SAN MARCOS ---- A new cache of material about business plans, venture capital and entrepreneurial activity is now part of the collection at Cal State San Marcos' Kellogg Library, made possible with funds from the Donald and Marie Van Ness Endowment.

About 200 new titles, both print and electronic, have reached the shelves, said Ann Fiegen, the business and economics librarian at the Kellogg, and the collection will be expanded as $20,000 a year comes to the library from the endowment.

Among the acquisitions is a Lexis-Nexis database package for business and selections from a business plan index maintained by the Carnegie Public Library in Pittsburgh .

Joining university staff on an advisory group that helps select the materials is Gary Knight, president and chief executive officer of the San Diego North Economic Development Corporation. The university said his involvement underscores how the collection is available not only to students, but to the region's business community as well.

The university said that students have made wide use of the materials for projects that include identifying suppliers for a local manufacturer and plotting potential customers for a new restaurant in San Marcos .

Noted Knight, "The resources that the Van Ness Endowment provides guarantee that the entrepreneur can make decisions based on the best information available. The (library) will have one of the region's outstanding collections of entrepreneurial-related materials and online databases."

Donald Van Ness died Nov. 20, 2000 , at the age of 86. His wife, Marie, died Aug. 26, 1995 , at age 85. Together, they owned as many as 13 businesses.

In 2001, a Desert Hot Springs man named Arne Ristol, who represented himself as the executor of the Van Ness estate, alleged that "undue influence" had been applied on Van Ness by the university to get him to change the terms under which he gave the endowment.

The change, Ristol argued, enabled the university to abandon plans to name the College of Business Administration building for Donald and Marie Van Ness. Ristol asked the university to give the money back to the estate.

State Superior Court Judge Richard G. Cline ended months of legal squabbling when he ordered that the estate be given to the Cal State San Marcos Foundation.

Contact Bruce Kauffman at (760) 761-4410 or bkauffman@nctimes.com .