ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries 167 ★ ★ ★ N ew s fr o m the f i e l d Acquisitions • Em ory University’s Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta, Georgia, has received a gift from Richard C. and M artha Kessler of rare and first editions of L utherana. The gift consists of 49 Reform ation works plus support for additional acquisitions and programs to be developed over the next six years. Included is a first edition of L uther’s September Testament of 1522, of which only 40 copies are known to exist. • Ohio State University, Columbus, and George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, have jointly acquired the collection of American Theater pro­ fessional Robert Breen. The donation by Robert and Wilva Breen includes extensive material on his activities as an actor, as the first executive director of the American National Theatre and Academy, an d as d ire c to r of th e fam e d p ro d u c tio n of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess which toured interna­ tionally w ith a cast th a t included Leontyne Price, William W arfield, and C ab Calloway. The collec­ tion includes correspondence, photographs, press releases, clippings, posters, theater groundplans, scene designs, music scores, films, and even Porgy’s cart. George Mason’s Institute on the Federal The­ atre Project and New Deal Culture will administer the ANTA and Breen’s early papers while Ohio State’s Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Library will administer the post-ANTA material, which includes the Porgy and Bess archive, m ate­ rial from the Harold Arlen show Free and Easy, and other projects. The institutions will cooperate in conducting oral and video histories, organizing symposia and traveling exhibits, and in making the collection available to scholars. • The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has acquired the literary papers of John Williams, re­ cipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his novel Augustus. The donation includes correspon­ dence, notes, worksheets, publishers’ proofs, and related m aterial. Williams’ other novels include Nothing But the Night (1948), Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and Stoner (1965). His poetry has been pub­ lished in numerous periodicals and has been widely anthologized; two published volumes are The Bro­ ken Landscape (1949) and The Necessary L ie (1965). Williams, who spent his academic career at th e U n iv ersity of D en v er (1954-1985) is th e founder of the Denver Quarterly and has held fel­ lowships and grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the American Acad­ emy and Institute of Arts and Letters, among oth­ ers. • The University of Wisconsin, Madison, re- cently acquired the archive of poet Carl Rakosi, who was educated th ere and who re tu rn e d as writer-in-residence during 1969-1970. Rakosi is the last living member of the “objectivist” poets of the 1930s; his Collected Poems have recently been published. The archive contains eighty folders of letters, notes, unpublished pieces, worksheets, typescripts, book reviews, translations and other materials, and about 20 cassettes and other tapes of interviews and readings. Grants • Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, is one of eight academic institutions in the city to share in a new network, Fenway Libraries Online, Inc. The Massachusetts Board of Library Commis­ sioners has contributed $720,226 in LSCA Title III funds for the system, together w ith a $400,000 equipment grant from Digital Equipm ent Corpo­ ration tow ard the acquisition of a VAX 8350 com­ p u te r system an d $25,000 from th e C h a rle s Hayden Foundation. The system will include an autom ated catalog and library circulation, serials control, and acquisitions systems, and will provide users w ith access to a combined collection of more than 900,000 volumes. A special feature will be dial-up access from any telephone. The FLO net­ work also includes Em m anuel College, Massachu­ setts College of Art, Massachusetts College of P har­ macy and Allied Health Sciences, the Museum of F in e A rts, th e New E n g la n d C o n se rv a to ry , W e n tw o rth I n s titu te of T ec h n o lo g y , an d Wheelock College. W entw orth will house the cen­ tral site equipment and a small staff. • The New York State Archives, Albany, has re- ceived a $191,250 grant from the National Endow ­ ment for the Humanities to arrange, describe, and microfilm more than 600 cubic feet of records that document the settlement and dvelopment of the state of New York. The grant will be m atched with funds from the State Challenge G rant program. Most of the records date from 1760 to 1860, a pe­ riod of rapid westward movement, population in­ crease, and commercial expansion. Included in the microfilming project are survey routes of the Erie Canal and other canals constructed during the pe- 168 riod, and plans that describe in detail canal locks, bridges, basins, mill races and weigh stations. Also scheduled for preservation are petitions and ap­ peals to the State canal board from thousands of in­ dividuals and firms along canal routes concerning leasing of water rights and other canal property; sale of lands; reimbursement for claims; and per­ mission to erect docks, culverts, and other struc­ tures. Selected records of the Supreme Court of Ju­ dicature, the Court of Chancery, and the Court of Errors, important state courts of the period, will also be preserved, along with records relating to land sales and settlement, some of which date from the colonial period. The project is expected to take 2 years. • New York University’s Robert F. Wagner La- bor Archives, M anhattan, has received a $50,000 state appropriation to continue preservation work. Efforts to process the archives of the Transport Workers Union, the United Federation of Teach­ ers, the Union Label Trades, and the New York State AFL-CIO archives have been underway for two years. The funds will also help establish a plan­ ning commission to lay the groundwork for a state­ wide labor documentation project. Bobst Library has received a $350,000 endow­ ment from the estate of Lillian Barry for the pur­ chase of materials for the general collections. • Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, has received a Title II-C grant of $119,784 to con­ vert the remaining titles in its Africana collection to machine-readable form. About 30,000 records re­ main unconverted, most of which represent items not found elsewhere in the United States. They will be created on the NOTIS system over a 15-month period that began in October 1987. • Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, has received a $130,000 Title II-C grant to catalog ALA telep h on e for the hearing- impaired Deaf and hearing-impaired members of the American Library Association may now com­ municate with ALA H eadquarters via tele­ phone by calling (312) 944-7298. The number links the caller to a Telecommunication Device for the Deaf (TDD) and Teletypewriter (TTY). The number is dedicated for the use of TDD callers, and will be added to the American Li­ braries masthead, Chicago telephone directo­ ries, the 1989 International Telephone Direc­ tory of TDD Users, and the ALA Handbook of Organization. The unit is a portable Intele-type housed in ALA’s Office Services unit. Office Services staff will receive and route messages to appropriate ALA offices for a response. All responses to TDD messages or calls will be input by Office Services staff using the TDD terminal. seven First Amendment Freedom collections, in­ cluding the Ralph E. McCoy Collection and the Theodore Schroeder Papers and Library. These and other smaller collections total more than 10,000 volumes, rare and fugitive pamphlets and printed ephem era, briefs, correspondence and manuscripts relating to freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. The items date from the 17th century to the present and will be entered onto OCLC. • The University of California, Berkeley, has re- ceived an NEH grant of nearly $500,000 to support the preservation of European language and litera­ ture materials and to preserve some 22,000 badly deteriorated volumes. The university will match the grant, one of 14 NEH grants awarded for a to­ tal of more than $3.2 million. • The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will use part of a $2,079,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation (see C&RL News, December 1987, p. 723) to establish an electronic network that will link its holdings to five public libraries in the state. Michigan will use the funds to purchase Telefax e q u ip m en t and m icro co m p u ters as p a r t of a planned five-year project known as M-Link. The remainder of the funds, part of a grant exceeding $4.7 million to five academic libraries in the state, will be used for retrospective conversion. The other institutions are Michigan State University, Wayne State University, the Detroit Public Library, and the Library of Michigan in Lansing. • The University of Vermont, Burlington, has received a Title II-C grant of $90,000 for the iden­ tification, acquisition and cataloging of Canadian documents on acid rain. The funds will strengthen ongoing research conducted into the problem by the Colleges of Medicine, Agriculture and Life Sci­ ences, the School of Natural Resources and the U.S Forestry Station in Burlington. A selection of docu­ ments will be forwarded to the National Agricul­ tural Library to be scanned, digitized and mas­ tered onto CD-ROM disks for distribution to 42 land-grant libraries as a full-text database on acid rain. • The University of Wisconsin System has been awarded a $3,000 grant from the Council on Li­ brary Resources to develop, distribute and analyze a questionnaire regarding the information needs and information-seeking practices of scholars in Women’s Studies. The questionnaire will be de­ signed by women’s studies librarians at the Madi­ son and Milwaukee campuses; their findings will help improve library-generated reference publica­ tions in the discipline. • Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, has received a $100,000 fund from George A. Mas­ terton, retired Wayne State librarian, in memory of his late wife. Income from the endowment will support the Mary Dickey M asterton Award, a manuscript prize for outstanding women authors who publish w ith the W ayne State University 169 Press. The fund has already provided support for two publications; only manuscripts in the hum ani­ ties and social sciences are eligible. • Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, has received a $500,000 NEH matching grant to preserve some 23,000 volumes and serial items items relating to European history. ■ ■ .P E O P L E . Profiles Lawrence D owler, librarian of the Houghton Library at Harvard University and special assistant to the director of Houghton since 1985, has been appointed associate li­ brarian for public ser­ vices in th e H a rv a rd College Library. D o w ler joined th e College Library staff in 1982 as associate librar­ ian with administrative responsibilities for rare books, manuscripts and special collections and general oversight of col­ lection development. As part of his new position he will oversee the im­ Lawrence Dowler plementation of an on­ line catalog in the Houghton Library. Before coming to Harvard, Dowler was acting director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and associate librarian of the Sterling Li­ brary at Yale University. He was instrumental in the planning and development of the AMC format that has become standard for machine-readable bibliographic control of manuscripts and archives, and directed the H arvard-Radcliffe M anuscript Survey and Guide Project, which covered 48 repos­ itories. Professionally active in research library forums and special collections concerns, Dowler serves on a number of collection and access-related commit­ tees at Harvard and elsewhere. In the summer of 1987 he conducted research at the University of Michigan in the uses and users of special collections as the recipient of a Mellon Fellowship. Dowler is a scholar in American history who holds a Ph.D. (1974) from the University of Mary­ land. J ames F. W illiams II, associate director of li­ braries at Wayne State University, has been named director of libraries at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Williams began his career at Wayne State in 1968 and was appointed associate director in 1981. He has served as a member of the U.S delegation to the People’s Republic of China on Exchange of Biomedical C om m unications, Presidential a p ­ pointee to the Board of Regents of the National Li­ brary of Medicine, delegate to the Michigan White House Conference on Libraries and Information Science, and d irec to r of the K entucky-O hio- Michigan Regional Medical Library Network. People in the news Anne K. Beaubien, director of the Michigan In­ form ation Transfer Source at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has been awarded a distin­ guished Alumna Award by the the School of Infor­ mation and Library Studies at Michigan. Beau­ bien, who received her bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University, joined the library staff in 1971 as a reference librarian and bibliographic instructor. In 1980 she was chosen to head MITS, a fee-based inform ation brokerage unit of the li­ brary. Beaubien has been active in ACRL, serving on the Board of Directors, as well as on the execu­ tive board of the Michigan Chapter of the Special Libraries Association. She is a member of the Mich­ igan Online Users Group, and in 1982 was honored as “Woman of the Year” by the Ann Arbor chapter of the Business and Professional Women’s Club. Richard M. D ougherty, director of the library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, since 1978, will step down at the end of the academic year. Pie will maintain his appointment as profes­ sor in the School of Information and Library Stud­ ies. Before coming to Michigan, where he has been instrumental in the development of MIRLYN, a campus-wide network, Dougherty was university librarian at the University of California at Berkeley