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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, January 2005
Vol. 66, No. 1

by Dawn Mueller

The New York Public Library (NYPL) has received two grants totaling $30 million that will enable the library to pursue a range of new initiatives to acquire, preserve, and improve access to materials, while also implementing a series of financial stabilization measures. The gifts comprise $25 million from financier Robert W. Wilson and $5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A major part of the Wilson gift will support a large endeavor to catalog and process numerous archival collections at the NYPL’s performing arts library. It will also allow the library to make significant strides in developing technology. The Mellon grant will support the operations of the research libraries over the next three years. The foundation’s most recent grant brings its total giving to $29 million.

Cornell University Library has received a $269,000 National Leadership Grant from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services to develop an internship program for Native American librarians in preservation management and practice. The library’s Department of Preservation and Collection Management will develop a twoyear internship program to train twelve Native American librarians to establish and maintain programs to preserve cultural heritage materials at tribal colleges and universities.

The University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries has received an endowment from an anonymous donor to provide financial support for its Interlibrary Loan Services. The donor recently received a Ph.D. from the university and wished to credit the Interlibrary Borrowing Department for helping achieve this goal. This endowment, directed at the increasing amounts of fees and other charges associated with interlibrary borrowing, may be the first of its kind in major research libraries.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC), has received a $500,000 gift to benefit Special Collections in the University Library. The endowment will be established in honor of the late Miller and Bunny Outcalt and their lifelong partnership in the field of photography. Proceeds will be used to fund a permanent staff position dedicated to work on the extensive photography archives housed at UCSC. The new photo archivist position will help the library to process collections, inventory, catalog and index photographs, and prepare finding aids for the materials, as well as to appraise the physical condition of the collections and plan for preservation and conservation.

The University of Illinois Library-Urbana-Champaign has been awarded $239,000 in federal partnership funds to protect and preserve its Carl Sandburg Collection. The funds are part of the 2004 "Save America’s Treasures" federal grant program, which seeks to conserve some of America’s most significant cultural treasures. The library is one of 60 organizations and agencies throughout the country that received funding, including 35 historic properties and sites and 25 nationally significant collections of artifacts, documents, and artistic works. The grant will fund a combination of treatments to preserve the collection, which includes Sandburg’s personal library of more than 2,800 volumes; roughly 300,000 pages of literary manuscripts; more than 3,000 photographs; more than 25,000 letters of correspondence with notable contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Franklin D. Roosevelt; more than 45,000 newspaper clippings; and more than 600 audiovisual materials.

The University of Wyoming (UW) Libraries received a $1 million dollar gift endowment from Carol McMurry and Pat Spieles of Loveland, Colorado. Their gift will be doubled to $2 million by state matching funds approved by the Wyoming State Legislature to encourage private contributions of more than $50,000 for UW endowments.

Acquisitions

Lynda Petty, wife of stock car racing legend Richard Petty, has donated a large collection of materials documenting her husband’s career to the Appalachian State University Libraries Stock Car Racing Collection. The donation, which covers 1958–2003, includes newspaper and magazine articles, fan letters, scrapbooks, promotional and charitable materials, awards of recognition, photographs, books, and race programs. The Stock Car Racing Collection is the only library in the country open to the public that focuses specifically on stock car racing. It contains more than 500 books, periodicals, and videos; an extensive clippings file covering more than 1300 subjects; photographs; posters; and promotional materials.

Emory University has acquired the largest private English language poetry library from Raymond Danowski. Highlights include the rare first printing of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855); T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), inscribed to "Miss Emily Hale" by the author; W.H. Auden’s first collection of poems, privately printed; and Allen Ginsberg’s second book, Siesta in Xbalba, printed on a mimeograph machine on a ship near Icy Cape, Alaska. The collection, considered the largest ever built by a private collector, comprises some 60,000 books as well as tens of thousands of periodicals, manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials. Danowski, who collected the extensive library over a period of nearly three decades, donated it to Emery so that it can be shared and celebrated within the world of literary scholarship.

The UCLA Library has acquired the papers of Harry Crane (1914–99), creator of The Honeymooners and a prolific writer of radio, television, and film comedy. The collection encompasses scripts, correspondence, photographs, topical humor publications and awards spanning his career from the 1940s through the 1990s. It includes pieces Crane wrote for Frank Sinatra; items from the television specials Crane created for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme; material he wrote for Joey Bishop, Perry Como and Alan King; scripts for major award programs such as the Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Golden Globes; and Crane’s unique gag files. The Crane collection will reside at the Arts Library Special Collections, which houses rare and unique materials in the visual and performing arts, with particular strengths in film and television, radio, and Los Angeles theater and art.

The Rutgers University Libraries received the collection of hundreds of English language dictionaries of historic scope and breadth, formerly owned by Rutgers University President Edward Bloustein (1925–1989), recently donated by his daughters Elise and Lori to the libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives. The Bloustein Dictionary Collection features a copy of one of the first known published English language dictionaries, a bilingual Latin-English word list entitled Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae published in 1573 by Thomas Cooper. The Bloustein collection also contains several representations of the rivalries by scholars that often spurred the development and publication of well-known dictionaries.

SUNY Maritime College’s Stephen B. Luce Library has received the historical ledgers of the Moore-McCormack Archives. The collection consists of sixty-four ledgers that were maintained by the Office of the President of the Moore-McCormack shipping company from 1928 to 1970.

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: dmueller@ala.org.