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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, January 2007
Vol. 68, No. 1

by Ann-Christe Galloway

The Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries have been awarded a $185,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create a prototype system that will capture and preserve the massive digital datasets generated by large-scale astronomy projects for the Virtual Observatory (VO). The VO is a Hopkins-led effort to develop a common set of standards in a Web framework for digital astronomy. Johns Hopkins will establish a collaboration of publishers, libraries, and the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) to give astronomers universal access to the specially processed digital images, spectra, and time series that are graphically represented in scientific literature.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas-Austin has completed work to preserve and catalog a large portion of the center’s modern French literary manuscript and visual arts holdings with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award made possible the arranging, housing, and description of five sizable modern French collections, specifically the Ransom Center’s Carlton Lake collection, widely recognized as one of the finest research collections of modern French materials outside of France; the Princess Marthe Bibesco papers; the William Bradley Literary Agency records; the Edouard Dujardin papers; and the Artine Artinian collection. The collections include diverse works in history, literature, music, philosophy, photography, religion, and women’s studies by such important literary and cultural figures as Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Georges Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, James Joyce, Pierre Louÿs, Henry Miller, Henri-Pierre Roché, Maurice Saillet, Erik Satie, Gertrude Stein, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The department created archival finding aids for each collection, including biographical sketches, scope and content notes, series descriptions and detailed indices of manuscript titles, correspondence, and photographic materials present in the collections. The finding aids for each collection can be found at the Texas Archival Resources Online Web site at www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/.

Acquisitions
The archive of The New Leader, a magazine of political opinion and cultural criticism, has been acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Founded in 1924 as a newspaper of the American Democratic Socialist movement, it went on to publish some of the most influential intellectual figures of the 20th century. The Columbia Libraries will also host Myron Kolatch, The New Leader’s executive editor from 1962 through its final issue in 2006, for a five-year appointment to develop an active New Leader Web site, put together a New Leader anthology, and write a history of the magazine. During its 82 years of publication, The New Leader provided one of the first American forums for Soviet-era dissidents, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Djilas, and Joseph Brodsky, as well as for the vanguard of the U.S. civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., whose “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” appeared in the magazine’s June 24, 1963, issue.

A major collection of photo postcards has been acquired by Angelo State University (ASU). The postcards and other materials on the borderlands augment ASU’s holdings on the Mexican Revolution and expand its overall collection of Mexican holdings for the period between the 1870s and 1940s. The West Texas Collection historical repository at ASU acquired the collection from collector Russ Todd, who amassed a collection of some 8,500 postcards during his career as a bookseller and collector. The collection was acquired for $81,250 through an anonymous gift to the Friends of the Porter Henderson Library and West Texas Collection. Of the 8,500 postcards, approximately 8,000 are photo postcards, meaning they are images made by photographic rather than printing processes, thus providing a higher quality image. The images include extensive shots from the Mexican-U.S. border as well as the Pacific Coast, including Mazatlán before 1914. The collection also includes numerous books, railroad brochures, photograph albums, pamphlets, posters, maps, and other ephemera.

_{A 1954 Polaroid test photograph of company founder Edwin H. Land.}

The K. Marie Stolba collection has been bequeathed to the Colorado Christian University (CCU) Library. Stolba, an author, violinist, composer, musicologist, and educator, served on the faculty of CCU as distinguished lecturer and visiting professor of music from 1993 until her death in 2005. She was the author of the widely used text The Development of Western Music: A History, as well as several scholarly articles and monographs. After her death in 2005, she gifted a significant portion of her estate to CCU and her entire personal library, which included more than 2,000 items: books, music CDs, slides, original scores, research materials for articles. 

The Harvard Business School’s Baker Library (HBS) has acquired the Polaroid Corporation’s archives. Housed in the library’s Historical Collections, the Polaroid Corporation Collection includes approximately 4,000 linear feet of materials dating from the company’s founding in 1937 to the present—and chronicling the invention of instant photography by Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land. Artifacts within the collection include sunglasses, military goggles, 3D glasses, and examples of many of the camera models and accessories Polaroid produced from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. Notable items within the collection are research and development files and patent records that detail the company’s many innovations, including Land’s early work with polarizing lenses and the invention of instant photography. The firm’s marketing and publicity efforts are well documented by an extensive collection of advertising materials, product packaging, and corporate publications. The collection also contains a vast and comprehensive set of photographs taken by Polaroid employees and professional photographers from 1937 to the 1990s. These images were taken for research purposes during the testing of new Polaroid products and as part of the company’s advertising campaigns.

The institutional archive of the Penumbra Theatre Company has been acquired by the University of Minnesota Libraries, which will become part of the Givens Collection of African American Literature. The archive includes the historical documentation of the theatre, as well as the personal and artistic papers of Penumbra Founder and Artistic Director Lou Bellamy, who is also on the faculty of the University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Dance. Once the Penumbra archive is catalogued and processed, it will be available for research and study by the general public as well as University students, faculty and staff. Penumbra, founded in 1976, was born of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement and the tenet that an artist’s ethics and aesthetics must be one. The theatre has garnered critical acclaim for creating an authentic voice and style for African American theatre and achieved national recognition as a pioneer in crosscultural dialogue.

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