jan11b.indd


C&RL News January 2011  56

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

Clemson University Libraries has received 
a $773,444 National Leadership grant from 
the Institute of Museum and Library Ser-
vices to make more than 3 million pages 
of resources held by the parks—150,000 
artifacts, photographs, and other objects—
and selections from the National Park 
Service directors’ papers in the Libraries’ 
Special Collections available digitally. It 
will let park professionals and researchers 
discuss parks issues and will allow the 
display of park research and project fund-
ing needs. The collections to be digitized 
include many technical reports, journals, 
photographs, artifacts, and other printed 
material used by the parks that are not 
currently available online. Clemson, one 
of 34 institutions to receive funding in this 
category, is contributing in-king matching 
funds of $799,167, for a project total of 
$1.57 million. The Open Parks Grid will 
supply information on parks in the south-
east United States. 

Acquisitions

The A. S. Williams III Americana Collection 
which was acquired in June 2010, officially 
opened for public viewing at the University 
of Alabama (UA) Libraries. The collection, 
which is valued at more than $12 million, 
contains more than 20,000 books and 12,000 
photographs, and it represents a lifetime’s 
effort by Williams, former executive vice 
president and treasurer of Protective Life 
Corp. in Birmingham. For more than 40 
years, Williams, a UA alumnus, amassed rare 
examples of Americana—primarily books, 
manuscripts, and photographs relating to the 

history of the United States, Alabama and the 
South. The companion Web site to the col-
lection, www.lib.ua.edu/williamscollection, 
is available for browsing. The first exhibit 
features samples from the collection. Items 
displayed include a 1793 document signed 
by Thomas Jefferson, just one example from 
the Presidential Collection, which includes 
signed items by every U.S. president from 
George Washington to George W. Bush. Oth-
er items illustrate the history of photography 
up to 1910. Among the rarest items are books 
and documents printed in the Confederate 
States of America that bear a CSA imprint. A 
few of those works are part of the exhibition, 
and give onlookers a glimpse of everyday 
reading life during the Civil War.

Four thousand 19th-century paperbacks 
and yellowbacks have been acquired by 
the Emory Libraries’ Manuscript, Archives, 
and Rare Book Library (MARBL). The col-
lection was acquired from Chester W. Topp 
of Cleveland, says David Faulds, MARBL 
rare book librarian. Emory Libraries plans 
to make the new collection available online, 
which Faulds estimates will take approxi-
mately three years to catalog, organize and 
digitize. Emory announced the completed 
digitization of its previous yellowbacks col-
lection last spring. About 1,260 yellowbacks 
were scanned into a digital format and made 
available on the libraries’ Web site, includ-
ing books by authors such as Jane Austen 
and Mark Twain, as well as popular yellow-
back writers like Wilkie Collins, Anthony  
Trollope, and Ouida. Yellowbacks were 
cheap, 19th-century British literature sold at 
railway bookstalls, with colorful, sensational-
ized covers to attract buyers. Topics varied 
widely and included well-known literature, 
detective stories, romance, sports, medicine, 
science, war, and other subjects. The nick-
name comes from the yellow-glazed illus-
trated covers. 

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