ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


520 / C&RL News ■ July/August 2002

G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n s Ann-Christe Young

E m o ry U n iv e rs ity  has b e e n  a w a rd e d  a 
$314,000 grant from the National Endow m ent 
for the Humanities to digitize and create an 
online database of 330 American and British 
d e te c tiv e , c rim e , a n d  r o m a n c e  n o v e ls  
authored by w om en in the late 19th and early 
20th centuries. The extensive collections of 
Emory’s Robert W. W oodruff Library and the 
Indiana University’s Lilly Library of Rare Books 
and Manuscripts will provide the source texts 
for this digitization project, w hich will create 
a digital collection of texts by w om en au­
thors as well as the largest text-based, search­
able database of digitized dim e novels. The 
period addressed by the database will roughly 
coincide with the peak of the popularity of 
dim e novels, w hich flourished in America 
from the 18ó0s through the 1920s. During the 
two-year project, staff will identify, digitally 
convert, proofread, and encode approximately 
130,00 pages from 330 literary texts.

The U niversity o f Tennessee (UT) Librar­
ies have received $500,000 from the National 
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to iden­
tify, preserve, and catalog historic n ew spa­
pers in West Tennessee, including the A d v o ­
cate a n d  Western District Intelligencer and 
the M em phis Appeal. The grant will also com ­
plete the ten-year effort to discover and cata­
log historic new spapers in Middle and East 
Tennessee. UT began identifying and describ­
ing more than 6,000 unique titles in 1994 with 
NEH funding, and they e xpect researchers to 
find 4,000 m ore titles in West Tennessee col­
lections.

Johns H o p k in s  U n iv e r s ity  has b e e n  
aw arded National Science Foundation grants 
totaling $3 million for tw o digital research 
projects in the Sheridan Libraries. Both projects 
are collaborative efforts that focus on applied 
research driven by real world educational and 
scholarly problem s, said Nancy K. Roderer, 
interim  d e a n  of university libraries. O ne 
project involves the creation of three-dim en­
sional images of ancient cuneiform  tablets, 
the oldest written docum ents in the world. 
The second project, w hich comes out of the

libraries’ Digital K now ledge Center, involves 
enhancing a data capture technique that will 
allow researchers to digitize a w ide range of 
cultural materials from ancient Greek texts to 
medieval French manuscripts to music for the 
lute from the 17th centuiy.

The C e n te r fo r  Research Libraries (CRL) 
has been  aw arded a $510,000 grant by the 
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support stra­
tegic initiatives in cataloging, the developm ent 
of distributed print archives, and cooperative 
collection developm ent. The initiatives, to be 
carried out over the next two years, will e n ­
hance CRL’s ability to catalyze cooperative 
resource building and preservation am ong its 
m em bership of North American research li­
braries and to m ore closely engage area stud­
ies specialists and scholars in those efforts.

A c q u i s it io n s

The papers o f Ben Shneiderm an, profes­
sor of com puter science at the University of 
Maryland (UM), College Park, and a m em ber 
of the Institute for Advanced Com puter Stud­
ies and of the Institute for Systems Research, 
have b een donated to 
the UM Libraries’ Ar­
c h iv e s  a n d  M a n u ­
scripts D epartm ent. 
Founder of the Soft­
w are Psychology So­
c ie ty  (1 9 7 6 ) a n d  
founding director of 
th e  UM ’s H u m a n - 
Com puter Interaction 
Lab, Shneiderman de­
veloped the notion of Ben Shneiderman
“direct m anipulation,” w hich led directly to 
the invention of the “e m b ed d ed  m en u ” or

Ed. n o t e :  S end y o u r  n e w s  to : G ra n ts  Si A c q u is itio n s , 
C&RL News, 50 E. H u ro n  St., C hicago, IL 60611-2795; 
e -m a il: a y o u n g @ a la .o rg .

mailto:ayoung@ala.org


C&RL News ■ July/August 2002 / 521

“hot link” that becam e a key contribution to 
the usability of the Web. Materials in the col­
lection, w hich include w orking papers, cor­
respondence, manuscripts, and other related 
items, span his entire career, beginning in 
1968 with his graduate studies at SUNY-Stony 
Brook and continuing to the present.

The U.S. Naval Academy's N im itz Library 
has received a generous gift of two 18th-cen­
tury letters relating to Jo h n  Paul Jones from 
Faith McCurdy of Cold Spring Harbor, New 
York. O ne letter is from George W ashington 
to John Paul Jones, dated July 22, 1787, dur­
ing the Constitutional Convention in Phila­
delphia. The other letter is from John Paul 
Jones to the editor of the Gazette de Leyde, 
w ritten “O n board the Bonhom m e Richard’s 
prize the late British Ship of War Serapis Texel 
N ovem ber 11th, 1779.” McCurdy gave the let­
ters in m em ory of her late h usband Jam es 
Am,son McCurdy, naval architect and designer 
of the sail training vessel know n as the Navy 
44. Her daughter, Sheila McCurdy, is a m em ­
ber of the Fales committee, w hich advises

Sheila McCurdy and Faith McCurdy present 
Vice Admiral John R. Ryan, superintendent 
of the Naval Academy, w ith  letters from 
George Washington and John Paul Jones, 
during a ceremony at the Nimitz Library on 
April 24, 2002.

the Naval Academy about its sailing program. 
The letters w ere presented during a ceremony 
in the Nimitz Library’s Special Collections and 
Archives Division on April 24, attended by 
faculty, staff, administrators, and other friends 
of the Academy. ■

( “Living theFuture4” continuedfrom  page 512)
T hroughout the full conference, partici­

pants experienced a continuous and active 
learning process. The format w as p u rp o se­
fully designed to encourage m eaningful dia­
log and collaborative learning, recognizing 
that all participants contribute to the learning 
of the w hole community. Even the breaks 
w ere scheduled to provide participants with 
am ple time for conversation with colleagues 
or simply time for the opportunity to reflect.

Is the w ay p eople w ork in academ ic li­
braries really changing? Is there a payoff for 
the effort involved in organizational change? 
Living the Future confirms that libraries can 
articulate future-oriented priorities and express 
am bitious quality standards b ased  o n  the 
needs of users and that staff can develop work 
styles and organizational structures to m eet 
these goals. These libraries have taken the 
leap— applause all around!2

N o tes
1. “Leap Before You Look” by W. H. Auden.
2. The LTF4 Conference Web site provides 

links to both the UA team  projects and to 
o th e r  in itia tiv e s  at h t t p : / / w w w .lib r a r y . 
arizona.ed u /co n feren ce/. ■

http://www.library
arizona.edu/conference/