ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


July/August 1 9 9 2 /4 7 3

B row n U niversity's John 
Hay Library has received a 
$72,466 Title-IIC grant from 
the U. S. Department o f Edu­
cation for a two-year project 
to provide original cataloging 
for 4,000 books, pamphlets, 
and serials in the H. Adrian 
Smith Collection o f Conjuring 
and Magicana. The Smith col­
lection covers the art, theory, 
and history of magic as a per­
formance art and includes a 
copy of the second edition of 
Hocus Pocus Ju n io r (London,
1635) signed on the title page “Harry Houdini, America Electronic Components), to aid in col­

lection development.

 The U niversity o f M a n ito b a  Libraries re ­
ceived three grants from the Canadian Council 

 of Archives (CCA): $8,310 will be used to pro­
cess papers of Manitoba playwright and screen­

 writer Maxwell Charles Cohen; $4,800 will pro­
 cess records o f the university’s now-defunct 

Centre for Settlement Studies; and $20,000 is 
 for preservation microfilming of archival records.
 
 

 
 Acquisitions

 A  lib r a r y  o f Josiah W e d g w o o d  in fo r­
 mation collected by Elizabeth Chellis has been 
 donated by Lucille Stewart Beeson to the Bir­
 m in g h a m  M useum  o f  Art. The 1,200-volume 
 library includes a core collection of 18th-cen­
 tu ry  b o o k s  d o c u m e n tin g  th e  fa c ts  o f 

W edgw ood’s world including the impact of the 
discovery of classical artifacts on 18th-century 
European tastes. Also included are 21 letters, 

 13 o f w hich w ere inscribed or w ritten by 
 Wedgwood.
 
 H e n r y  S. V illa r d , fo rm e r U.S. a m b a s ­
 sador to three African nations, has donated his 
 papers to the Twentieth Century Archives at 
 B oston  U niversity. Villard’s career as a for­
 eign service officer spanned a period from the 
 late 1920s to the early 1960s. As a diplomat he 
 served at posts in Tehran, Rio de Janeiro, 

Caracas, and Oslo and as ambassador to Libya,

London, Jan 4/1904, The Jail Breaker.”

N o rth e rn  Illinois U n iv e rs ity  (N IU ) has
been awarded $2,475 from the Cooperative Col­
lection Management Coordinating Committee
of the State Library of Illinois for the acquisi­
tion of the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and
Lesbian Serials microfilm collection—almost all
of the major lesbian and gay publications pro­
duced in Northern California betw een 1950 and
1990 as well as a significant num ber o f lesser-
known and short-run journals. The gay press
collection already housed at Northern em pha­
sizes both the regional press of the Midwest
and the new spapers o f record from cities with
substantial homosexual communities. Accord­
ing to NIU, this acquisition will create the larg­
est single microfilm collection of this genre at
any research library in the United States. The
collection presently includes titles from Canada,
England, an d  France as well as the United
States. The NIU collection began in 1982 as a
project to create an index to The ADVOCATE
under the direction of Robert B. Marks Ridinger.

Rutgers, the State University o f N e w  Jer­
sey, h as rec eiv e d  a co n tin u a tio n  g ran t o f
$125,000 in outright funds and $108,658 in
matching funds from the National Endowment
of the Humanities. The grant supports the U.S.
C e n te r o f th e  L ex ico n  I c o n o g r a p h ic u m
Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC) for an additional
two years. The LIMC is an international project
of nearly 40 countries to publish a pictorial
dictionary o f classical mythology. The U.S.
Center is located in A lexander Library on the
Rutgers Campus.

G r a n t s  
and 

Acquisitions

The University o f Califor­
n ia , I r v in e ’s East Asian 
C o lle c tio n  r e c e n tly  r e ­
c e iv e d  tw o  g ra n ts from  
Japanese sources. For the 
second consecutive year, 
the Japan Foundation ap­
proved a two million yen 
($16,000) grant to support 
the library’s Japanese acqui­
sitions program. A $10,000 
grant was also provided by 
Toshiba International, To­
kyo (with the assistance of 
the Irvine-based Toshiba 



4 1 4  /  C&RL N ew s

Senegal, and Mauritania. The collection includes 
m a n u scrip ts from  his articles, b o o k s an d  
speeches, diaries, foreign service dispatches, and 
co rre sp o n d e n c e  from  n u m ero u s A m erican 
statesmen including Dwight Eisenhower, Chris­
tia n  H e rte r, H u b e r t H u m p h re y , J o h n  F. 
Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

M ic ro film  runs o f th e  m a jo r n e w s p a ­
pers o f record produced by the Chicago gay 
and lesbian community betw een 1973 and the 
present have been donated to the Chicago His­
torical Society by Robert B. Marks Ridinger of
Northern Illinois University in memory of the 
late Joseph Gregg, head of the Henry Gerber 
a n d  P earl M. H art Library a n d  A rchives. 
G regg d ie d  o f AIDS in 1987. T h e d o n a ­
tio n  in c lu d e s full ru n s o f The C hicago Gay
C rusader, G ay Life, W in d y  City Times, an d  
C hicago O u tlin es.

The e n tire  b o o k  collection fro m  A llian ce 
College o f Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, 
has been donated, u p o n  the college’s closing, 
by the Polish National Alliance to the Hillman 
Library at the U niversity o f  Pittsburgh CUP). 
The collection of 35,000-45,000 items consists 
mainly of Polish-language books on the his­
tory of Poland, Polish literature, and the his­
tory of Poles in America. A small part of the 
collection contains English-language books on 
the same topics. To help catalog the collection 
UP has hired a full-time cataloger, and the Pol­
ish-American Kosciuszko Foundation is send­
ing an exchange fellow from Poland to work 
for ten months beginning in the fall.

Eleven ink, pencil, a n d  w aterco lo r d r a w ­
ings of the “Yellow Kid’’ by artist Richard Felton 
Outcault (best know n for his later creation, 
“Buster Brown”) have been discovered in the 
archives at Syracuse U niversity Library. The 
“Yellow Kid” was America’s first comic strip 
superstar according to Brian W alker o f the 
Museum of Cartoon Art. The 11 illustrations 
are believed to be designs for the Yellow Kid
magazine. The Yellow Kid character was a bald, 
beady-eyed street urchin with two teeth, large 
ears, and bare feet, dressed in a formless yel­
low nightshirt.

Papers o f th e  B a rb a ria n  Press, a  sm all
press in British Columbia, have been donated
to the U niversity o f  B ritish Colum bia (UBC). 
The press had a varied output from fine mono­

 

 

 

 

graphs, miniatures, and pam phlets, to typo­
graphical oddities, broadsheets, keepsakes, and 
business cards. The papers include project files, 
financial records, and sample presswork.

UBC also received an addendum to the papers 
of Nan Cheney (1897-1985), a noted landscape 
and portrait painter, and the first medical illustrator 
at UBC (1951-1962). The addendum  includes 
editorial pages generated by the publication of 
Emily Carr’s letters to Cheney (UBC Press, 1990) 
and a large collection of medical drawings span­
ning Cheney’s career.

Actor, w rite r, an d  director Crane W ilbur's 
papers have been acquired by the U niversity 
o f  Southern California Cinema-Television Li­
brary. C orrespondence, scrapbooks, p h o to ­
graphs, diaries, and scripts are included in the 
collection which covers a 58-year show busi­
ness career encompassing motion pictures, tele­
vision, radio, and the Broadway stage. Wilbur 
first gained recognition on the stage, then rose 
to international fame as Handsome Harry, Pearl 
White’s leading man in the 1914 movie The 
Perils o f Pauline. He also produced a script for 
the 1953 3-D chiller “House of Wax.” ■

(W ashington c o n t.fro m  page 468)
library products and services. S. 2748, the Li­
brary o f Congress Fund Act of 1992, replaces 
the earlier S. I4 l6 . While the new  bill includes 
some improvements suggested by ALA’s Com­
mittee on Legislation together with the Asso­
ciation of Research Libraries and the American 
Association o f Law Libraries, problems remain.

Improvements include a clearer delineation 
of three different kinds of LC products and ser­
vices— core (no cost), national (distribution cost 
only), and specialized (full cost recovery). Pro­
tections have been added concerning deposi­
tory library distribution, copyright, and recip­
rocal exchange agreements. Problems include 
inclusion o f both direct and indirect costs of 
distribution, a broad and inclusive list of distri­
bution cost elements, and a too-limited protec­
tion against redistribution fees. An overarching 
problem is the difficulty of drawing the line 
betw een core and fee-based services, made 
even more troublesome by LC’s late addition 
of “electronic access to the contents of the col­
lections” to the list o f specialized full-cost re­
covery services. At this writing, ALA’s Commit­
tee o n  Legislation w as en g ag ed  in further 
analysis of S. 2748. ■