Recent Acquisitions: Archives from the "Hero for the Planet" and the New Yorker of Car Mags

Stanford University Library

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale Test kit

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds every Friday.

Christmas has come early for the Stanford University Libraries. In the last month, Stanford has announced three wildly different acquisitions: A portable Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale Test kit, the archives of environmentalist William McDonough, and 65 years of archives from Road & Track magazine.

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Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale Test kit

The school's objects collection has added a 1960 Revision Houghton Mifflin Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale Test kit. The test originated in France, where psychologist Alfred Binet was tasked by the French government with developing a method to identify intellectually challenged children for special education programs.

In 1916, Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman revised the examination, which is believed to have initiated the modern field of intelligence testing. The Stanford-Binet is still used, now in its fifth edition, for a variety of tests, from compensation evaluations to adult neuropsychological treatment.

The Library's suitcase holds the mobile test, which includes instructions for administering and scoring the test, as well as puzzles and games for children.

Archives of Environmentalist William McDonough

William McDonough

Leading environmentalist and architect William McDonough will donate his archives to paper and digital materials to the library on an ongoing basis. Robert Trujillo, head of the library's special collections, said "It's a real-time archive."

Named "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine in 1999, McDonough is the only individual to ever received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development in 1996.

McDonough was behind the 10-acre green roof atop Ford Motor Company's River Rouge truck factor in Dearborn, Michigan, and is co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

65 Years of Road & Track Magazine

Stanford also inherited the entire 65-year archives of Road & Track magazine. Professor Clifford Nass sees the monthly publication collection as getting the University one step closer to becoming the de factor hub for automobile collections.

Nass is the director of the Revs Program, which will greatly benefit from the thousands of books, photos, diagrams, and ephemera the collection will bring to Stanford. Revs is not trying to turn academics into gearheads, but does want researchers to consider the automobile as a transformative object in society.

Founded by friends Wilfred H. Brehaut, Jr. and Joseph S. Fennessy in 1947, Road & Track is considered the New Yorker of car publications, and is the longest- running automotive magazine in the United States. It is now owned by Hearst Magazines, and Larry Webster was named editor-in-chief last June.