| Meet the New Dean T he University of Houston Libraries are pleased to announce that Dana C. Rooks was named the Dean of Libraries effective January 1997. Dana Rooks has had a long and distinguished career. She earned a B.A. in English and an M.S. in Library Science from Louisiana State University. After graduation, she became the Lower Division Librarian at the University of Oklahoma, where she established a new undergraduate library and earned |
Administration, Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Library Trends, and other journals. Between 1991 and 1996, she served as an Associate Editor of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, one of the first peer-reviewed electronic journals published on the Internet. From 1990 to 1994, she was co-editor of The Public-Access Computer Systems News, an electronic newsletter. Since 1991, she has been the lead moderator of PACS-L, a large Internet |
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| an M.A. in Public Administration. Next, she briefly served as a Reference Librarian at the University of Missouri at St. Louis before being promoted to Head of the Instructional and Research Services Division. In this capacity, she co-founded the St. Louis Regional Library Network. The University of Houston Libraries hired Ms. Rooks in 1979. After brief periods as Business/Economics Reference Librarian, Coordinator of Library Instruction, and Library Personnel Coordinator, she was promoted to Assistant Director for Administration. She held this position until 1994, when she became the |
 
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discussion list with subscribers in over 70 countries. Since 1989, she has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Texas' School of Library and Information Sciences. She has been a frequent speaker at professional conferences. In recognition of her many accomplishments, Ms. Rooks has received the Librarian of the Year award from the Texas Library Association, the Outstanding Alumna award from Louisiana State University's School of Library and Information Science, and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Service from the University of North Texas' |
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| Assistant Director for Public Services and Administration. In 1995, she served as Acting Director of Libraries for seven months while she continued to perform her other duties. Between 1994 and 1996, she also was the Co-Prinicipal Investigator of TexShare, a newly established consortium of public higher education institutions in Texas aimed at expanding access to electronic information and speeding the delivery of printed information. Ms. Rooks has written two books as well as numerous articles in the Journal of Library |
School of Library and Information Sciences. She was selected to participate in the prestigious UCLA Senior Fellows program in 1991.
Regarding her appointment, Ms. Rooks said: "I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to lead the University of Houston Libraries, which I regard as one of the most dynamic and innovative research libraries in the country. I am confident that, with the help of the university community, we can continue to build a new type of research library that blends the best of traditional print-based scholarship with emerging electronic scholarship." |
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| Performing Arts Collections Play Starring Role in Special Collections | ||||
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Most of us have never come any closer to our favorite actors than watching them on the screen. Furthermore, much of our knowledge about our favorite playwrights comes only from enjoying performances of their work. In Special Collections |
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(the Cheryl Crawford Collection, the H. David Kaplan Performing Arts Memorabilia Collection, and the Larry McMurtry Collection) contain a wealth of performing arts materials available for use by both the serious researcher and the patron interested in learning more about performing artists and writers. Cheryl Crawford, the Broadway producer and founder of the Actors' Studio, includes among her luminous correspondents actors such as Sir Laurence Olivier, Helen Hayes, and Paul Newman. Letters from the playwrights Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams are also in Crawford's collection. David Kaplan's autograph collection boasts the signatures of Shirley Temple, Lena Horne, and Edward G. Robinson, as well as autographed publicity   
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photos of opera stars Beverly Sills and José Carreras. The collection of author Larry McMurtry includes a hand-written draft of his script for the film Hud, and letters which reveal the process he and singer John Mellencamp went through in scripting the film Falling from Grace. Materials such as these give visitors to Special Collections unique insight into the lives of performers and creators while helping to reveal the process by which they turn their ideas and talents into performance magic on the stage, screen, or in the concert hall. |
| Electronic Journal Access at UH | ||||
| T he University of Houston Libraries is a charter participant in an innovative project known as JSTOR. In 1994 JSTOR received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to scan 750,000 pages of journal material and to develop software that would make page images available on a World Wide Web site. JSTOR, short for journal storage, is now a not-for-profit organization of approximately two hundred libraries including Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other nonprofit organizations. The initial goal of JSTOR is to provide electronic access to a minimum of 100 core journal titles in 10 to 15 fields during the next three years and to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technologies. JSTOR's focus is on the | searches the full text of all the articles for matches. If users prefer, they can select specific journals and browse those journals' tables of contents. Users are allowed to download, copy, or store one electronic and one paper copy of any article. The benefits of having the back issues of core journal titles available through JSTOR include the ability to perform complex searches, desktop access to journal titles, and availability of complete runs. Users will be assured that journal articles are available whenever access is required. Not only will a search retrieve citations, but complete journal articles. If a student or scholar requires additional research |
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| complete run of a journal title's backfile, 1994 or earlier, back to the first issue. JSTOR negotiates with publishers to purchase the rights to a journal's complete run of issues and for licensing terms that allow JSTOR to retain ownership of all the digitized images. To date, JSTOR has digitized all or some portion of |
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at 3:00 a.m. on Monday
morning, although the library is closed, JSTOR's resources are available from a computer desktop. JSTOR is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and on holidays. By joining JSTOR the University |
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52 core journal titles in 12 disciplines. The disciplines include economics, mathematics, philosophy, political science, history, sociology, ecology, population/demography, finance, higher education, Asian studies, and anthropology. Journal pages are scanned at a high resolution to produce bit-mapped images of journal pages and text is converted through optical character recognition. By using a World Wide Web browser, library patrons can access JSTOR from the library, other campus computers, and remote locations via a University of Houston computing account. JSTOR not only provides journal article viewing but also full searching capabilities. Users can look for articles on specific subjects or by certain authors while JSTOR |
of Houston Libraries are participating in the continuing development of this important project. According to Dana Rooks, Dean of Libraries, "Research libraries face a number of critical problems with print journal collections, including their storage, preservation, accessibility and cost. JSTOR provides an attractive nonprofit model of how to deal with the difficult financial, logistical, technical and legal issues involved with digitizing and making available massive amounts of existing print information." Further information about JSTOR can be found at the following World Wide Web URL: http://www.jstor.org/about. |
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http://info.lib.uh.edu/dev/libed/index.html The Libraries' web page is: |
The M.D. Anderson Library (713) 743-1050 Hours:
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| Women's Archives in the University of Houston Archives | ||||
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The Women's Archives is one of the most recent additions to the University of Houston Libraries. Located within the University of Houston Archives, its goal is to document Houston area women's organizations and make their records available to the public for research. |
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donated the materials, also has provided additional materials on the founding of the Women's Studies Program at UH-Clear Lake. The Houston Area Women's Center Records were the second donation. These records date from the founding of the center in 1977 through the late 1980s and include copies of the two newsletters which have been published by the center, the Catalyst and CenterLine. Additional materials will be added to this collection over the next few years. Finding aids for both the Houston Area Women's Center Records and the National Women's Conference Collection are available in the Archives or on the Internet. The papers of Nikki Van Hightower are the most recent addition. The papers document her work as Executive Director of the Houston Area Women's Center during its formative years. Hightower served as the first Executive Director of the Houston Area Women's Center, having previously |
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  held the position of Women's Advocate for the City of Houston in the late 1970s. The UH Women's Studies Community Outreach Association generously funded a full-time internship position with the Women's Archives this summer to assist with its collections. Stephanie Ashley, a library science graduate student at the University of Tennessee, processed the Nikki Van Hightower Papers and assisted with identifying additional collections to be added to the Women's Archives in the future. Additional information on the Women's Archives, including finding aids for processed collections, is available on the World Wide Web at http://info.lib.uh.edu/speccoll/archwom.htm. For questions, call (713) 743-9754. |
| Honor with a Book
T he University of Houston Libraries provide a unique and meaningful way to honor an individual with a gift of a book. "Even years after the passing of my father, I still remember the one special friend who gave a donation to the University Libraries for the purchase of a book in his memory," states long-time library supporter, Welcome Wilson. "Many friends and relatives sent flowers but the memorial book will be something I will always cherish." Each tribute book is inscribed with a personalized commemorative bookplate. "One family even traveled from Dallas to see the bookplate honoring a relative at the |
University Libraries. It really is a special gift," states Mr. Wilson. Donations for the purchase of a tribute book can also be made to honor a graduation, birthday, or other special occasion. Gifts in amounts of $25, $250, or $2,500 will go toward the purchase of a book or collection of books in a subject area, chosen by the donor. The University Libraries will send a letter notifying the family or honoree of your gift. This is such a special way to give a gift while helping the University Libraries provide the valuable tools needed to educate our students. If you are interested in making a tribute donation, please fill out the form on the last page of this newsletter. |
| Remembering Ruth Wikoff | ||
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"Iwas sitting at my desk in the library on the first floor
of the Roy Cullen Building when the door opened and a hand reached in and dropped a snake on the floor. The disgruntled nephew of a faculty member was playing a prank. Another time I was looking on the shelves for something when across the top of the books, slithered a snake."
Snake handling had not been part of Ruth Slater Wikoff's training when she attended library school at Milliken University in Illinois in the 1920s. But, from removing the occasional serpent to creating a university library on an annual budget of $2500 to challenging administrators for more space, it was all in a day's work for Mrs. Wikoff during her 30 years at the University of Houston. Wikoff, the university's first professional librarian, passed away in April. Much of what the M.D. Anderson Library is today, especially its spirit of commitment to students and the faculty, is owed to the tone Ruth Wikoff set for herself, her staff, and one UH enterprise that, perhaps more than any other, has remained closest to the hearts of its students. Wikoff was hired in 1933 by Houston School Superintendent and first UH president, Dr. E.E. Oberholtzer when UH was still Houston Junior College. The snakes, indigenous to the swampy land where the UH campus was built in the late 1930s, were perhaps the easiest of Wikoff's trials as the chief UH librarian. Far more formidable were the penny-pinching university administrators. But Oberholtzer and his successors knew they had met their match in Ruth Wikoff. "We've got to give the library space or she'll take over the whole building!" Oberholtzer said while Roy Cullen Building classrooms were continually annexed to house the library's collection. But the Roy Cullen Building was a paradise compared to the library space Wikoff first found at HJC, then housed in San Jacinto High School. As Dr. Patrick Nicholson reports in his history of UH, In Time, when Wikoff arrived there were 8,627 total documents in the HJC collection. Despite its inadequacy, this total represented a great increase over the 1,988 volumes the library had started out with in 1927 when it was relegated to one end of the regular high school library. Wikoff's crusade to increase the collection persuaded President Oberholtzer to appropriate the high school's music room for the college library. From the beginning Ruth Wikoff was a fan of the junior college which became a four-year university in 1934. She would later earn two degrees from UH, a B.S. in 1938 and a M.A. in 1945. Wikoff knew how crucial a good library collection and a professional staff were, both for creating a quality library and ensuring the university's accreditation. While most of the faculty supported her efforts and were eager to see the library expand, sometimes administrators stood in her way. Still, she was not shy or hesitant about asking for what was needed. "Every time I would send a requisition down to Dr. Oberholtzer," she said, "I knew it would come back marked 'justify'. And I did !" Wikoff was the head of a very small staff of professional librarians and student workers during the library's years in Roy Cullen. The Depression and war years were hard on the new institution; everyone had to pitch in. Wikoff even recalls the faculty, of which she was a member, having to do fund-raising despite protests from the Dean of Women. With the support from the faculty, Wikoff built the collection, augmenting those areas where UH had strong programs and where the city's other libraries did not have strong collections. In 1940, when the library had just over 12,200 volumes, Wikoff worked with UH benefactors Dr. Ray K. Daily and Leopold Meyer to raise $2,000. In 1951 the library moved its 50,000 volumes into its very own building, a $1.5 million gift from the M.D. Anderson Foundation. When Mrs. Wikoff reported that the new library would assume only about a third of its capacity on opening day, Meyer, with help from H.R. Cullen, increased the |
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collection to 56,000 books in time for the dedication on April 1, 1951. By 1955, the collection had reached 145,000 volumes while expenditures, which had been abnormally low, reached over $200,000.
Ruth Wikoff had steadily built her staff from just three in the Roy Cullen days to a cadre of professional librarians, well respected in their specific fields of expertise and as trained researchers. After some faculty asked why there weren't "scholars" on the library staff, she rebuffed the criticisms with the retort, "What do you think WE are?!" However, the university administration, believing they needed a man with a Ph.D. as library head, named Howard McGaw to oversee the UH Libraries. Under McGaw and his successors she remained head of the main library. By that time there were also five branches: a nursing library in the Texas Medical Center, the law library in the basement of the main building, the architecture and pharmacy libraries, and a business library located at UH's building downtown. In 1962 McGaw was followed by Edward G. Holley who was responsible for the Libraries great growth in the 1960s. 
While serving as chief librarian, Wikoff also managed to compile a bibliography of UH theses and dissertations from 1940 through 1962. She also wrote for the Library Journal and the Library Quarterly which published her article "The Academic Status of College and University Librarians in Texas" in 1963. In addition, she was active in a number of university groups and library professional organizations. Yet again, Ruth Wikoff witnessed the library outgrow its space, taking up increasing public space with shelves. In 1962, as UH was about to become a state-supported institution, an addition to the library was a high priority. The library's $3,300,000 addition was completed in 1967. In 1971 library holdings had almost tripled to 664,000 volumes. In 1973 she retired as Professor of Library Science and Associate Director of Libraries, Emeritus. Among her most significant legacies to UH are her copiously detailed annual reports which she drafted each year of her tenure as an active librarian. They remain in the UH Archives. She continued as a supporter of the library and of the university. One of her last visits to campus was to celebrate the career of Robin Downes who was moving from Director to University Librarian and head of the planning process for just the kind of effort Mrs. Wikoff spent her own career championing and bringing to excellence a bigger and better UH library. |
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The Library is looking for...
$30 for the IPI Storage Guide for Acetate Film. $70 for a desktop light box for sorting slides. $150 for the Dublin Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, edited by the renowned Joyce scholar Danis Rose. $225 for the International Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. $340 for a facsimile edition of Mary Shelley's 1816 manuscript novel Frankenstein. $400 for a Designer's Edge professional mat cutter for exhibition assembly and design. $450 for volumes 5, 6, and 7 of the complete works of Aphra Behn, one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration Theatre and author of the novel Oroonoko. $500 for the four-volume Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics. This encyclopedia offers breadth, completeness, and organized ideas within narrowly defined studies that are often isolated within a specific industry or intellectual field. $650 for The Forum of Trajan in Rome: A Study of the Monuments, in three volumes, by James E. Packer. $50-$1000 for materials to assist students in mathematics. $200-$1500 for books and conference proceedings to support the university's research program in Virtual Reality. |
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Thank you to our benefactors
The University Libraries would like to extend a sincere congratulations and thank you to the graduating Class of 1997, especially those seniors who pledged more than $7,000 through the Senior Challenge Campaign to support the University Libraries. Your contributions will serve to enrich the libraries for the students who follow you in the years to come.
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This newsletter is produced by the University Libraries Development Office. If you have any questions please contact Bonnie C. Crews at (713) 743-8864 or Stuart Block at (713) 743-9740. |
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University of Houston Libraries Annual Fund The University of Houston Libraries appreciates your contributions to help expand the research resources available to our students and faculty.
I (we) wish to support the University Libraries with a gift of $ _______________.
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Enclosed is my company matching gift form from ____________________________________ Please print and mail to: University of Houston Libraries, Attn: Bonnie C. Crews, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-2091.
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In Memory of or