences, the partners are developing and implementing the pilot “Program for University Librarians in the Sciences” to recruit, educate, and train nine librarians to serve the sciences, applied sciences, and health sciences. Participants will earn MLS degrees from UI’s School of Library and Information Sciences while working on assistantships at one of the three participating university libraries.

Shimer College has received a five-year institutional development grant of $889,000 from the U.S. Department of Education. Out of 307 institutions that applied for a grant, Shimer was one of only 74 colleges to receive an award. The funds will be used to expand academic opportunities and enhance student support in three areas, including the establishment of a virtual library at the college. The grant will also provide financing for the hardware and software for digital resources, as well as for the hiring of a full-time librarian.

The College of William and Mary will esta- blish a new reference and research
center with a $160,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation. The center will include state-of-the-art computers that will provide access to all of the library’s multimedia resources, as well as serving as training aids for members of the William and Mary and Williamsburg communities.

Emory University and Boston College have completed a two-year grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to digitize collection descriptions and develop a searching interface to allow scholars both on and off site to explore the Irish Literary Collections Portal and quickly find materials relevant to their research. The Irish Literary Collections Portal (irishliterature.library.emory.edu) provides access to a fully searchable array of finding aids for the Irish literary manuscript collections at Emory and Boston College. The portal presents a wide range of materials from the Irish literary renaissance to the present.

The George V. Higgins Archive has been established at the University of South
Carolina’s (USC) Thomas Cooper Library to house the personal, literary, and legal papers of the Boston author whose career included work as a journalist, federal prosecutor, district attorney, novelist, critic, historian, and professor of creative writing at Boston University. In the decade before his death in 1999, Higgins had visited the USC campus as a speaker, conference participant, and visiting professor. Higgins, who held degrees in English and law, earned international fame when his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was published in 1972. The archive includes drafts, edited typescripts, proofs, unpublished early fiction, and screenplays, as well as photos and realia. The collection is valued at $106,000, about half of which came as a donation from Higgins’ widow, Loretta Cubberley Higgins.

A 17th-century Chinese hand scroll has been donated to Columbia University’s
C.V. Starr East Asian Library by professor Yosef Yerushalmi. The scroll, produced in 1658, is in excellent condition and contains several panels of script on color silk brocade and imperial dragons on both ends. It was prepared for a second-rank military mandarin and his wife on the occasion of his promotion to the first rank. The scroll is written in Chinese and Manchu, which were both official languages of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). The Qing Dynasty was founded by Manchurian invaders from the north and was the last imperial dynasty of China. Yerushalmi is director of the center for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Salo W. Baron Professor of Jewish History in the History Department at Columbia.

^{This Chinese hand scroll from 1658 was
donated to the C. V. Starr East Asian
Library at Columbia University.}

A 2,376-item collection of secondary materials devoted to author J. R. R. Tolkien, assembled by Grace Funk of Vancouver, Canada, has been acquired by Marquette University’s Department of Special Collections and Archives. Films, documentary videos, newspaper clippings, Tolkien bibliographies, and Tolkien-focused journals are just some of the items that comprise this collection. Funk, a retired librarian and Tolkien enthusiast, decided to sell her collection to Marquette University Libraries after a visit to the archives in 1999. Marquette is home to one of the world’s major Tolkien archives, which includes the original manuscripts of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Chicano comedic theatre troupe, Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Sigüenza), donated their collection of drafts of scripts, playbills, original art work, and other items to the Oviatt Library at California State University-Northridge. Highlights from the collection, which spans a 20-year history, will be displayed in a small exhibition scheduled to open in the Oviatt Library on May 5, 2004. Some of Culture Clash’s best-known plays and productions include The Mission (1988), A Bowl of Beings (1991), S.O.S.—Comedy for These Urgent Times (1992), Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami (1994), and Chavez Ravine (2003). The group created the first Latino comedy show on the Fox network, Culture Clash, which ran from 1993 to 1995 and has authored two books, Culture Clash: Life Death and Revolutionary Comedy (1998) and Culture Clash in AmeriCCa (2003). Under the auspices of the library’s five-year, $1.6 million Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Grant, the Culture Clash Collection is being inventoried, processed, and preserved to make it available to students, faculty, and the community for research purposes.

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)’s Gladys Marcus Library has received a
gift of 1,500 books, valued at $22,500. The books were given by Herbert Solomon in memory of his late wife, Sally, who owned them. The volumes are in fine or new condition, with original dust jackets. The majority are art publications published between 1970 and 1990; included are monographs of major 20th-century artists, as well as exhibition catalogs. The donation also includes books on music, dance, literature, fiction, biography, politics, and Judaica by authors such as Bellow, Proust, Roth, Thurber, and Updike. There are more than 50 volumes on Thomas Jefferson.