December 2017 623 C&RL News

G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway

The University of Virginia Library has 
received $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mel-
lon Foundation to complete the work of 
establishing the Social Networks and Ar-
chival Context (SNAC) Cooperative. SNAC 
began as a Research and Demonstration 
project with funding from the National En-
dowment for the Humanities (2010–2012), 
followed by funding from the Andrew W. 
Mellon Foundation (2012–2015). The proj-
ect demonstrated the feasibility of separat-
ing the description of persons, families, and 
organizations—including their social-intel-
lectual networks—from the description of 
the historical resources that are the primary 
evidence of their lives and work. For this 
final phase of establishing the Cooperative, 
the University of Virginia Library is collabo-
rating with the U.S. National Archives and 
Records Administration and 27 other coop-
erative members. The SNAC Cooperative as-
pires to improve the economy and quality of 
archival processing and description, and, at 
the same time, to address the longstanding 
research challenge of discovering, locating, 
and using distributed historical records by 
building a global social-document network 
using both computational methods and hu-
man curation. 

A c q u i s i t i o n s

The Dartmouth College Library has acquired 
the 1866 edition of Gardner’s Photographic 
Sketch Book of the War, which both docu-
ments the Civil War and builds a post-war 
narrative to memorialize it. The 100 original 
albumen silver prints included in the two-

Ed. note: Send your grants and acquisitions to Ann-
Christe Galloway, production editor, C&RL News, email: 
agalloway@ala.org.

volume set include many of the most fa-
mous images of the war, including: “Burial 
Party, Cold Harbor,” “A Harvest of Death,” 
“Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Battle 
of Gettysburg,” and “President Lincoln on 
Battle-Field of Antietam.” The acquisition 
was made possible by a bequest by Hans 
Penner, former Dartmouth dean of faculty 
and professor of religion. 

Film critic Roger Ebert’s motion picture press 
kits have been acquired by the University of 
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The press kit 
files were used by Ebert when he served as 
film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times newspa-
per. The files include 35mm slides and black-
and-white glossy photographs, press release 
information promoting films from the 1980s 
through the early 2000s, as well as tear sheets 
of reviews by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. 
Nine file drawers of color slides and approxi-
mately 57 file drawers of press kits for more 
than 5,200 films spanning a substantial portion 
of Ebert’s time at the Sun-Times now reside at 
the university, awaiting arrangement and de-
scription to make them accessible to students, 
scholars, and the public. The University Ar-
chives and the Communications Library at Illi-
nois have already starting working together to 
create a complete index of all of the thousands 
of reviews Ebert wrote. Other universities had 
approached the Sun-Times for the materi-
als, however Chaz Ebert, Ebert’s widow and 
publisher of RogerEbert.com, wanted to see 
the materials go to the University of Illinois, 
Ebert’s alma mater. Ultimately, the Sun-Times 
materials will reside within close proximity to 
the Roger Ebert Center being established with-
in the College of Media at Illinois. The Ebert 
Center will offer undergraduate scholarships 
and mentoring, along with other programs for 
those interested in filmmaking and film criti-
cism. For more information about the Ebert 
Center, visit http://media.illinois.edu/ebert.  

mailto:agalloway%40ala.org?subject=
http://media.illinois.edu/ebert