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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, November 2005
Vol. 66, No. 10

The Afghanistan Digital Library, a project based in New York University’s (NYU) Division of Libraries, has received a grant of $298,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This grant will enable NYU to continue its major effort to catalog, digitize, and provide access to approximately 60 percent of the published heritage of Afghanistan from 1871 through 1930. The Afghanistan Digital Library project, which began in 2003, seeks to recover and preserve Afghanistan’s literary heritage, recreating much of the bibliography of Afghanistan digitally and making these books available to anyone with access to the Internet. The project has gained international endorsements and partnerships, including a contribution from the British Library and an agreement with the Afghanistan Ministry of Information and Culture to include materials from the National Archives in Kabul and from other Afghan cultural institutions. The Afghanistan Digital Library Project will make available in electronic form (Web site and CD-ROM) Dari (Persian) and Pashto books published in Afghanistan, with a possible continuation to imprints after 1930.

Columbia University has received $160,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year project to survey the university’s extensive collections of audio and moving image materials. These include such highlights as tapes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and other social and political icons; interviews with native Yiddish speakers after World War II; and early recordings of composers, such as Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, and Samuel Barber. The grant will enable the university libraries to assess the physical condition, intellectual property rights, and scholarly significance of each item in these collections. The survey is especially urgent due to the inherent fragility of historic documents captured on early phonographic discs, magnetic audio tape, and nitrate film. Janet Gertz, director of the Libraries’ Preservation Division and principal investigator for the survey, will lead a team of archivists and preservation experts to consolidate information on the broad range of the university’s audio and moving image collections into a single database. This specially designed data tool will allow preservation librarians to record the physical condition of the materials and let curators and managers rank each item according to research and monetary value, the university’s degree of intellectual control, and other criteria.

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s (UNC-CH) School of Information and Library Science
has been awarded two federal grants totaling more than $1 million from the National Institute of Museum and Library Services. The first grant for $804,344 will fund the study “Workforce issues in library and information science,” a three-year project by the school and the UNC Institute on Aging. Researchers will study the career patterns of library and information science graduates, investigating the educational, career, workplace, and retention issues they face. The second grant for $392,295, will fund “Recruiting medical students into health sciences librarianship,” a study by UNC-CH in partnership with the Duke University Medical Center Library. The project will focus on recruiting medical students into a new MLS program while they obtain medical degrees.

Wayne State University Library System has been awarded one of ten 2005 Digitization for
Preservation and Access grants from the Library of Michigan totaling $150,000. These grants represent a statewide effort to digitize local and state-related information held in Michigan libraries. The grant funds will be used to further develop the Virtual Motor City photo collection, an online resource  containing 15,000 digitized images from the Detroit News Collection, a photojournalistic resource held at the Reuther Library. Donated to Wayne State in 1997, the full collection consists of more than 800,000 photonegative images, many of them on vintage glass plate. The Detroit News was a pioneer in the use of photojournalism equipment and techniques, which gives many of the early images recorded on glass and film additional historical significance.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science
was awarded more than $10.5 million in new grants from a number of organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. Some of the research projects to be funded include a study of behavioral development and the Western honey bee; the first research-based MLS and post-MLS degrees to prepare librarians for work in digital library programs; and a massive music database.A collection of writer Eudora Welty’s private letters has been given to Louisiana State University by the nephew of John Robinson, to whom most of the letters are addressed. The collection, which spans the years 1951 to 1957, is a window into Welty’s personal and professional life. Topics touched on include the theater, the cinema, artists, writers, and Welty’s mother. Through the letters, Welty shares with Robinson many of the feelings and first-hand experiences that she draws upon for much of the fiction collected in The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955). Welton won most of the major literary prizes during her career, including the Pulitzer Prize and the French Légion d’Honneur. 

Acquisitions
A collection of writer Eudora Welty’s private letters has been given to Louisiana State University
by the nephew of John Robinson, to whom most of the letters are addressed. The collection, which spans the years 1951 to 1957, is a window into Welty’s personal and professional life. Topics touched on include the theater, the cinema, artists, writers, and Welty’s mother. Through the letters, Welty shares with Robinson many of the feelings and first-hand experiences that she draws upon for much of the fiction collected in The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955). Welton won most of the major literary prizes during her career, including the Pulitzer Prize and the French Légion d’Honneur.

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