December 2021 C&RL News557

G r a n t s  &  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, at email: 
agalloway@ala.org.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services 
has given 78 awards totaling $22.7 million to 
support libraries across the country. The FY 
2021 awards were made through National 
Leadership Grants for Libraries and the Laura 
Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. Na-
tional Leadership Grants for Libraries support 
projects that address significant challenges and 
opportunities facing the library and archives 
fields and have the potential to advance theory 
and practice with new tools, research findings, 
models, services, practices, or alliances that 
will be widely used. 

California State-Los Angeles and the University  
of Southern California have been awarded a 
nearly $500,000 grant from the Council on 
Library and Information Resources to digitize 
Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial materi-
als. Through the three-year Digitizing Hidden 
Special Collections and Archives grant, the 
universities will receive support for the digi-
tization of cultural artifacts, rare books, and 
photography collections from their libraries. 
The project aims to preserve a diverse and vi-
sually compelling record of Mesoamerican and 
Spanish colonial cultures and many facets of 
the region’s complex history. 

Acquisitons

The Library of Congress has acquired the 
M.C. Migel Memorial Rare Book Collection 
from the American Foundation for the Blind, 
comprised of more than 750 items dating from 
1617 to the present, including books by and 
about Hellen Keller and other blind authors. 
The collection is a treasure trove of seminal 
books on blindness, maps, rare pamphlets and 
many volumes of poetry, biographies, and au-

tobiographies. Among the rare finds in the 
collection are books that provide a historical 
perspective on changing social attitudes toward 
the blind and innovations in the treatment and 
education of the blind over the past 300 years. 
There are books by or about Samuel Gridley 
Howe (1801–76), considered the founder of 
education for the blind in the United States 
and whose activism included advocating for the 
abolition of slavery, prison reform, support for 
refugees from Crete, and caring for intellectu-
ally disabled children. The collection includes 
a copy of Howe’s Atlas of the United States Printed 
for the Use of the Blind published in 1837 and 
written in raised roman type. Robert Irwin, the 
first director of the American Foundation for 
the Blind, began the collection in 1926 with 
a $1,000 grant approved by the board to cre-
ate a definitive reference library for the blind-
ness field. As the library donations grew from 
around the country, the foundation hired li-
brarian Helga Lende to manage the collection. 
Lende expanded it by traveling to Europe and 
acquiring volumes in English, French, Span-
ish, German, Italian, Esperanto, Dutch, Polish, 
and Norwegian. The earliest book in the col-
lection, published in France in 1617, concerns 
Louis Grotto, an Italian ambassador and ora-
tor who was blind, and is titled Les Harangues 
de Louys Grotto, Aveugle D’Hadrie Admirable 
en Eloquence (The Speeches of Louys Grotto, A 
Blind Man Famed for His Eloquence). The first 
landmark book in the library is Denis Diderot’s 
Lettre Sur Les Aveugles À l’Usage de Ceux Qui 
Voyent (A Letter Regarding the Blind for the At-
tention of Those Who See), published in 1749. 
Considered radical in its day, the book explores 
the effect of all five senses on the intellect and 
what happens when there is loss of sight. Works 
in the collection also highlight the expansion of 
tactile methods of reading beginning in the late 
18th century. The Migel library includes the 
1839 edition of Louis Braille’s book explaining 
his invention of a tactile six-dot reading and 
writing system rather than raised letters of the 
alphabet.  

mailto:agalloway@ala.org