Sci Fi Collection Gets a Boost

Hello All,
Today, thanks to the duplicates exchange network and the University of Texas at Dallas, our cherished special collection of Science Fiction was amplified by the addition of a very full run of Analog, from 1960 to the present. From the Morgan Library in Alabama, we also received several issues of Extrapolation, the academic journal about Sci Fi.

Acquisitions fund established

We recently received a generous donation from Kenneth N. Swezey of New York City to establish our first donor-advised acquisitions fund. The donation is to support the acquisition of English-language materials from the former Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and other socialist countries. We already hold some books and magazines of this nature in our collection, and they're quite amazing. The first book we've bought using Ken's fund is Rags, Borya and the Rocket, a fictionalized story of how homeless dogs Laika, Kozyavka, Otvazhnaya, Belka, Strelka, Chernushka and Zvezdochka became famous as the USSR's first cosmoanimals. You can see a page from this book at the Smithsonian Institution website.

We look forward to many more acquisitions in this area, and thank Ken for his support.

Interesting Independent Library in Florida

We just learned of the Gainesville, Florida, Civic Media Center's Alternative Press Library and Reading Room. Their website is civicmediacenter.org. We're always interested to hear of other independent libraries that are organizing collections and offering access in parallel to conventional library systems.

Periodicals want list

We have just posted our periodicals and serials want list.

In order to deepen our holdings in subject areas where we actively collect, and to better serve patrons who express recurrent interest in these areas, we are looking for runs of the following serials. Many of these are quite difficult to find, so we're not expecting that this list will shrink quickly, but it ought to illuminate our current collection development areas of interest.

Like-minded reanimators in Brooklyn

Andrew Beccone has started the Reanimation Library, an appropriation-friendly collection of visually rich materials.

Their mission statement: "The Reanimation Library seeks to provide the space and the resources for artists and others to gather, interact, and create new work out of preexisting images and texts. The Library provides its users with materials relating to historical and contemporary forms of appropriation art, the history and current status of copyright law, and the complex relationship between the two."

New Yorkers, please support your local nontraditional library.

New zines donated!

Thanks to Dan Strachota for generously donating over 300 zines to our ever-growing zine collection. Also, the Punk Planet zine collection is now all organized (thanks to Molly Davis for able assistance!), archivally boxed, and ready for use by scholars of self-publishing and the merely curious.

Documents sorting in January

We want to thank, profusely, everyone who helped us with the documents sorting party on December 11. The sixty-five of you who came helped us make sense of a real mountain of materials.

In January we've been working to refine the sorting that happened December 11, and we've been putting the ephemera into tidy gray documents boxes.

We also want to thank the new people who have been finding us through word-of-mouth and coming during our open hours in January. We'll keep up with open Wednesday evenings, and work on adding more non-appointment hours.