nov13_b.indd


C&RL News November 2013 542

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

The George A. Smathers Libraries at the 
University of Florida were recently awarded 
funding from the National Endowment for 
the Humanities (NEH) to digitize approxi-
mately 100,000 pages of historic newspapers. 
The $325,000 NEH grant will provide fund-
ing support for the “Florida and Puerto Rico 
Digital Newspaper Project,” which is part 
of the state’s and territory’s participation in 
the National Digital Newspaper Program. 
The project is a collaboration between the 
Smathers Libraries and the library at the 
University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. It 
will provide a national, digital resource of 
historically significant newspapers published 
between 1836 and 1922 from Florida and 
Puerto Rico. The completed project will 
provide free, Internet-based access to news-
papers that are currently available only on 
aging microfilm. The digitized papers will 
be available through the Library of Congress 
Chronicling America (http://chronicling-
america.loc.gov/), the University of Florida 
Libraries Florida Digital Newspaper Library 
(http://ufdc.ufl.edu/fdnl1), and the Biblioteca 
Digital Puertorriqueña at the University of 
Puerto Rico (http://bibliotecadigital.uprrp.
edu/cdm/). 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has 
been awarded a $300,000 grant from the 
National Endowment for the Humanities. 
The grant will be used to fund the partial 
renovation of the existing Special Collec-
tions wing of the George C. Gordon Library, 
which will create a sustainable environment 
to preserve access to Humanities, Innovation, 
and STEM Education collections. The WPI 
collection contains documents pertaining to 
the industrial history of Central Massachusetts, 
the Charles Hill Morgan diaries, a rare book 
collection dating to the 1500s, and several 

other historic university and private docu-
ments, garments, artwork, and sculpture. The 
university archives include the original 1865 
land grant for the Worcester County Free 
Institute of Industrial Science, which later 
became WPI and was one of the nation’s 
earliest technological universities, and the 
papers of past presidents and trustees. The 
manuscript collection includes faculty and 
alumni papers, a Worcester corporate archive, 
and art and literature collections. 

A c q u i s i t i o n s

The archive of Julia Alvarez—novelist,  
poet, and essayist—has been acquired by the 
Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research 
library and museum at the University of Tex-
as-Austin. Alvarez’s extensive archive consists 
of manuscripts, correspondence, journals, 
and professional files. The manuscripts span 
her writing career and include fiction, nonfic-
tion, poetry, essays, and unpublished works, 
often in multiple drafts. Alvarez regularly sent 
drafts of her work to friends and colleagues, 
and these copies usually bear handwritten 
comments from the reader alongside Alva-
rez’s revisions. Alvarez’s correspondence in-
cludes poems and letters from fellow writers, 
such as Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, 
Dana Gioia, and Marilyn Hacker. Alvarez was 
born in New York City but raised in the Do-
minican Republic until she was 10. In 1960 
her family was forced to flee the Dominican 
Republic when it was discovered that her fa-
ther was involved in a plot to overthrow dic-
tator Rafael Trujillo. Much of Alvarez’s work 
is considered semi-autobiographical, drawing 
on her experiences as an immigrant and her 
bicultural identity. Alvarez’s unique experi-
ences have shaped and infused her writing—
from such award-winning novels as How the 
Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the 
Time of the Butterflies to her poetry. 

G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway