ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, June 29, 1996 TAG: 9607010033
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
Virginia Tech's efforts to assemble a substantial research collection of Civil War-related documents will receive a substantial boost from a grant award announced this week.
The George R. Wallace Foundation of Boston will give Newman Library's Special Collections Department $300,000 over the next five years, a donation that delighted Eileen Hitchingham, dean of university libraries.
Credit for obtaining the grant goes to James I. Robertson Jr., Tech's nationally prominent Civil War historian.
For some years, Robertson has been the leading advocate of building a Civil War archive at the university. His friendship with Washington, D.C., book collector E.E. "Josh" Billings led to the donation of about 7,000 volumes to Tech, a collection said to be second only to the Library of Congress.
John Grado Jr., a Tech graduate and a trustee of the Wallace Foundation, was motivated to provide the grant after he attended one of the annual Civil War Weekend symposiums sponsored by the university and hosted by Robertson.
Two-thirds of the foundation's grant will provide an endowment to repair, preserve and catalogue important historical documents, Hitchingham said.
Part of that effort will be to make Civil War documents held by Tech more accessible to scholars worldwide by placing the materials on the Internet, an effort hampered by recent state budget cuts, she said.
The remaining $100,000 will be used by the library to purchase documents related to Civil War and Virginia history, and also to add materials to other collections.
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