For Libraries at UCLA and Yale, $5 Million Arcadia Fund Gifts Go Beyond Money

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 2/25/2009

• At UCLA, a record-setting gift
• Funds to be used for collections
• Gift affirms the role of the research library

(This article first appeared in the February 24 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)

Like many librarians, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) librarian Gary Strong has a wish list. “I have this file that I keep in a drawer,” he told the LJ Academic Newswire, “and every time I think, boy, I wish had $25,000 or $30,000 to do something, I write that idea down and keep it in there.” Thanks to a record-breaking $5 million gift from the Arcadia Fund announced this month, Strong, despite an international economic crisis and a California state budget trimmed to the bone, can break finally out the list.

At UCLA, the $5 million is the largest single gift for collections in UCLA’s history. Although the library has yet to decide how it will spend the windfall, perhaps the best part, Strong said, is that under the terms of the gift, the money must be used for collections and services. “I am forbidden from using the money for operational expenses,” Strong said, adding that the library will look at ways to leverage technology to make more of its priceless collections accessible to scholars and students on the web. In 2008, the Arcadia Fund donated $500,000 to support the UCLA’s Center for Primary Research and Training at Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections.

Gift to Yale
In addition to UCLA, the Yale University libraries also received a $5 million gift from the Arcadia Fund. At Yale, the generous gift isn’t quite a record-breaker. “Historically, John William Sterling’s 1918 bequest of $18 million dollars to the university, equivalent to almost $200 million today, stands out,” Yale library spokesperson Geoffrey Little told the LJ Academic Newswire. 

“The library has not yet specifically designated any new projects,” Little said about its latest major gift from Arcadia. But as it is with UCLA, he confirmed, the funds will be used support work on Yale’s collections. “Arcadia’s previous generosity enabled us to catalog some rare Hungarian and Czech materials, as well as a large collection of African materials in several hundred indigenous languages,” Little noted, adding that part of the gift will support the continuation and completion of the African cataloging project. “A large proportion of the works cataloged turn out not to have been cataloged in any other library,” he explained, “so our work has put new material into the scholarly domain and significantly advances access to international publications.”

Mission support 
Since 2001, the U.K.-based Arcadia Fund (formerly the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund) has committed some $181 million to funding “works that protect endangered treasures of culture and nature,” including endangered languages, archives and artifacts. In tight budget times, such financial generosity is certainly welcome, Strong said, but because of its focus, the Arcadia fund gift goes beyond the money.

“This kind of support really makes a difference—here is someone who truly believes in research libraries, truly believes that the research library is important to the academy,” he said. By designating funds to use new technology to create new services, Strong told the Newswire, the $5 million gift will ultimately help transform the research library, he noted, making more collections more accessible, and in novel ways to scholars anywhere in the world. “This will help us expose our valuable collections,” Strong effused. “What an opportunity.”

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