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Acquisitions

The Bowling Green State University Libraries and Center for Archival Collections, Bowling Green, Ohio, have recently acquired 16,000 popular music recordings from a Panama City, Florida, collector. The collection features examples of early rock and roll and all country music #1 hits from 1949 to 1982.

Bowling Green also acquired 6,000 volumes and hundreds of manuscripts belonging to the late Sam Pollock, an Ohio labor leader. The archive includes much primary material documenting labor history and early runs of labor, socialist, and communist periodicals.

Coppin State College, Baltimore, Maryland, officially opened the Cab Calloway Jazz Institute with the donation of the personal papers and memorabilia of the famed bandleader. The collection features more than 300 photos, paintings, recordings, movie and play scripts, and other Calloway items, including his popular canary yellow zoot suit and directing baton. The legendary entertainer, whose career spans more than 60 years, appeared at the opening ceremony with his wife and officials of the college.

Cornell University’s Olin Library, Department of Rare Books, has received the papers and memorabilia of the late William Stringfellow, who died in March 1985. Stringfellow, regarded by many as the most important U.S. theologian of his generation, was also a lawyer and the author of some 14 books, most of which focus on the practice of Christian ethics in modern society. On leaving Harvard in 1956, he settled in East Harlem and worked as legal counsel for the poor and for outcasts of all kinds, including homosexuals. He was also an early critic of American involvement in Vietnam.

Harvard University’s Houghton Library has acquired the surviving correspondence between Theodore Roosevelt, an 1880 Harvard graduate, and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee. More than three dozen letters, part of a group of family documents and photographs relating to the marriage and preserved by their daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, were recently presented to the Library by her granddaughter, Joanna Sturm. Roosevelt met Alice Lee in 1878 while a junior at Harvard. Engaged after a 15-month courtship, they were married in October 1880, following his graduation, and lived in New York City while Roosevelt began his political career as a member of the State Assembly at Albany. Alice died on Valentine’s Day, 1884, two days after giving birth to their daughter. After eulogizing her in a privately printed memorial, Roosevelt never mentioned his wife again, not even in his autobiography, published in 1913. Until now it had been assumed that Roosevelt had destroyed virtually all their correspondence.

The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has become the depository of the political papers of U.S. Senator Charles Mathias Jr. (R-MD). The collection includes Mathias’ papers from 1958 to the present, covering his term in the Maryland House of Delegates as well as three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and three in the Senate. Containing correpondence with every president since Eisenhower and many foreign heads of state, the papers are notably important in the areas of civil rights, environmental concerns, and foreign relations. An original sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Mathias was chief sponsor of the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1982, and introduced the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Mathias will join the faculty at the University’s School of Advanced International Studies following his retirement from the Senate early next year.

Millersville University’s Ganser Library, Pennsylvania, recently acquired a 1748 edition of Tieleman J. van Braght’s Martyrs’ Mirror from Frederick Kring, a university alumnus. The volume, the largest printed in colonial America, contains biographies of Christian martyrs from the beginning of Christianity up to the 16th century. It became a favorite among the pacifist Protestant sects while they were in Holland, and many wished to have a translation in their native German. The feat was accomplished in three years by Amish brothers using local materials and a local translator.

The New York State Library’s Manuscripts and Special Collections unit, Albany, has acquired an interesting collection of materials on early telegraphy. The papers of the Bishop Gutta Percha Company, a pioneer in the development of insulated telegraph and electrical cables and wires, were received as a donation from the company’s last president. Through inventive methods the company developed the insulation used on the first telegraph across the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, as well as the first cable across the Atlantic Ocean. The company was also the first in New York City to institute the eight-hour workday.

The Library has also obtained a collection of ambrotype photographs of the Hidley family of Rensselaer County. The only known portrait photo of Joseph H. Hidley, an important 19th-century American folk artist who painted Upstate New York townscapes, is included.

Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, recently acquired a collection of significant biographical information on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Included are 149 cloth and 47 paperbound volumes on the composer, many of which are in German and several of which are pre-1850 imprints. Also acquired were 10 framed portraits of Mozart and an early square piano believed to have been built around 1780. Ephemeral material from the collection, donated by the estate of a New Bavaria, Ohio, collector, includes a holograph letter dated 1642 and a sixth edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1785), as well as 100 imprints from Germany and Austria dating from the WWII period, of interest to scholars of the Third Reich.

Ohio State University’s Library for Communication and Graphic Arts, Columbus, has received the personal papers of the late Walt Kelly, cartoonist and creator of Togo. Some 15 boxes of materials have been shipped so far, including letters, records, poetry and comment, examples of the Pogo books based on the strip, and letters from fans as far away as Cambodia and New Zealand. The collection has been donated by Kelly’s widow, Selby Kelly, of New York City.

Oregon State University, Corvallis, has beenchosen as the depository of the personal, scientific, and peace papers of Linus C. Pauling (1901– ), eminent chemist and humanitarian. The collection will also include the papers of Pauling’s late wife, Ava Helen Pauling, a noted feminist leader and social activist. The Pauling papers include a series of Pauling’s scientific notebooks developed over the last 50 years, a large volume of correspondence to and from both Paulings, a collection of Pauling’s original manuscripts for his voluminous publications which include more than a dozen books and 500 articles, and a substantial collection of reprints and books collected by Pauling to aid in his scientific work. Pauling is the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes as an individual working alone. His work on the nature of the chemical bond resulted in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954; in 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership among the international scientific community in calling for the nuclear test ban treaty signed the next year by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Texas A&M University’s Evans Library, College Station, has purchased the personal library of a noted American archeologist and former director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. The collection, of approximately 2,000 books and bound periodicals, includes excavation reports from such classical sites as Delphi, Sardis, and Delos. Among the books acquired is a very early archaeological study, Cochin’s Observations upon the Antiquities of the Town of Herculanaeum (London, 1756), and many 19th-century titles. Also part of the collection are works by prominent archeologists including Carl Biegen, Gisela M.A. Richter, and J.D. Beazley. Especially important are the complete runs of several rare journals published by the Archaeological Society of Athens, including Hesperia, Praktika (dating back to 1837), and Ephimeris Archaiologiki (dating to 1897).

Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center,Wheaton, Illinois, has received records of the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago dating back to the 1870s. The collection includes the papers and other items of such noted evangelists such as Harry Ironside, and contains memorabilia relating to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 as well as issues of The Moody Church News dated 1910-1970.

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book andManuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut, has acquired the papers of poet, novelist, and essayist Robert Penn Warren (1905– ). Considered by many to be the the nation’s pre-eminent man of letters, Warren was appointed U.S. poet laureate in February 1986. The archive includes working and final drafts of virtually all of Warren’s writings from 1929. Yale will also receive Warren’s incoming correspondence dating from the same time, some 17,000 letters from writers, editors, scholars, critics, and friends. The same purchase has also resulted in a bibliographically complete collection of all Warren’s printed works in their first and subsequent editions. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Warren is the author of the widely acclaimed novel All the King’s Men and his New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 (published last year).

Grants

Augustana College’s Mikkelsen Library, SiouxFalls, South Dakota, has received a grant of $20,000 from the Helene Fuld Health Trust of New York. The money will be used to purchase books and periodicals to support the health sciences programs of the college.

Brandeis University’s Department of SpecialCollections, Waltham, Massachusetts, has received a grant of $27,000 from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of materials related to the American participation in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Brandeis will initiate a program to catalog its collection of Spanish Civil War materials and to preserve a group of some 200 rare posters. Included in the collection are more than 7,000 monographs, 200 serials, and more than 5,000 rare photographs, including 400 of Nazi origin, as well as personal memorabilia, propaganda films, recordings, and the Archives of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and the Spanish Refugee Aid Committee.

Harvard University has received a $100,000gift from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation of New York for preservation of the collections in the Harvard College Library. Much of the money will go toward preserving the Judaica Collection. The gift is part of a $3.6 million drive to complete the third stage of renovation of the library and follows a 1981 endowment of $500,000 from the Foundation for the purpose of microfilming Judaica holdings.

The Johns Hopkins University’s Milton S.Eisenhower Library has received a $204,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to provide a program of preservation education to academic and research libraries across the country. Continuing an earlier Mellon grant, the new threeyear program will place greater emphasis on special problems of paper conservation. An important part of the program will be the production of instructional videotapes for the purpose of teaching preservation methods to library and archival staffs. The University plans to offer a series of two-day workshops in preservation techniques beginning this fall. Six consultancies and four internships will also be offered in each of the three years.

Lake Forest College, Illinois, has received a$75,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation to endow a venture capital fund for its library. Annual income from the fund will be used to study new ways to provide traditional services to library users and to identify and foster the development of new services.

The Missouri Botanical Garden’s Library, St.Louis, has been awarded a grant of more than $240,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to complete the recataloging and reclassifying of its collections on the OCLC database. The project began in 1978 and is now expected to be complete by 1990. Much of the money will be shared with the New York Botanical Garden. Together, the two libraries hold approximately 80% of the world’s printed literature on plant distribution and floristic studies, plant identification, the history of botany and agriculture, and many other botanical topics.

The New York University School of Law hasbeen awarded a challenge grant of $1 million from the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Michigan, toward the construction of the Law School’s new underground library and the renovation of its existing library facilities. The grant is contingent upon the School’s raising an additional $4,350,000 in order to complete the project, of which more than $1 million has already been raised. The expanded portion of the library will open this fall, with the renovation of the existing library to proceed shortly thereafter.

The Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, has received a matching grant of $21,000 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to preserve and make available the Museum’s maritime history manuscript collections. The collections document the participation of Salem and New England in the lucrative trade with Africa, Asia, and Oceania from the late 17th through 19th centuries.

The Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, Seattle, has received a NHPRC grant for the preservation of the Joe Williamson photographic collection. The photographs depict the maritime history of the Pacific Northwest from the 1880s to 1950s, including a wide variety of ships, many coastal towns and industries, and the Alaska gold rush.

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been awarded a grant of $144,208 from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of the Bibliographic Phase of the New Jersey Newspaper Project. New Jersey is one of several states and repositories participating in the United States Newspaper Program, a national effort to promote the newspaper as a valuable source of history and culture. New Jersey Newspaper Project staff will catalog the approximately 3,000 American newspapers located in 537 repositories throughout the state, making them available on the OCLC database. Rutgers will serve as the headquarters for the project.

Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection,Lubbock, has received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant for preservation and improved access to a local television newsfilm and videotape collection documenting west Texas since the mid-1950s.

Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton MemorialLibrary, New Orleans, has received a $750,000 grant from the Pew Memorial Trust to complete retrospective conversion of the library’s card catalog system. The project is expected to be completed by May 1988.

The University of California, Los Angeles, hasbeen awarded a grant in the amount of 650,000 yen by the Japan Foundation. Part of the foundation’s 1986 Library Support Program, the money will be used by the UCLA Oriental Library to acquire the 60-volume reproduction edition of the Tsushin zenran, the first diplomatic correspondence of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The collection ranges from the closing days of the Tokugawa regime in 1853 to the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Divided into two parts, the work is considered a treasure for its wealth of historical source material and will be of considerable value to Japanese scholars.

The University of Idaho, Moscow, has received a partial matching grant of $55,000 from the NHPRC to appraise, arrange, and describe the records of more than 50 mining companies from the Coeur d’Alene region of northern Idaho. The project will also develop general appraisal guidelines for the records of hard rock mining companies.

The University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign has received a private gift of more than $1 million to establish the C. Walter Mortenson and Gerda B. Mortenson Distinguished Professorship for International Library Programs. The primary purpose of this new position will be to promote international peace, health, education and understanding through programs at the library on the Urbana-Champaign campus. Exchanges of people and materials will be a main responsibility of the professorship, with connections to China and African nations of particular interest. In addition, the professor funded by the gift will oversee institutional and personal links with libraries and librarians in foreign countries, faculty involvement in international programs, and promotion of research and teaching that further international understanding.

The University of Maryland College Park Campus libraries have been awarded a three-year, $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The money will be used to organize and make available for study and research the Gordon W. Prange Collection on the history and development of Japanese education during the early years of the Allied Occupation of Japan, when the Japanese educational system underwent drastic and far-reaching reforms. The Endowment also awarded $49,817 in federal matching funds. The collection contains copies of many publications issued in Japan from 1945 to 1949, when censorship was ended, ranging from scholarly monographs to popular literature, and including school textbooks, study guides, and other educationrelated items. Many of the publications were initially printed in limited quantities due to extreme shortages, were often recycled for their paper content, and were not systematically collected by either U.S. or Japanese libraries at the time.

The University of Minnesota’s Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, Minneapolis, has announced the bequest of $1,052,000 from the estate of Dr. George Eitel. The late Dr. Eitel, a well-known Minneapolis surgeon, had previously established an endowment for the purchase of rare surgical texts.

The University of Missouri Libraries, Columbia, have been awarded a two-year grant of up to $73,205 from the Council on Library Resources for “Developing Leadership in Academic Librarianship: The UMC Libraries’ Intern-Scholar Program.” The program will train up to eight junior librarians in leadership, administration, and advanced library skills, with the aim of giving them an expanded view of their profession and a better understanding of the university environment. It will include in-house seminars and discussion groups led by senior staff and visiting scholars, and exercises designed to build self-knowledge and teamwork skills.

The Utah Museum of Natural History of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, has received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant for the preservation of photographic negatives of archeological excavations in the Great Basin and northern Colorado plateau. The photographs document early American cultures, such as that of the Anasazi people.

News notes

Drexel University’s College of Information Studies, Philadelphia, will provide a team of faculty members hired by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Office of the National Park Service to design an information system that will enable the NPS to handle a greater volume of queries more efficiently. At present the agency maintains vertical files of some 11,000 documents which it must access daily in order to respond to questions from professionals throughout the country. By creating an “infobank,” the team hopes to resolve the backlog and enable staff to find answers quickly and efficiently. The 18-month, $100,000 project could serve as a model for streamlining operations at other NPS regional offices.

Dropsie College’s Board of Trustees voted July 7 to change the name of the Merion, Pennsylvania, institution to the Annenberg Research Institute for Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. The move was made to reflect last year’s decision to cease operations as a graduate school and be restructured as a postdoctoral research institute. The program of the Institute is to be modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and other academic research centers.

Dropsie College was founded in 1907 as the country’s first nontheological and nondenominational graduate school for the study of the litarature, languages and culture of Judaism. Under the guidance of Walter Annenberg, chairman of the Institute and former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, the Institute plans to move to a new site near Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The new structure will include a state-of-the-art research center with climate-controlled rare book rooms and computerized databases of ancient manuscript material. Bernard Lewis, an internationallyrecognized scholar of Islamic and Judeo-Islamic Studies, recently left the Princeton Institute and Princeton University to serve as director of the Annenberg Research Institute.

The Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge, have announced the creation of the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Historical Collections. This new department in the division of Special Collections combines under one administrative structure all of the collections and staff previously designated as the Louisiana Collection, the Manuscripts Collection, the University Archives, and the Russell Long Collection. The reorganization was carried out with the intent of making LSU’s historical research materials more accessible to scholars.

The University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Library, Madison, has microfilmed a substantial portion of the Ph.D. dissertations written on its campus before 1957. So far more than 3,000 dissertations have been photographed, with the film to be stored in an environmentally controlled vault. The university is now accepting orders for positive microfilm copies of the dissertations, available through the Interlibrary Loan Department, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706; (608) 262-3680.

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