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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONSC&RL News, February 2008Vol. 69, No. 2 by Ann-Christe Galloway The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Miller Nichols Library has received a $502,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will help UMKC maintain and share one of the library’s richest radio collections in its Marr Sound Archives. While many of history’s radio and music recordings have long disappeared, UMKC’s Marr Sound Archives preserves these historic sounds for future generations. The Mellon grant will support a cataloging project for the J. David Goldin Collection, which represents a portion of the more than 290,000 unique items that comprise the Marr Sound Archives. J. David Goldin, a leading authority on historic radio programs, contributed nearly 10,000 items to the Marr Sound Archives. The Goldin Collection consists of 16-inch instantaneous cut acetate discs and pressed recordings—dating from 1935 to 1950—each 30 minutes in length and produced for broadcast. These delicate recordings are not preserved in any other form or format. The cataloging project will make the contents of these rare, original sound recordings available for the first time to academic researchers worldwide through online catalog access. The project began January 1, 2008, and is expected to continue through December 31, 2010. Illinois State University received a $58,000 Library Services and Technology Act Grant to promote information literacy among Illinois citizens. The library is using the grant to explore the feasibility of establishing the Illinois Center for Information Literacy. The proposed center would coordinate statewide efforts to enhance the ability of Illinois citizens to access and use information more effectively. The center would also serve as a teaching and research resource on the subject of information literacy for librarians, educators, and citizens. An important function of the Illinois Center for Information Literacy would be helping libraries across the state enhance their capacity to assist patrons in working with an increasing amount of diverse information. The grant money supports research on the information needs of various constituencies, and determining how libraries can help to meet those needs. Illinois State is currently working with academic and public libraries as well as elementary and secondary schools and colleges and universities across the state to develop information literacy programs. The University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics in partnership with the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has been awarded a $517,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop and pilot “EthicShare,” an online Web site and bibliographic database for ethics scholars to discover and share high-quality digital articles and other materials—scholarly and popular press articles, multimedia objects, preprints, and archival documents. During the pilot phase, the EthicShare team will develop features for users to rate, comment on, and vet content, allowing EthicShare to establish new forms of editorial control and community participation in the growth and future of the Web site. The EthicShare pilot is a continuation of an earlier grant awarded to the University of Minnesota by the Council of Libraries and Information Resources with funds from the Mellon Foundation. EthicShare grows out of a planning partnership with Indiana University-Bloomington; Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis; University of Virginia; and Georgetown University. This phase of EthicShare is bolstered by newly established relationships with the National Library of Medicine, OCLC, and others. EthicShare is part of a larger trend towards discipline-specific online communities that support the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences—all fields that play a role in practical ethics scholarship. Recent priorities of American Council of Learned Societies, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, as well as the University of Minnesota, have included strategies to build community and support collaborative exchange among scholars distributed across the globe. Acquisitions The manuscript that Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–89), West Indian polymath and giant of 20th-century intellectual history, adjudged to be his single most important piece of work, has been acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. An abridged and bowdlerized version was published in 1980 from an uncorrected typescript. The present manuscript represents the complete original work in its entirety, thus making possible a surer grasp of James’s original thought. In addition, ten lengthy handwritten letters by James related to the original manuscript were also acquired. Notes on Dialectic is the only extant full-length manuscript in James’s handwriting. It was written by James between late September and early November 1948 in Nevada, where James had gone to obtain a divorce. James was employed as a landscaper and handyman at the Pyramid Lake Ranch, located on the Indian reservation at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and worked on the manuscript in the evenings and on weekends. According to Robert Hill, professor of history at UCLA and executor of the James Estate, the purpose of the manuscript was to educate the members of James’s political organization in the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic and to work out the political premises of the coming stage of revolutionary struggle on the part of the modern working-class following the end of World War II. The acquisition of Notes on Dialectic complements the extensive collection of James’s papers acquired by the library in September 2007. The 1949 Bibliotheque Française publication of Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, illustrated with 38 drypoint etchings by Pablo Picasso, has been donated to San Diego State University Library and Information Access. The 163-page folio, donated by Norman Mann, is copy 200 of 320 and includes a title and justifications page signed by Picasso. The story of Carmen, a gypsy girl killed by her jealous lover, originated as an anecdote overheard by Mérimée as he traveled through Andalusia, Spain, in 1830. His novella Carmen was originally published in 1845. It has been speculated by many that the story of Carmen fascinated Picasso and influenced some of his works. Vassar College has become an official repository for the collection of artists’ books produced by the nonprofit Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW), which since 1979 has grown to become the largest publisher in the country of these hand printed and hand bound works. WSW is based in Rosendale, New York, and its artists’ books gain their first Hudson Valley archive with this Vassar partnership. While there is no fixed definition of an artist’s book, it is always a work of art in itself, created for its own sake. The objects incorporate a wide range of media, which at WSW may include hand drawn, sewn, and painted images; handmade paper; letterpress; silkscreen; photography; intaglio; and ceramics. Artists have produced 160 of these books with WSW, through annually juried international competitions. The workshop’s first shipment of 22 artists’ books was recently made to the Special Collections section of the Vassar libraries, which houses all of the college’s extensive rare book holdings, including a number of private press and artists’ books. Vassar will acquire nearly the entire existing body of the publisher’s books over the next five years, and simultaneously Special Collections will add the new books WSW produces each year. Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: agalloway@ala.org. |
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