Home Publications College & Research Libraries News index.xml March Grants and Acquisitions

GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, March 2005
Vol. 66, No. 3

by Dawn Mueller

Syracuse University (SU) has received a generous gift from William J. and Joan Brodsky, which has made possible the new Brodsky Endowment for the Advancement of Library Conservation. Beginning in spring 2005, the endowment will be used to promote and advance the knowledge of library conservation theory, practice, and application. Programs designed for on-campus and regional participants will include lectures and workshops by prominent library conservators. The educational programming sponsored by the endowment will be organized by Peter Verheyen, an internationally known and award-winning conservator, craft binder, and book artist who directs the conservation lab at the Special Collections Research Center at SU Library. Endowment-sponsored events will complement the internship, independent study, and class presentations currently offered by the SU conservation lab, which have already led some students to pursue library conservation as a career.

The University of Minnesota (UM) Libraries has received a grant of $162,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to assess support for scholarly inquiry in the context of a large research university. The grant will allow the UM Libraries and the university’s College of Liberal Arts (CLA) to develop a conceptual framework to analyze the needs of various academic disciplines as they acquire, create, manage, and use knowledge resources. The 12-month project will include a team of librarians, graduate and post-doctoral researchers, and administrators from UM. The team will carry out its exploration within targeted academic communities in CLA. The team’s goal is to better understand discipline-specific needs for information content, services, tools and expertise, and to present a model for bringing coherence to these distributed resources through physical and virtual means.

Columbia University has been awarded funding for two separate projects by the New York State Program for the Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials. Through the program Columbia will receive $150,052 for a two-year cooperative project to microfilm approximately 2,014 brittle East Asian serial volumes. Materials will be drawn from collections at Columbia University, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, and other libraries in New York State. Columbia will also receive $65,017 for a one-year cooperative project to photocopy brittle reference materials. Columbia will manage the project and will contribute approximately 55 volumes amounting to over 36,000 pages. Cornell University and SUNY at Albany will contribute an additional 115 volumes. Included in the materials to be photocopied are encyclopedias and other reference tools that have deteriorated physically, and must be preserved in paper form because they are not available online.

Acquisitions

Records of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company (Frisco) have been acquired by Southwest Missouri State University’s Duane G. Meyer Library. The records were donated to SMSU by Louis Griesemer, president of Springfield Underground Incorporated, who acquired the materials from the former Frisco Museum in Springfield, Missouri. The collection consists primarily of more than 1,000 bound volumes of Frisco Interstate Commerce Commission reports and Record of Property Change (RPC) books from 1918 to 1974 and shop files from the 1940s to the 1970s. The RPC volumes cover a wide geographical area including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. The shop files include diagrams and schematics (including painting diagrams) for a broad range of railroad equipment from railroad cars to tools and fittings. Other materials donated include Frisco maps, stationary, labor agreements, and publications.

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