November 2015 563 C&RL News

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, 
C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; 
email: agalloway@ala.org.

Meadville Lombard Theological School has  
received a $37,456 grant from the Illinois State 
Library to digitize archival materials so that 
researchers can easily access primary sources 
concerning the social and political activism that 
grew out of liberal religion in Illinois. Illinois in 
Transition: Liberal Religious Activism, 1890–1983 
will digitize material relating to Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones, Preston Bradley, and Lombard College. 
Jenkin Lloyd Jones (1843–1918), a Chicago-area 
Unitarian minister, was the general secretary of 
the World Parliament of Religions during the 
1893 World’s Fair and carried the mission of 
the Parliament into the 20th century. Lombard 
College, founded in 1853 in Galesburg, Illinois, 
was a coeducational Universalist college whose 
students have had an outsized influence on 
Illinois history. Preston Bradley (1888–1983), a 
Unitarian minister, was a leading religious leader 
in Chicago whose sermons were broadcast 
across the country. 

George A. Smathers Libraries at the University 
of Florida were recently awarded supplemental 
funding from the National Endowment for the 
Humanities (NEH) to digitize more than 100,000 
additional pages of historic newspapers. The 
$288,000 NEH grant will provide funding sup-
port for the Florida and Puerto Rico Digital 
Newspaper Project, which is part of the state’s 
and territory’s participation in the National 
Digital Newspaper Program. The award supple-
ments a $325,000 grant the libraries received 
in 2013, making the total award $613,000, the 
single largest direct award ever received by the 
libraries. Led by project director Patrick Reakes 
and project manager Melissa Espino, the project 
is a collaboration between the University of 
Florida Libraries and the library at the Univer-
sity of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. It will provide 
a national, digital resource of historically sig-
nificant newspapers published between 1836 

and 1922 from Florida and Puerto Rico. The 
project provides free, Internet-based access to 
newspapers that are currently available only on 
microfilm. The digitized papers will be available 
through the Library of Congress Chronicling 
America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), 
the University of Florida Libraries Florida Digital 
Newspaper Library (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/fdnl1), 
and the Biblioteca Digital Puertorriqueña at the 
University of Puerto Rico (http://bibliotecadigi-
tal.uprrp.edu/cdm/).

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

The official congregation files of the Uni-
tarian Universalist Association have been 
acquired by Meadville Lombard Theologi-
cal School. This archival collection stretches 
over 300 linear feet and records the activities 
of more than 1,000 Unitarian, Universalist, 
and Unitarian Universalist congregations and 
fellowships during the 20th century. These 
files provide valuable insight into the growth 
of liberal religion in the 20th century.

The papers of Paul Espinosa, an award-
winning independent filmmaker, have been 
acquired by University of California-San Diego. 
Espinosa is known for his documentary and 
dramatic films focused on the U.S.-Mexican 
border region, which helped to increase aware-
ness about a host of immigration and cross-
cultural issues. Espinosa, who has been the 
recipient of eight Emmy Awards for his films, 
recently retired from Arizona State University, 
where he was on the faculty at the School of 
Transborder Studies. He continues to make 
films through his company, Espinosa Produc-
tions, now located in San Diego. The materi-
als include approximately 200 linear feet (200 
boxes) documenting Espinosa’s more than 35 
years of filmmaking, including interviews, re-
search materials, photos, and correspondence, 
as well as films scripts, DVDs, and video. 

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