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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, September 2005
Vol. 66, No. 8

by Ann-Christe Galloway

The University of Kentucky (UK) has been awarded $310,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its participation in the first phase of an NEH and Library of Congress program to digitize 20 million pages from U.S. newspapers in the public domain. In the first two-year phase of the program, the UK Libraries will focus on digitizing more than 100,000 pages from Kentucky newspapers published from 1900 to 1910. During the term of the grant, UK and the other five institutions will develop processes that will be used by other libraries in subsequent phases of the program.

Northeastern University in Boston has received $175,000 for its two-year project, Processing and Providing Access to Boston African American and Latino History, from  the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). Support for the first year ($90,000) is guaranteed; the remainder of the award is pending NHPRC funding. The Archives and Special Collections Department will arrange, describe, and make accessible 436 cubic feet of mainly 20th century historical records from six private, nonprofit organizations relating to social justice in the African American and Latino communities in Boston.

The University of South Florida, School of Library and Information Science, in partnership with the University of Central Florida Libraries, Florida Atlantic University Library, and the University of South Florida Tampa Campus Library, has received a grant in the amount of $758,736 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The ALSTARS grant provides funding for 24 full-time students to pursue a curriculum designed to educate future professionals for positions in academic libraries. Partner libraries will provide employment/internship opportunities, chart student progress, and coordinate students’ advising, mentoring, and curriculum needs. This information will be analyzed to aid in the development of a model academic library curriculum. Students selected will have  an advanced subject degree, be willing to enter into a dual-degree program, or have special language skills.

The University of Iowa has received a $236,000 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust of Muscatine to help expand and renovate the main library’s Information Arcade electronic classroom. Construction of the two-year, $1.36 million project is expected to begin in 2006. The project will expand the arcade by adding a second electronic classroom to alleviate pressure on the existing room, as well as two others at the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences. The new classroom will explore the use of wireless technology and provide a more flexible teaching environment, and it will divide much of the existing space into workstations that allow for more collaborative learning and interaction between students and faculty members.

Acquisitions
A rare photographic resource related to Idaho’s World War II history has been acquired by the University of Idaho (UI). It is a handmade scrapbook of 148 original photographs and two drawings of activities and buildings related to the Kooskia Internment Camp on the Lochsa River. By mid-February 1942, federal authorities had rounded up more than 3,000 Japanese aliens living in the United States. Arrested by the FBI and local officials, these men were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who placed them in internment camps. The Kooskia camp was not one of the 10 large concentration camps where West Coast Japanese-American citizens and their families were sent unconstitutionally. Rather, it was a road-building site in which the inmates were extending the Lewis and Clark Highway, now US 12, up the river toward Montana. The photographs in the scrapbook, estimated to have been taken in 1944, are the work of either one of the Japanese inmates or one of the federal guards. The photographs provide an extensive record of life in the camp, with multiple views of the mess hall, the canteen, and the recreation facilities, as well as scenes of the heavy equipment and the construction work on the highway, where the Japanese worked closely with the Bureau of Public Roads personnel.

The world’s largest book, according to  Guinness World Records, has been donated
to the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Measuring a full 5 feet by 7 feet when open and weighing 133 pounds, Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, by Michael Hawley, is a photography book capturing more than 100 images of the small Asian country’s rich landscape and culture. Each copy of Bhutan requires a gallon of ink, 24 hours of printing time and more paper than the length of a football field. Each digital image was two gigabytes, stretching the capabilities of most computers and printers. The binding was done by the world’s oldest book publisher, Acme Bookbinding, and uses an Asian fanfolded structure combined with European techniques.

^{Nancy Gwinn (left), director of the Smithsonian
Libraries, and Mary Augusta Thomas (right), associate
director, standing with world’s largest book, Bhutan.}

The archive of novelist James D. Houston has been designated for the University of California-Santa Cruz. Houston, is the author of numerous award-winning novels, including Continental Drift, The Last Paradise, and, most recently, Snow Mountain Passage. He is also the author of a wide-ranging set of nonfiction works, including Californians: Searching for the Golden State and a memoir of the Japanese interment, Farewell to Manzanar, coauthored with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. The archive will also include research and collateral material associated with Farewell to Manzanar.

The papers of writer Jim Harrison have been acquired by Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, through funding by the Meijer Foundation. Harrison, an international best-selling author, has been published in 22 languages and is the author of five collections of novellas (including Legends of the Fall), eight novels, ten collections of poetry, a children’s book, three works of nonfiction, and his memoir, Off to the Side. The $600,000 collection currently comprises approximately 200 linear feet of shelf space. It consists of manuscripts, unpublished material, correspondence, notebooks, screenplays, photographs and artwork, and the works of others. There is also a very large section of correspondence with noted American writers, including Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Dan Gerber, Ted Kooser, Tom McGuane, and Peter Matthiessen. Harrison has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association.