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BANCROFTIANA PUBLISHED OCCASIONALLY BY THE FRIENDS OF THE BANCROFT LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 9472O-60OO *& HO March 1997 cI(etrospe^i & Prospeffi ANUS-LIKE, Bancroft faces forward to the ty, as the first step toward the creation of a Jpast and backward to the future. As an insti strategic plan to deal with the issues most crit tution dedicated to conserving the past as well ical to Bancroft as we head into a new century. as making it come alive for the future, we must The review committee was chaired by David every so often re-examine both our roots and Farmer, Director of the DeGolyer Library at our route, where we have come from and where Southern Methodist University; other mem we are going. bers were Genaro Padilla, Vice Chancellor for These thoughts are motivated by the year Undergraduate Affairs, Joe Duggan, Associ just past, my first as the James D. Hart Direc ate Dean of the Graduate Division, Bill Sim tor of The Bancroft Library. It has been both mons, Dean of Social Sciences, Richard Walk exhilarating and exhausting. I am profoundly er, Chair of the Department of Geography, grateful to the Bancroft staff and to the mem Ling-Chi Wang, Associate Professor of Eth bers of the Council of the Friends, particularly nic Studies, Elizabeth Witherell (UC Santa to Chair Tom Worth, who has been a tower of Barbara), General Editor of the Papers of strength, and to Peter Hanff, who has guided Henry David Thoreau, and Charles Weiner me through the intricacies of the management (MIT), Professor of History of Science. of a large research library. Bancroft owes Peter The committee's report served to guide our a special debt of gratitude for having led the li deliberations during a retreat held at the end of brary through very difficult times after the May and attended by all Bancroft staff, mem death of Jim Hart and during the University of bers of the Council of the Friends, library staff California's worst budget crisis. from outside Bancroft, faculty, and users. Af I have been impressed by the willingness of ter two days of intensive discussions, we iden Tom and the other members of the Council to tified three critical issues facing Bancroft: col invest their time, energy, and talent in helping lection policy, outreach, and the physical plant. me to carry out Bancroft's mission. I have A Strategic Planning Committee has just learned much from them and from the Ban- - finished a comprehensive plan for dealing with croft staff; but possibly the most important les these issues over the next five years. Collection son is the realization that I still have much to policy must reflect the dramatic demographic learn. I know that I shall receive the same kind changes of contemporary California so that of help and advice from the officers of the the twenty-first century can understand its Council, Cindy Barber (chair), Dorian Chong immediate past. Outreach is concerned with a (vice chair), and Bill Barlow (treasurer). reinvigoration of Bancroft's engagement with the campus, the scholarly community, and the STRATEGIC PLAN general public. However, neither of these ini One of my first actions last fall was to set in tiatives can be successful without an adequate motion a process leading to a comprehensive facility for the library. The State of California review of Bancroft's relations with the Berke will provide funds for seismic upgrading of our ley campus and the larger scholarly communi building, but for nothing else. All of the other [1] make headway on large-scale processing pro jects that cannot be covered with our normal resources. • utrp tut mm"tk MtfjrA ***&?**** Currently the National Endowment for the Humanities supports our California Heritage Project to digitize and make available on the Internet 25,000 images from our pictorial col lections; a National Historical Publications t] 1 and Records Commission grant is allowing us jj'x* ij^ *ef**f. '$ h,f'*&*»*»*& ftt<xM&> ;r*f- (fat* From the Wilkes Journal: "The Costume of the Californios is peculiar, but beautiful..." to gain bibliographical control of those collec tions (over three million images). We have fin —^__L'.. I aU;»^t-^ improvements that need to be made—climate rected toward augmenting Bancroft's donor ished microfilming the Japanese-American control, improved working conditions, com base. Having just completed service as the War Relocation papers, one of our most heav puter networking, enlarged reading room and Chair of the Council of the Friends, Tom ily used collections, and both microfilming exhibition space—must be financed with pri Worth has graciously agreed to head the revi and cataloguing the papers of pioneer Berkeley vate funds. We are faced with the prospect of talized Bancroft Development Committee, anthropologists Theodore Kroeber and raising substantial sums in order to carry out which will be working with Bancroft friends to Robert Heizer. Finally, we have just received the kind of comprehensive renovation re identify areas of possible interest and support. approvals of four new grant projects: a Depart quired to take Bancroft into the next century. ment of Education grant to record the history For acquisitions and certain ongoing opera ACQUISITIONS of the disabled persons independence move tions we rely heavily on private contributions. The generosity of our friends, both present ment, which got its start in Berkeley; an NEH Less than half of Bancroft's budget—essen and past, has allowed us to make some signifi grant to a consortium of major universities tially salary and supplies—is provided by the cant acquisitions this past year. We used en (Duke, Princeton, Michigan, Yale, Columbia, state of California. Eighty percent of the sup dowment funds to buy the journal of Dr. John and Berkeley) to preserve and process our col port for acquisitions comes from current con Fox, naval surgeon on the U.S.S. Vincennes lections of Greek papyri; a second NEH grant tributions and endowment income. during the Wilkes expedition of 1838-42, in collaboration with Columbia, Duke, Stan Calculating the cubic capacity of a barrel without calculus. For decades the Regional Oral History Of recording detailed information about the lands ford, and Virginia focused on intellectual ac From Regole di Geometria, ca. ipo. fice has depended almost entirely on gifts and of the Pacific, including customs of the Cali- cess to our American history collection; and a contracts for the creation of specific oral histo fornios and California coastal trade. In collab grant from the Mellon Foundation to work our activities the next day with a continuous ries. This approach must continue, but RO oration with the Mathematics 6c Statistics Li with Columbia University on digitizing our showing of selected Beat Films in the Pacific HO has also begun to build endowments with brary we acquired for the History of Science respective collections of medieval manu Film Archive and the 49th Annual Meeting of support from Ruth Teiser, Edmund and Ber- and Technology Collection a late-i5th-centu- scripts. All of the finding aids and inventories the Friends of The Bancroft Library. The nice Layne Brown, Mina Schwabacher, and ry Italian manuscript containing a set of created by these projects will be made available business meeting was followed by a reading by the Class of 1931. This, we trust, is just the be anonymous treatises on geometry, algebra, and to scholars and students around the world via Ferlinghetti himself to a standing-room-only ginning: ROHO needs a much larger endow weights and measures. Berkeley resident Elise the Internet, using the Encoded Archival De crowd of over 500 people. After the annual ment base to give it the flexibility to undertake White gave us the letters of her great-grandfa scription format developed at Berkeley and meeting, we formally opened the exhibition on worthy projects that cannot otherwise find a ther, Edward P. Reed, that record his life in now accepted as a national standard. "Ferlinghetti, City Lights, and the Beats in sponsor. California from 1849to ^76. Perhaps our most San Francisco," drawn from Ferlinghetti s pa The Mark Twain Project, Bancroft's ongo important acquisition, however, is the series of ACTIVITIES pers as well as Bancroft's rich holdings in ing effort to edit all of Mark Twain's works in sixty-one trial records from the Mexican In Last spring we held three events: at the end of manuscripts and letters from other writers of impeccable scholarly editions, counts on quisition, dating from 1595 to 1817. The most March we reprised our workshop on rare books the period. The next keepsake will serve as a grants from the National Endowment for the extensive and spectacular of these trials, from and book collecting, with talks by Tony Bliss," permanent record of these events. Humanities for almost half of its budget. Most the end of the 16th century, deal with the In Peter Hanff, and the Library Conservation This past fall we mounted a special exhibi of the rest must be raised privately in the form quisition's attempts to suppress the secret prac Department's Lynn Jones; at the beginning of tion, "California Arrivals: the International of matching funds. Bancroft is unique among tice of Judaism by Jewish converts, Spain's cris- May, we joined forces with the Friends of the Heritage of the State," at the bookfair of the Berkeley campus libraries in its reliance on pri tianos nuevos; but there are also rich resources Botanical Garden for a lecture by horticultural International League of Antiquarian Book vate funding for a majority of its budget. for studying many other aspects of colonial historian Tom Brown, "California Gardens, sellers.