C&RL News April 2019 244

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

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

The Library of Congress has received a   
$540,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mel-
lon Foundation to evaluate the physical 
health of the national collection of books 
in American research libraries and to guide 
their archive retention and preservation 
decisions. Since there currently is no ob-
jective formula to assess the condition of 
millions of books in the custody of the 
nation’s libraries, this scientific study will 
help inform best practices and provide a 
baseline for libraries to analyze their print 
collections based on established scien-
tific guidelines. This is the first effort of 
its kind to lay the scientific groundwork 
for the development of a national effort 
to preserve the corpus of books held in 
American libraries. Entitled “Assessing the 
Physical Condition of the National Collec-
tion,” the 40-month grant project through 
the Scholarly Communication Program 
will compare the physical, chemical, and 
optical characteristics of a representative 
sample of bibliographically identical books 
across five large research libraries in dis-
tinct regions of the country to quantify and 
objectively assess the condition of these 
volumes. The five participating institu-
tions are Arizona State University, Cornell 
University, University of Colorado-Boulder, 
University of Miami, and University of 
Washington. The study will help provide a 
comparable and reliable decision-making 
method for libraries to follow in deciding 
what books and how many should be kept 
in the national collective. The collected 
data will build a knowledge base for how 
materials naturally age and decompose, 
provide a rich set of data about books as 
artifacts, and lead to a stronger predictive 
model for the condition of books. One 

objective of the project is also to develop 
simpler testing tools that could be used 
on-site in library book stacks. PRTD will 
host two researchers for three years, each 
of whom will complete the analysis of 500 
of the same volumes from the five selected 
American research libraries, totaling 2,500 
volumes. The library will convene an ex-
pert advisory body to review the work in 
process and schedule conferences periodi-
cally to report the project’s progress. The 
study’s findings will be shared nationally 
at a major event in 2022.  

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

The John Ashbery Reading Library has 
been acquired by the Houghton Library at 
Harvard University. When Ashbery died in 
2017, he left behind more than 30 collec-
tions of elliptical, often collagelike poetry, 
including “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mir-
ror,” which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize. 
The John Ashbery Reading Library includes 
more than 5,000 books of poetry, art criti-
cism, architectural history, philosophy, re-
ligious history, and cookbooks collected 
over the poet’s lifetime. There are anno-
tated editions of books by Boris Paster-
nak, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, and 
others, as well as the copy of the Oxford 
Book of American Verse Ashbery used as 
an undergraduate, with pressed flowers 
used as bookmarks. Harvard began acquir-
ing Ashbery’s papers in 1986, when it paid 
$200,000 for the first portion of them (at 
the time, the highest price it had ever paid 
for a manuscript collection, a curator told 
The Harvard Crimson in 1987). The final 
portion of the papers, delivered in Decem-
ber, brings the total holdings to 250 linear 
feet of manuscripts, letters, memorabilia, 
and other material.  

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