Vanderbilt University Receives $1 Million for Library Fellowships

Vanderbilt University in Nashville has announced a $1 million gift from alumni Poppy and Richard Buchanan in support of its Library Fellows Program.

The gift to establish the Poppy Pickering Buchanan and Richard D. Buchanan Library Fellows Fund will benefit students and future library users through the fund's support for strategic projects in which selected students work on multidisciplinary teams under the mentorship of faculty and professional librarians. Among other things, fellows will have the opportunity to work in the library's rarest and most significant collections, including the J. León Helguera Collection of Colombiana, a trove of works focused on Colombian political, economic, and social history; Judge Hu C. Anderson's personal papers from the Nazi war crimes trial over which he presided; and presidential speeches from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

Poppy Buchanan earned a bachelor of science in nursing from Vanderbilt in 1961, while her husband, Richard, received a bachelor of arts in 1957 and an MD in 1961. Longtime supporters of the university, the couple previously made gifts in support of its School of Medicine and School of Nursing, as well as the Library Fellows Program.

"We are deeply grateful to the Buchanans for their significant investment in our students' research interests," said Susan R. Wente, the university's provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. "The Library Fellowship Program will be a novel path through which the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries support Immersion Vanderbilt and create opportunities for undergraduates to conduct an academic project that extends and supports their overall learning experience."

(Photo credit: Joe Howell/Vanderbilt University)