april12b.indd April 2012 229 C&RL News Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: agalloway@ala.org. The New-York Historical Society has re- ceived a 2011 Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives award of $255,700, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Founda- tion, for the American Almanac Collection. This two-year year project, led by Henry Raine, director of Digital Programs and Li- brary Technical Services, will allow the New- York Historical Society to catalog a collection of approximately 5,500 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century American almanacs, greatly in- creasing scholarly access. Most of the collec- tion’s almanacs, including an estimated 600 almanacs dating from before the year 1801, were published in New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Mas- sachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but it also includes representative examples from other states east and west of the Mississippi. Highlights include the only known copies of early 18th-century editions of Daniel Leeds’s American Almanack, printed in New York by William Bradford; the earliest almanac printed in New Jersey, Poor Roger, 1760; and Confed- erate almanacs printed in Vicksburg, Missis- sippi; Mobile, Alabama; and Charleston, South Carolina. More details on the CLIR hidden col- lection projects can be found at www.clir.org /hiddencollections/awards/index2011.html. University of California (UC)-San Diego Libraries have received a $56,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Re- cords Commission (NHPRC), to begin a two- year effort to digitize the 40,000-plus items in the archive of Chicano activist Herman Baca— including correspondence, photographs, post- ers, slides, and audio interviews. When the Baca collection was received in 2004, it became the UC-San Diego Libraries’ first archival collec- tion on Chicano activism. Since that time, the collection—which is housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library—has grown to in- clude the American Friends Service Committee United States-Mexico Border Program Records (1974–2004), and the Roberto Martinez Papers (1969–2009). In the 1960s, Herman Baca, who grew up in National City, California, became a prolific Chicano activist, political organizer, printer, and founder, as well as chairman, of the Committee on Chicano Rights. Baca, who brought the emerging Chicano movement into local electoral politics through his work with the Mexican-American Political Association, is known and admired for his community-based grassroots organizing in support of civil rights and political and judicial equality. Acquisitions University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham- paign’s faculty, staff, and students now have 24/7, online access to 12 discipline-specific video collections, which together include more than 10,000 full-length streaming videos—all cross- searchable from a single interface. The univer- sity, along with Southern Illinois University-Car- bondale, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, worked together to make a significant purchase of video content from Alexander Street Press, publisher of online collections for scholarly research, teaching, and learning, for their campuses. The online collec- tions include American History in Video, Classical Music in Video, Counseling and Therapy in Vid- eo, Counseling and Therapy in Video: Volume II, Education in Video, Ethnographic Video On- line, Dance in Video, Filmmakers Library Online, Nursing Education in Video, Opera in Video, Theatre in Video, World History in Video. Users from within the university community can view and search transcripts alongside videos in this collection and create and share custom clips and playlists—all from a computer or even a mobile device, including iPhone, iPad, and Android. To assist patrons in using these online collections, the university library has created an Alexander Street Press Video Portal research guide at http:// go.library.illinois.edu/ASPlibguide. G r a n t s a n d A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway