sept09c2.indd


C&RL News September 2009  484

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 librar y at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign has received a $397,000 
two-year grant from the National Digital 
Newspaper Program (NDNP) for its Illinois 
Digital Newspaper Project. The award will 
support the digitization of 100,000 pages of 
historically signifi cant Illinois newspapers dat-
ing from 1860 to 1922. NDNP is a partnership 
between the National Endowment for the 
Humanities (NEH) 
and the Library of 
Congress to provide 
online access to U.S.
newspapers. It is part 
of the “We the Peo-
ple” program at NEH 
designed to promote 
the study and teach-
ing of American his-
tory and culture. The 
NDNP funding will 
be used to digitize 
Illinois newspapers 
selected by an advi-
sory board based on 
their regional infl u-
ence, their role as 
the “paper of record” at the county level, or 
their signifi cance for specifi c ethnic, racial, 
or other social groups. The digitized material 
will be deposited in Chronicling America, 
the browsable and searchable repository 
of historical newspapers digitized through 
NDNP. Chronicling America was launched in 
2007 and currently contains more than 1.1 
million pages of U.S. newspapers published 
between 1880 and 1922. For additional 
information about NDNP, visit www.neh.
gov/projects/ndnp.html. To view newspa-
per pages using Chronicling America, visit 
chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

Acquisitions

The papers of Robert Davolt (1958–2005) 
national columnist, writer, publicist, and edi-
tor have been acquired by the Leather Archives 
and Museum at Northern Illinois University. 
The 25-box collection covers several decades 
of Davolt’s fi ction and nonfi ction literary work, 
including materials from his time as the fi nal 

editor of DRUMMER 
magazine from 1996 
until 1999, signifi cant 
business correspon-
dence and internal 
papers of Desmodus 
Publishing, and his 
erotic fi ction pieces, 
which appeared in 
Bound and Gagged 
magazine. Davolt 
was a major fi gure in 
the leather and levi 
counterculture of the 
United States. His 
online columns on 
l e a t h e r p a g e . c o m 
reached a global au-

dience and were eventually published in 2003 
as the anthology Painfully Obvious.

A  c o p y  o f  E u d o r a  We l t y ’s  f i r s t  b o o k , 
A Curtain of Green, has been donated to 
a collection-in-progress at Mississippi State 
University (MSU) Libraries by MSU English pro-
fessor and editor of The Mississippi Quarterly 
Noel Polk. Polk, both a Welty and Faulkner 
scholar, is currently working with Mitchell 
Memorial Library’s Special Collections depart-
ment to create the Noel Polk Collection, which 
will feature books, papers, and memorabilia 
on Mississippi authors. This 1941 edition of 
A Curtain of Green, with an introduction by 
author Katherine Anne Porter, is signed by 
both Welty and Porter. Visit library.msstate.
edu/specialcollections/index.asp for more 
information about the collections. 

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

Mississippi State University Libraries’ Lynne Mueller 
(left) accepts Eudora Welty’s fi rst book from Noel Polk 
to be added to Polk’s Collection at Mitchell Memorial 
Library. Photographed by Jim Tomlinson, MSU Libraries.