C&RL News April 2022 183

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

Ed. note: Send your grants and acquisitions to Ann-Christe Galloway, production editor, C&RL News, at email: agalloway@
ala.org.

University of California (UC)-San Diego alumna and UC-San Diego Foundation trustee Sally 
T. WongAvery is donating $10 million through the Avery-Tsui Foundation to support East 
Asian collections, research, and scholarly activities at UC-San Diego Library. The gift, which 
establishes the Sally T. WongAvery Fund for East Asian Collections and the Natasha Wong 
Endowment for East Asian Collections, will ensure that East Asian scholarship and collections 
are a key part of the UC-San Diego Library in perpetuity. In recognition of this philanthropic 
gift, UC-San Diego will rename its existing Biomedical Library the Sally T. WongAvery Library, 
to be commonly known as the WongAvery Library. WongAvery’s gift is among the largest dedi-
cated library endowments to East Asian scholarship in North America. In addition to enhancing 
and expanding the library’s existing East Asian Collection, which was established in 1987 and 
now includes more than 200,000 print volumes and access to more than 1.2 million digital 
titles, the endowment will support the naming of the Sally T. WongAvery Librarian for Chinese 
Studies. The inaugural holder of the position will be UC-San Diego’s Chinese Studies Librarian 
Xi Chen.

The University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill’s University Libraries has received a 
$400,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand the use of machine learn-
ing to identify racist laws. The grant will also fund research and teaching fellowships for scholars 
interested in using the project’s outputs and techniques. The “On the Books: Jim Crow and 
Algorithms of Resistance” is a text mining project that began with a question from a North 
Carolina social studies teacher: Was there a comprehensive list of all the Jim Crow laws that had 
ever been passed in the state? Finding little beyond scholar and activist Pauli Murray’s 1951 book 
States’ laws on race and color, a team of librarians, technologists, and data experts set out to fill 
the gap. The group created machine-readable versions of all North Carolina statutes from 1866 
to 1967. Then, with subject expertise from scholarly partners, they trained an algorithm to iden-
tify racist language in the laws. “On the Books” is an example of “collections as data”—digitized 
library collections formatted specifically for computational research. In this way, they serve as 
rich sources of data for innovative research. The next phase of “On the Books” will leverage the 
team’s learnings through two activities: direct support to several research and teaching fellows 
and a portion of the funding will be regranted. Recipients will use “On the Books” workflows, 
scripts, and tools to identify Jim Crow language in laws from two additional states and will re-
ceive detailed guidance and mentoring from the UNC-Chapel Hill team.  

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