june13_b.indd June 2013 327 C&RL News Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: agalloway@ala.org. Texas Tech University Libraries has received a three-year, in-kind software donation worth $900,000 from Side Effects Software for the Houdini 3D Animation Tools. The software will enhance the library’s new Me- dia Lab in Informatics and Scientific Visual- ization which will focus on 3-D research ef- forts. Houdini software is also offered in the 3D Animation Lab and via 3D Lab remote access. The gift is a culmination of a four- year relationship with Side Effects Software. A c q u i s i t i o n s The Gay J. McDougall South Africa and Namibia Papers and the records of the Law- yers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Southern Africa Project have been acquired by Columbia University Libraries’ Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research. McDougall served as the director of the Southern Africa Project for 14 years and was the only American to be appointed to the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC). IEC was the South Afri- can governmental body established through the multiparty negotiations to set policy and administer the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, resulting in the election of President Nelson Mandela and the transi- tion from apartheid. The McDougall papers contain documentation of the activities and decisions of IEC from the perspective of a member of the commission and reveal a day-by-day detailed picture of the challeng- es confronted by the commission in mount- ing South Africa’s first democratic elections. The Gay J. McDougall South Africa and Namibia Papers include correspondence, memoranda, photographs, videos, ephem- era such as election ballots, original local news coverage, and McDougall’s diaries from trips to South Africa, Namibia and the Frontline States. Unique collections of pub- lications by South African organizations, in- cluding books, reports, and briefing papers, are also part of the collection. The papers of Ambassador Thomas P. and Margaret B. Melady have been acquired by the Archives and Special Collections Center of Seton Hall University. Thomas P. Melady has served as the U.S. ambassador to Burun- di, the executive vice president of St. John’s University, and is currently the interim dean of the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall Univer- sity. Margaret has served as the President of American University in Rome, and she current- ly serves as president of Melady Associates, a firm specializing in public affairs and educa- tional counseling. Ambassador and Margaret Melady were substantially acquainted with and broadly involved with the political move- ments in many African nations throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959, Thomas P. Melady cofounded the Africa Service Institute, head- quartered in New York, which was dedicated to helping African students attend college in the United States and teaching African leaders to obtain humanitarian aid, promote their na- tions internationally, and negotiate Cold-War global politics. The Melady Papers Collection spans the years 1960 to 1975 and consists of 400 items—mainly correspondence with news articles and photographs. The letters discuss political issues and movements, events of the day, and personal matters. Noted correspon- dents include Holden Roberto, prime minister in exile of Angola; Ketumile Masire, vice presi- dent of Botswana; John Foncha, prime minister of Cameroon; and Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe. The Vermont Marble Company Archives have been acquired by the University of G r a n t s a n d A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway C&RL News June 2013 328 Pennsylvania Libraries and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Comprising business records and a stone sample col- lection, the archives document the firm’s activities from its beginning in 1869 as the Sutherland Falls Marble Company to its final years in the 1970s. The purchase has been made possible by the gen- erosity of the B. H. Bre- slauer Foun- dation, Lisa Sardegna, and the G. Holmes Perkins Fund. Bernard H. Breslauer, one of the great a n t i q u a r i a n booksellers of the 20th centu- ry, established the foundation, which provides timely support for the pur- chase of important primary sources by rare book and manuscript repositories. Vermont Marble produced everything from everyday memorials to commercial and domestic pal- aces to national monuments. The business records begin with Redfield Proctor’s consoli- dation of many of the existing smaller stone yards near Rutland, Vermont. Included are correspondence, purchase orders, payrolls, job books, individual project files, draw- ings (linens, blueprints, pencil sketches, and original watercolor designs), photographs, printed trade catalogs with illustrations, and salesmen’s kits. The photographic record is particularly complete with thousands of negatives documenting the company’s many quarries, stone yards, trimming rooms, con- struction sites, and finished projects, includ- ing the Lincoln Memorial, the National Gal- lery of Art, the United Nations, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A late autograph draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Binsey Poplars” has Marble yard in West Rutland, Vermont, during the early 20th century. been acquired by the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. “Binsey Poplars” is the last known major Hopkins manu- script to have been in private hands. The acquisition was made possible by financial support from a number of individuals and funding bodies, including the Friends of the Bodleian, the Friends of the National Libraries, and the V&A Pur- chase Grant Fund. An Ox- ford alumnus, Gerard Man- ley Hopkins (1844–89) is regarded as one the Vic- torian era’s greatest poets. Very few of his poems ap- peared during his lifetime, and he owns his posthumous reputation to his friend poet Robert Bridges, who edited a volume of his Poems that first appeared 30 years after his death in 1918. His revolutionary “difficult” style characterized by new rhythmic ef- fects influenced the work of Modernist and later writers. “Binsey Poplars” was written in response to the felling of trees running alongside the Thames in Binsey, a village on the west side of the city of Oxford. Hop- kins had been an undergraduate at Balli- ol College-Oxford and was a curate at St. Aloysius’s Church in the city at the time he wrote the poem. The trees were replanted after the poem was first published in 1918 (the poem seems to anticipate the ravages of the Great War), and there was an outcry when they were felled again in 2004. The poem formed part of the successful cam- paign to replant the trees. The poem has a very particular local meaning but speaks to a much broader audience in its plaintive evocation of spiritual desolation through the destruction of nature.