Home Grants and Acquisitions

GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, May 2005
Vol. 66, No. 5

by Ann-Christe Galloway

Columbia University will receive $1.1 million over three years from the Atlantic Philanthropies to create an oral history archive of the organization. The Atlantic Philanthropies Oral History Project will give researchers and scholars the opportunity to explore and learn about the decision-making process, the outcomes of grant-funded programs, and the international philanthropic and business practices of the Atlantic Philanthropies and its founder, Charles F. Feeney. Columbia’s Oral History Research Office (OHRO) will conduct taped interviews with more than 100 individuals, including current and former members of the institution’s Board; financial, philanthropic, and legal advisors; and grantees. The work will be conducted in two phases. The interviewing phase will run for 24 months, from July 2005 through June 2007. The second phase, post-production, will run from July 2007 through April 2008. During this time, the evaluating, processing, preserving, and archiving of all of the interviews will be accomplished. The Atlantic Philanthropies are a group of Bermuda-based charitable foundations whose grant investments are focused internationally in four program fields: aging, disadvantaged children and youth, population health and reconciliation, and human rights.

The University of South Carolina’s Newsfilm Library has received $300,000 in federal funding to support activities related to its Fox Movietone Newsfilm Collection. The money will be used in conjunction with the Library of Congress, which also holds a large portion of the Fox Movietone Newsfilm. The goal of the project is to establish a cooperative relationship between the two institutions for better use of the collections. It is anticipated that the groundwork laid this fiscal year will result in an extended partnership between the two libraries and their newsreel collections. The Newsfilm Library will also use the funding to develop mid- and long-term plans for the growth of the Newsfilm Library’s collections and facilities and for general film preservation needs.

The University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign’s Mortenson Center for International Library Programs has received a three-year, $499,900 grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The grant will fund a project to assist university librarians from seven Carnegie grantee institutions in East and West Africa to move into a fully automated online catalog environment and a computer-based library management system, which will better serve the research and learning needs of their users. Seven universities and their libraries in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda already have received grants as part of Carnegie’s focus on the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa. A team from the Mortenson Center will visit the libraries each year to provide assistance in the planning and implementation of an automated system. Training and technical support systems and communication systems will be set up to provide assistance and report on progress. Training also will be provided at the Mortenson Center for selected library staff to develop local expertise in library automation and develop strategies for sustainability. The report from the previous grant is available on the Mortenson Center Web site at www.library.uiuc.edu/mortenson. The grant period runs from April 1, 2005, to March 31, 2008.

The University of Florida Libraries has received an award from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) for the National Digital Newspaper Project: Florida. The highly competitive $320,959 award will digitize and make available approximately 50 Florida newspaper titles to the National Digital Newspaper Project based at the Library of Congress. These titles, dating from 1900 to 1910, represent all of Florida’s major geographic regions and localities, including county seats, other major cities, and selected smaller municipalities. This phase of the project constitutes a two-year development pilot. Only ten of the state-based U.S. Newspaper Project institutions, including the University of Florida, are involved in this phase. The University of Florida will target 120,000 newspaper pages in 60,000 frames of microfilm on approximately 200 reels.

Acquisitions
The archive of San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman, whose work incorporating laser and computer technology into performance and new media art broke  ground in the late 1970s, has been acquired by Stanford University. Hershman interactive laser disk, Lorna (1979–83), is considered the first interactive video art installation. The archive contains material related to all stages of Hershman’s completed projects since the early 1970s, including preliminary conceptual research and drawings, technical specifications, media, correspondence, and photographs. Hershman has worked in media, including photography, video, and electronic sculpture to explore issues such as consumerism, the effects of mass media on society, and humans’ relationships to machines. An endowment will be established to provide travel funds for scholars visiting Stanford to work with the archive.

The A&M Records Collection has been donated to the UCLA Library by company cofounders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Founded in 1962 in Los Angeles, A&M became America’s largest independent record company. The collection includes sound recordings, manuscript musical arrangements, photographs, correspondence, promotional materials, posters, gold albums, awards, books, and ephemera from the company’s founding through its sale to Polygram in 1989. The materials are housed in the Music Library Special Collections. Alpert and Moss have also made possible the organization and preservation of the collection, the digitization of portions of it, and the creation of an online finding aid, or inventory. In addition, the library’s Oral History Program plans to conduct interviews with Alpert and Moss as part of its series on popular music in Los Angeles.
 
The Willard C. Byrd Collection of architecture and design has been acquired by North Carolina State University. The collection represents the complete life work of Byrd, a prominent landscape and golf course designer, spanning his nearly half-century-long career. Elected a fellow by the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Society of Golf Course Architects, Byrd shaped an extent of land exceeding 346,000 acres—more than half the acreage of the State of Rhode Island. After founding the Atlanta-based firm Willard C. Byrd & Associates in 1956, he designed and remodeled more than 100 golf courses and resort communities located primarily in the southeastern United States. The Byrd Collection contains nearly 11,000 pieces, mainly drawings of more than 1,050 numbered projects dating from 1956 through 2001 and executed on drafting film, blue and blackline prints, and tracing paper; as well as aerial photographs, 193 volumes, and 114 proposals.