ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries March 1989 / 223 Ninety years and still trying Some things never change? In the fight against the poor quality of paper used in library materials, apparently not. The following quote is from the Report of the Librarian of Congress, printed in the Message fro m the President o f the United States to the Two Houses o f Congress, published in 1899 un­ der the McKinley Administration. “The attention of Congress has been called to the questionable quality of the paper upon which so much of the Library material is printed. The same criticism may apply to the paper used in other forms of Government records, although with that we have only a minor concern. The deleterious process in the making of modern paper, arising es­ pecially from cheapness, and the wood pulp and chemicals used, in the interests of economy, de­ stroy its texture and durability. We have in our L i­ brary printed journals going back to the time of C h arles I I , over 230 years old, the paper as staunch, the ink as clear, as when they came from the press. Under modern conditions of paper man­ ufacture, the press sending forth from day to day so much that is perishable— newspapers crumbling in the readers’ hands— the question may well arise, as affecting not only our own, but all modern li­ braries, as to how much of our collections will be­ come useless because of the deterioration and disin­ tegration of the paper used in the cheaper forms of literature. “The Prussian Government having taken up the question, so far as it affected the integrity of Ger­ man records, the L ib ra ry has been enabled, through the kindness of our American embassy in Berlin, to obtain a copy of the Prussian regula­ tions.... “While this important question might readily come under Government control, nothing being more essential than the physical integrity of the na­ tional archives, so far as the Library is concerned a remedy could be found under the operation of the copyright law. An amendment that no copyright should issue until articles in printed form should be printed on paper of a fixed grade would remedy the evil, so far as the im portant libraries are con­ cerned. There would be no trouble to the publisher beyond the cost of a few special sheets of paper and a slight delay in the presswork; and when the value of the franchise involved in a copyright is remem­ bered the guaranty thus exacted as to the quality of the paper would be slight return for the privilege. Extra cost of those special sheets would be cheer­ fully borne by the libraries, and in the end become to the publisher a profit rather than a loss.” Our great-grandparents made a bid for perma­ nent paper in 1899; perhaps our generation can make some progress by 1999?— GME. UU News From The Field Acquisitions •The Library of Congress, Washington, D .C ., has acquired the collections of the National Trans­ lations Center (NTC) from the John Crerar L i­ brary of the University of Chicago. NTC is an in­ ternational depository and referral center for helping users locate unpublished translations of foreign-language literature in the natural, physi­ cal, medical, and social sciences. Its files contain information on the whereabouts of approximately 1,000,000 translations, including 400,000 full-text translations held directly by the center. The trans­ fer is being made to strengthen the activities of the NTC by collocating it with the collections of the L i­ brary of Congress. The Library has also acquired the papers of Ar- mand Hammer, 90, board Chairman of Occiden­ tal Petroleum Corporation. Hammer’s career has spanned most of the 20th century and includes con­ tacts with most of the Soviet leadership from Lenin to G orbachev; all Am erican Presidents since Hoover; and numerous other world leaders. Corre­ spondence in the collection includes letters from Lenin, as well as items relating to Hammer’s strong support for Roosevelt’s foreign policy on the eve of World W ar II; his involvement in post-war famine relief; and his efforts to help resolve U .S.-U .S.S.R . tensions regarding detente, the state of Israel, the plight of Jewish refuseniks, the release of journalist Nick Daniloff, and the conflict in Afghanistan. The collection also includes an extensive amount of mi­ crofiche containing replicas of personal letters, dating back as early as 1825, written by prominent 19th- and 20th-century artists such as John Consta­ ble, Rembrandt Peale, Winslow Homer, and John 224 / C&-RL News Singer Sargent. The m icrofiche are from Knoedler’s Gallery in New York, the oldest art gal­ lery in the country, of which Hammer is chairman. •The State University of New York at Albany has acquired the papers of emigre economists Karl Pribram (1877-1973) and George F. Rohrlich (1914- ) for its German Intellectual Emigre Collection. Pribram worked in the German gov­ ernment and as a professor and researcher in both Germany and the U.S. Rohrlich also worked for the German government, then became a professor in the U.S. The papers include correspondence, manuscripts, offprints, and other materials per­ taining to the economists’ lives and work. •The State University of New York at Buffalo Foundation has acquired for its archives the most significant papers of Congressman Jack Kemp, who served in the Congress for 18 years. In 1988 he declined to run for re-election and has since been appointed by President Bush as Director of Hous­ ing and Urban Development. The papers include Kemp’s campaign files and economic papers detail­ ing his interests in international trade, tax reform programs, urban enterprise zones, and proposed changes in housing laws. •The University of Kentucky Library, Lex­ ington, has received two donations of family pa­ pers that provide unique glimpses into life during the 19th century. The first group, donated by Hazel Green, documents the life of Lexington resi­ dent Samuel S. Oldham, a freed slave, and his fam­ ily between 1830 and 1870. Included is an 1849 let­ ter of introduction signed by Lexington’s mayor, and an 1851 contract whereby Oldham’s daughter Fanny is sold to her father and her husband for the purpose of emancipating her. The second group of papers was donated by the Storey family of Lex­ ington and contains personal letters exchanged among members of several Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas families as early as 1841. The letters de­ scribe life during the settlement of Texas, the Civil W ar, and post-war industrialization and land speculation. •The University of Oregon’s Knight Library, Eugene, has opened the records of the Interna­ tional Woodworkers of America (IWA) to re­ searchers. The records, donated to the university in July 1987 upon division of the international union into two national unions, span the years 1936 to 1987 and fill nearly 600 linear feet of shelf space. They consist of correspondence, minutes, proceed­ ings, negotiation files, expired contracts, legal and financial documents, and officer and departmen­ tal records. Well-documented are the union’s basic activities in the areas of organizing, negotiating, litigating, and striking. Other topics of interest in­ clude the conflict between the “red bloc” and the “white bloc” forces in the union during the 1940s and 1950s; the issue of Canadian softwood lumber imports; national health insurance; labor law re­ form; affirmative action; and occupational safety and health. •The University of Texas at Arlington’s Special Collections Department has acquired the photo­ graphs of the late Fort Worth commercial photog­ rapher Will S. Wood Jr. Wood owned and oper­ ated the B ill Wood Photo Company from 1937-1973; his father had begun the business in 1930. The collection includes 9,000 black and white prints and 35 negatives dating from 1939-1967. The photographs of such subjects as weddings, family gatherings, business enterprises, manufacturing processes, machinery, real estate, and inventions, document both the rapid changes of technology and fashions of the period, and the enduring rituals of home and family life. Grants • Cornell University has received a $360,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for its John M. Echols Southeast Asia Collection Projects. The award is part of $8 million given by the Luce Foun­ dation to several Southeast Asia centers including the Library of Congress and the Research Libraries Group. The money will be used at Cornell for pres­ ervation, microfilming, and online catalog conver­ sion, as well as for the creation of a graduate stu­ dent post for candidates in the write-up stage of their dissertations, who will prepare bibliographic essays about Cornell’s holdings in their language of expertise. Cornell has the most extensive holdings in Indonesian, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Vietnam­ ese, and Lao outside of those countries, but no ade­ quate descriptions of those vernacular collections exist. Other projects involve filming manuscripts in Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand; retrospective conversion of existing vernacular holdings; and continued assistance to university library develop­ ment in Burma and Cambodia as part of exchange agreements. •Drexel University’s College of Information Studies, Philadelphia, has received a grant of more than $100,000 from the Department of Education to enable five of its faculty members to study the im pact of library automation at Bryn Mawr, H averford, and Sw arthm ore Colleges. The “Drexel Tri-College Research Project” will focus on the impact of the three colleges’ shift from man­ ual catalogs to a joint online catalog of their hold­ ings. Begun in October 1988, the project will con­ tinue until September 1991. •The Harvard University Library, Cambridge, has been awarded a $120,000 Title II-C grant from the Strengthening Research Library Resources Pro­ gram to film materials too fragile or rare to with­ stand heavy use of interlibrary lending, and to im­ prove bibliographic control of its collections of master microfilm negatives. The grant will enable the library to preserve research materials in six ar­ eas: 10-K reports of the Securities and Exchange Commission; rare books in block-print from the Productivity is a critical concern in today’s library. That’s why more and more decision makers are looking into Faxon. We can be the best source for all of your journal and continuation subscriptions. Our services enable you to devote your valuable person­ nel resources to other crucial library functions. As a full service agent with access to more than 200,000 different periodicals, we can handle ordering, claiming, check-in, and routing. Our growing international network links you to other libraries, publishers, online systems, and networks. If you can profit from improved productivity, a call to Faxon figures. 1-800-225-6055 or 1-617-329-3350 (collect) foion The Faxon Company 15 Southwest Park Westwood, MA 02090 2 2 6 / C & R L News 13th to 15th centuries; American Unitarian Associ­ ation letter-books from 1841 to 1850; Austrian and German labor newspapers devoted to individual industries; the papers of landscape architect Charles Eliot; and scrapbook collections including correspondence and ephemera of noteworthy U.S. women. Records of master negatives will be pre­ pared for input in the national databases and for production of special lists. Film copies of every­ thing reproduced will be available for loan. •The Ohio University Libraries, Athens, have been awarded a $104,705 II-C grant for cataloging into the OCLC database more than 4,000 mono­ graphic titles produced by the Library of Congress Jakarta Office’s Southeast Asia Microfiche Project in 1987-1988. With the completion of this project, all of the fiche produced since the program’s incep­ tion in 1978, except 1,100 serial titles produced in 1987-1988, will be available on the O CLC system and as Major Microforms Projects for tape-loading into local systems. •The Research Libraries Group, Stanford, Cal­ ifornia, has been awarded a $1 million NEH Office of Preservation grant to support the Great Collec­ tions Microfilming Project aimed at filming some 27,000 volumes of the key scholarly collections of R L G ’s members. The three-year project, begin­ ning in October 1989, will involve the libraries of seven RLG member institutions: Columbia, Cor­ nell, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Uni­ versities, and the New York Public Library. The subject areas targeted for filming include Ameri­ can history, German literature, Chinese history, and other humanities disciplines. RLG has also been awarded a $385,697 grant from the National Historical Publications and Rec­ ords Commission to enable six state and two mu­ nicipal archives to participate in a two-year, online government records project. The eight archives in­ clude the state archives of Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Virginia, along with the District of Columbia archives and the Georgia Historical Society (official archives of the city of Savannah). They will add some 30,000 entries—principally descriptions of government and other organizational records—to the RLIN database, which received more than 27,000 rec­ ords from seven other state archives in 1988. • The University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at San Diego have received jointly a $60,000 grant from the Japan- United States Friendship Commission to support Japanese acquisitions in their libraries. • The University of Missouri-Columbia L i­ braries have received a $500,000 NEH challenge grant to establish two endowments for library col­ lections in the humanities, one for acquisitions and another for preservation. The fund is expected to generate $90,000 to $100,000 for acquisitions an­ nually, which could provide approximately 3,000 volumes. Materials that might be underwritten by the endowment include musical recordings on compact disk, subscriptions to scholarly journals, foreign language works, music scores, back files of important journals on microfilm, and databases and/or full-text retrieval systems on CD-ROM or laser disks. The endowment for preservation would produce an estim ated $ 4 0 ,0 0 0 annually, and would be used to restore or microfilm the Libraries’ collections in history and literature. News notes •The California State University, Long Beach, Library held its millionth-volume celebration on December 8, 1988. The address for the occasion was delivered by Robert Wedgeworth, dean of the School of Library Service, Columbia University, following presentation ceremonies and the first public demonstration of the library’s newly in­ stalled NOTIS catalog. A first edition of the 1828 American Dictionary o f the English Language in two volumes by Noah Webster was presented to university president Curtis L. McCray as the mil­ lionth and millionth and first volumes. The dictio­ nary was a gift of the Library Associates, a commu­ nity support organization. The Oxford English Dictionary on Com pact Disk, produced by T ri­ Star Publishing in 1988, was presented as the first title in the second million. The compact disk is a gift from the Associated Students, a university stu­ dent governance organization. A special poster was designed for the occasion (see cover). •Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, has established the Larry E arl Bone Collection on American Literature in honor of Bone’s outstand­ ing contribution to the library profession. Bone, who served as Mercy’s director of libraries for 12 years, retired at the end of January 1989 but re­ mains on the faculty as a professor of library sci­ ence. •A New Mexico Consortium of Academic L i­ braries has been established by the state’s two- and four-year colleges and universities. Phyllis Dillard, coordinator of the Dona Ana Branch Community College L ib rary and Media C enter, has been elected the consortium’s first president; Hiram Davis, New Mexico State University dean of li­ braries, is president-elect; and Julia White, New Mexico State University-Carlsbad librarian, is secretary-treasurer. The consortium is designed to provide academic librarians with a forum for the discussion of common goals and ongoing commun­ ication among academic libraries in New Mexico. It will provide the means to devise and carry out statewide projects of common usefulness such as enhanced cooperation in resource sharing, collec­ tion development, and improved funding for li­ brary acquisitions. ■ ■