ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries 276 / C & R L N ew s ★ ★ ★ N e w s f r o m t h e f i e l d Acquisitions • The Atlanta Historical Society, Georgia, has received the sound archives of the public radio pro­ gram Southw ind from its creator, journalist Boyd Lewis. Originally funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Southw ind was a program of “new sounds from the old Confederacy,” incorpo­ rating interviews, music, and com m entary on vari­ ous aspects of Southern culture, history and poli­ tics. Among the topics included were black history, Southern Appalachia, religion, wom en’s issues and literature. For six years until January 1987, the program aired bi-weekly on Atlanta Public Radio, WABE–FM, and was broadcast via satellite to other parts of the United States for approximately three years. The collection consists of more than 170 half-hour program tapes, scripts, and more than 50 hours of field interviews w ith authors, m u­ sicians, civil rights and other community leaders, and educators, as well as w ith ordinary people. In addition to making the collection accessible to re­ searchers, the Society plans to make the program available to special audiences in Atlanta, including prison inmates, the handicapped, senior citizens, etc., through a series of audio salons featuring ex­ cerpts of the program w ith com m entary by Lewis and a team of humanities scholars. Lewis has also donated a collection of some 10,000 negatives from his work as an Atlanta photo journalist in the 1970s. • T he Johns H opkins U niversity’s M ilton S. Eisenhower Library, Special Collections D epart­ ment, Baltimore, has received fifty years of music correspondence from the noted Am erican sheet music collector Lester S. Levy. Among the corres­ pondents represented in the collection, which cov­ ers 1933 to 1983, are Irving Berlin, H arry Dichter, Arthur Fiedler, Foster Hall, James J. Fuld, Ira Gershwin, Joseph Muller, Rosa Ponselle, Richard Rodgers, and Elliott Shapiro. Levy had previously given the Library his extensive sheet music collec­ tion, which consists of more than 33,000 items. The correspondence details how it was assembled and how it has been used by researchers. • Portland State University, Oregon, recently received from Charles A. LeG uin, professor of French history, a collection of books dealing w ith the French Revolution and the Napoleonic E m ­ pire, the period from 1789 to 1815. Most of the 500 volumes are basic historical texts published in France in the 19th century. A notable item is the 40-volume set of the Histoire Parlementaire de la révolution Française (1834-1838), taken from the proceedings of the French assembly. The collection also features a reprint edition of L ’Ancien M oni­ teur, the revolutionary newspaper published be­ tween May of 1789 and November of 1799. • Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, has received more than 200 cartons containing the diaries, papers, books, and correspondence of Alice Paul (1885-1977), a pio­ neer in the fight for wom en’s suffrage in the United States and the author of the Equal Rights Amend­ ment. The papers are the donation of the Alice Paul Centennial Foundation, a feminist group based in southern New Jersey, w hich has also d o nated Paul’s clothing, banners, jewelry, campaign b u t­ tons, and her desk—which allegedly once belonged to Susan B. Anthony—to the Smithsonian Institu­ tion. Both collections were bought by the Founda­ tion at the auction of the estate of Paul’s nephew, D onald, in F eb ru ary . T he collection includes Paul’s letters to her family, w ritten while she was c a m p a ig n in g for su ffrag e in E n g la n d d u rin g 1907-1910; correspondence relating to her leader­ ship of the National W omen’s Party, and docum en­ tation of her extensive investigations of the legal statu s of w om en in co u n tries th ro u g h o u t th e world. The m aterial will be processed and pre­ served w ith the assistance of a grant from the W il­ liam Bingham Foundation of Cleveland, Ohio. • The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has received the papers, manuscripts and drawings of noted children’s author E .L . Konigsburg, whose work has been aw arded the prestigious Newberry Medal. The highest honor in children’s literature was given to Konigsburg’s second book, From the Mixed-Up Files o f Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in 1968. Her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, W illiam McKinley and Me, Elizabeth, published a year earlier, was a Newberry Honor winner. The author of 12 books, Konigsberg did graduate work in chemistry at Pitt from 1952 to 1954 and is a grad­ uate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie–Mellon University. Grants • Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, has received a $600,000 gift for retrospective con­ version of humanities and social sciences holdings in the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. The gift was m ade by Rockefeller’s sons, Laurance S. and David Rockefeller. It will enable the Rockefeller Library M ay 1987 / 277 to catalog approximately half of its 750,000 titles in machine–readable form. At present, less than 19% of the Library’s holdings are available online. • The Research Libraries Group, Stanford, Cal- ifornia, has been awarded $210,291 in outright funds plus $30,000 in matching funds by the Na­ tional Endowm ent for the Humanities’ Office of Preservation for a Chinese materials preservation m icrofilm ing p ro ject. In ad d itio n , a g ra n t of $30,000 has been made by the Henry Luce Foun­ dation. D uring the two-year project, which began last September, six RLG members (the Hoover In ­ stitution at Stanford University, Columbia Univer­ sity , P rin c e to n U n iv ersity , th e U n iv ersity of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago’s East Asian Library, and Yale University) plus the Library of Congress will film Chinese-language monographs, serials, and newspapers published between 1880 and 1949. The project was devel­ oped by RLG’s East Asian Program Committee to preserve the intellectual content of brittle or en­ dangered materials im portant to East Asian schol­ arly research. It is believed that many of the m ate­ rials to be preserved may be held only in North America, having disappeared in China as a conse­ quence of various political instabilities during the first half of this century, including the losses Chi­ nese libraries experienced during the Cultural Rev­ olution (1966-1969). • The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has re- ceived the donation of nearly $2 million from the estate of the late Peggie Jean G am barana, a real es­ tate developer, for the establishment of two library endowments. The gift is the largest ever received by the library and one of the largest ever to be given to the university. The Eddie and Peggie Jean G am ­ barana Endowm ent (named also in honor of Gam- barana’s late husband, a former hotel food and beverage director) will enhance the library’s Col­ lege of Hotel Administration Collection, which in­ cludes the library’s gaming collection. The R.J. Kaltenborn Endowm ent, named for Mrs. Gam- barana’s father, a Las Vegas developer, will sup­ port the library’s Howard R. Hughes School of E n­ gineering Collection. Excess funds from the annual income may be used to benefit other areas of the li­ brary. News Notes • The University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis­ tration’s Langley Research Center, Ham pton, Vir­ ginia, signed an agreement in January designating the University as a NASA Teacher Resource Cen­ ter. The designation was a result of a proposal by the NASA facility and the UNCC Mathematics and Science C en ter. U N C C ’s Atkins L ib ra ry now houses and administers the new Center. UNCC be­ comes one of 14 such centers around the country and the first in the southeast. NASA Teacher Re­ source Centers provide educators with an opportu­ 278 / C &R L News nity to utilize materials descriptive of NASA aero­ space discoveries in th e fields of science, engineering, and technology. Resources include vi­ deotape programs, slide/audiocassette programs, lesson plans, and NASA publications. ■ ■ . P E O P L E . Profiles Susan P. Besemer, associate director of library services at the State University of New York Col­ lege at Buffalo, has been named director of the li­ brary at the SUNY Col­ lege at Fredonia. Besemer had served at B uffalo since 1975, w here she received the C hancellor’s Award of Excellence in Librarian- ship. P rio r to her a p ­ pointment at Buffalo she was music librarian at Kentucky State Univer­ sity. B esem er holds a bachelor’s degree in En­ glish lite r a tu r e from Susan P. Besemer SUNY-Albany, an MLS from Indiana University (1967), and a master’s degree in creative studies from Buffalo (1980). She is currently taking courses tow ard an advanced studies certificate at SUNY- Buffalo. Besemer has w ritten many articles for library and education journals, and is the author of From Museums, Galleries, and Studios: A Guide to A rt­ ists on Film and Tape, published by the Green­ wood Press. Charlene E . Renner has been named dean of li­ braries at Western Michigan University, Kalama­ zoo. Renner previously served as associate director of libraries for bibliographic control at the University of Washington (1984-1987), as assistant director for technical services at Iow a State University (1982-1984), and held several positions at the Uni­ versity of Illinois (1965-1982), culminating in assis­ tant director for central processing. She has also worked at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Ohio State University, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania. While at the Univer­ sity of Illinois, Renner was involved in the autom a­ tion process, supervising a massive transfer of m a­ terials from the main stacks to storage while a new stack addition was being constructed. At the Uni­ versity of Washington she was again involved in the establishment of an integrated online library system and participated in a $28 million addition to the main library. She was one of five librarians selected by the Council on Library Resources to participate in the Academic Library Management Intern Program in 1980-1981, serving at the Uni­ versity of California, Berkeley. Renner has published several articles and p a­ pers, and has served on and chaired a number of ALA committees, including the editorial board of College & Research Libraries (1980-1983). She has served on the OCLC Users Council (as a delegate from Pacnet), and was the University of Washing­ ton Libraries’ representative to the Western Li­ brary Network Users Group. Renner holds bache­ lor’s (1958) and master’s (1959) degrees in English literature from Northwestern University and an MLS from Drexel University (1964). Robert Earle Skinner has been named director of the library at Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans. He had previously been a senior con­ sultant on the staff of Robert L. Siegel & Asso­ ciates, a New Orleans consulting firm. S kinner was p re v i­ ously a member of the D epartm ent of Medical B ib lio g ra p h y at th e Louisiana State Univer­ sity Medical C enter in New O rlean s (1979- 1984), and senior search analyst at the U.S. Air F orce School of Aero­ Robert Skinner space Medicine in San Antonio, Texas (1977- 1979). Between 1970 and 1974, Skinner served in the U.S. Coast Guard as a petty officer. He re­ ceived a bachelor’s degree in history from Old Do­ minion University and an MLS from Indiana Uni­ versity in 1977.