of the Yale Library
The Yale University Library has received more than $1 million in grants in support of new projects or ongoing initiatives.
The awards will help fund the library's Collections-Based Learning and Teaching at Yale and Strengthening Liberal Education Through Special Collections projects; support a new collaboration initiative to enhance access to and management of the University's library and museum collections; fund a curatorial position at the Lewis Walpole Library as well as a meeting to plan a major exhibition at Walpole's home; and help preserve a growing Arabic collection.
Specific information on each of the grant-funded projects follows.
The Davis Educational Foundation has awarded the Yale Library $299,600 for Collections-Based Learning and Teaching at Yale.
Through this award and the library's Electronic Library Initiative (ELI) program, the University seeks to improve teaching and learning by providing digitized images of its library collections and support for undergraduate courses. The ELI model offers faculty a collaborative method of course design that focuses on bringing together campus experts in pedagogy, technology and information to foster collection-based learning.
Faculty from a range of disciplines develop courses in concert with specialists from the library, Academic Media and Technology and the Graduate School, engaging students with primary source collections and new study tools. As recommended in 2003 by the Committee on Yale College Education, the program provides an opportunity to integrate collections into the curriculum, encouraging personal research and discovery.
Faculty will participate in this project through a competitive request for proposals. The project team will assess the effectiveness of the grant and disseminate results.
"I believe that the University Library has a special responsibility to work with faculty as they seek innovative approaches to their courses and to support students who seek their own pathways through the rich primary sources of both text and images at Yale," says University Librarian Alice Prochaska.
Stanton and Elisabeth Davis established the Davis Educational Foundation after Stanton Davis retired as chair of Shaw's Supermarkets Inc. Further information on ELI can be found on the library's website at www.library.yale.edu/eli/.
The Teagle Foundation has awarded $98,830 for "Strengthening Liberal Education through Special Collections."
This effort allows staff from the Yale Library and several other Connecticut colleges and universities to form a partnership that will explore and develop best practices for successful student learning using library special collections. The project will bring together librarians, faculty, curators and other professionals who will explore current practices and define the basic challenges of using special and original collections.
The project will be launched with an initial seminar for participating institutions, followed by small group workshops and a final symposium for the entire group.
"At the center of our project is the proposition that active learning by students is an optimal product of the nexus between objects and other scholarly materials and between teaching and the classroom," says Barbara Shailor, deputy provost for the arts.
For more information about special library collections at Yale, visit www.library.yale.edu/special_collections/.
The library has received a grant of $409,000 in support of a three-year collaboration initiative that will enhance access to and management and use of library and museum collections across the University.
The grant will provide a structure in which the staff in Yale's galleries, libraries and museums can meet to identify common issues and to share the expertise and resources needed to more systematically manage collections and make them more accessible.
"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant will help Yale to ensure that the use of collections is more fully integrated into the life of the University and supportive of scholarly research," says Richard Szary, the Carrie S. Beinecke Director of Manuscripts and Archives and the principal investigator for the grant. "In addition to strengthening Yale's long-standing commitment to preserving and providing access to these collections for teaching and research, the grant will also help Yale repositories to respond collaboratively to growing interdisciplinary needs and explore more specialized technological approaches to preservation and access."
For more information on this project, send e-mail to richard.szary@yale.edu.
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded two grants to Yale totaling $37,500.
One grant was awarded to the Lewis Walpole Library, a department of the Yale Library located in Farmington, Connecticut. It is a research center for 18th-century studies and is the prime source for the study of Horace Walpole, the 18th-century scholar, man of letters and connoisseur, and of Strawberry Hill, his house near London. The library's collections include significant holdings of British books, manuscripts, prints, drawings and paintings from that century, as well as examples of decorative arts.
The grant will support a curatorial fellow who will develop an electronic database that will identify and describe the many objects collected by Walpole for Strawberry Hill. The database will be an international collaborative resource for scholars and students.
The second grant, awarded to the Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art, funded an organizational meeting to plan a major exhibition dedicated to Strawberry Hill. The exhibition will be organized by those two Yale entities in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Michael Snodin, head of designs collection in the Word and Image Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the guest curator of the exhibition, says the show will "re-create the experience of Strawberry Hill which established the idea of the romantic interior crowded with objects that told stories and sparked imagination." The exhibition objects will be arranged within expressly themed rooms.
For more information, send e-mail to walpole@yale.edu.
A $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will be used to preserve the library's Salisbury Collection, a comprehensive assemblage of foundational works on Islamic law, history, religion, science, mathematics and poetry, along with European imprints that document European scholars' first systematic study of Arab religions, language and cultures.
The collection began in 1870 with a gift from Edward Elbridge Salisbury, the first professor of Arabic languages and culture at Yale College. It has since grown to 16,000 items and forms the core of the library's Near East Collection of over 400,000 volumes supporting Arabic and Middle Eastern studies.
"The project will enable us to make the collection more accessible to a wider audience through microfilming and other preservation activities," says Simon Samoeil, curator of the Near East Collection. "We are delighted to be able to conserve this collection for use by present and future generations."
For more information on this project, send e-mail to simon.samoeil@yale.edu.
T H I S
Collections-Based Learning and Teaching
Enhancing liberal arts education
Collections Collaborative
Walpole Library/Strawberry Hill projects
Preservation of Arabic Collection
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