When it comes to acquiring research materials at the tier-1 research level, not everything can be delivered to your front door. There are no routes librarians can explore online to purchase materials because countries do not have the same framework as the US. And even if a librarian discovers a method for shipping, in reality, often it is cheaper for librarians to pack collections with them on airplanes.
To maintain UT’s subject expertise and to help build and steward effective networks abroad, librarians need to go overseas to make negotiations — face-to-face — for one-of-a-kind purchases that distinguish and develop UT’s collections.
Along with acquiring materials, even more important, it is the responsibility of the librarian to set in motion international relationships, and nurture them, and create mutual education with our partners abroad on behalf of the Forty Acres.
The University of Texas at Austin is unique. We are the only university in Texas where librarians travel and function like ambassadors. As a result, our collections serve all researchers in Texas and many of our collection items serve as the only copy for the US. Library projects in South & Central America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East keeps the Forty Acres active in the global community.
This spring, the University of Texas Libraries will embark on a crowdfunding campaign to ensure that $20,000 is raised by April 19 so librarians may make acquisition trips in 2020.
For 134 years, the University of Texas Libraries have committed to building one of the greatest library collections in the world. New knowledge emerges only if we continue to expand the universe of information we make available to the Forty Acres, Texas and the world.
Will you help us build and keep our bridges with the international community intact?
During the first four years of my tenure at the university my focus was squarely on positioning the Libraries for new directions where we would do things differently and/or do very different things. We chose four purposeful pathways as our focus and developed roadmaps to advance them: Collaboration, Digital Scholarship, Distinctive Collections and Spaces. I am deeply indebted to my colleagues who have contributed to these accomplishments and who moved the needle with a deep commitment to excellence in both new and core foundational responsibilities.
As I enter my fifth year as Vice Provost and Director of UT Libraries, we will continue this trend. With the help of the Provost’s Task Force on The Future of the UT Libraries, I am also keenly interested in learning more about the community’s awareness of what they need from the Libraries. More specifically, what library services, expertise, spaces, information resources and opportunities for broader partnership do they expect? How can we position UT Libraries more centrally as a core resource to stimulate student learning in order to advance President Fenves’ priority to unlock their potential? In what ways can librarians and professional experts add value to the research life-cycle that will net more grant funding, or inspire the creation of knowledge by connecting students, faculty, scholars and researchers to dynamic data and specialized or distinctive information resources? And how do we maintain our traditional strength in collection building while ensuring that those collections are appropriately preserved for use by future generations of scholars and students?
As one of the largest research universities in the country, UT must be equipped to support the highest level of research activity. Digital scholarship plays a key role in setting the stage for our continued momentum in investigation and innovation. It facilitates sharing of new knowledge across disciplines. What library facilities could be transformed to position the Libraries as the hub of collaboration, digital innovation and scholarly endeavor on the Forty Acres?
These are opportunities we should pursue and advance to align with and anchor ourselves to the university’s mission in a rapidly changing higher education environment. We are a core node in that environment with high potential to catalyze new forms of scholarship, reshape scholarly communication, energize teaching and seek new campus partners (and beyond) to leverage that potential.
Organizational agility and flexibility to respond to new opportunities will be a necessary component of our work in such an environment. I am very pleased with the progress we have made to date to create structures that will facilitate flexibility and to provide exciting professional growth opportunities through new skills training, projects, research and more.
Together we are poised to take the University of Texas Libraries to new heights and to honor the expectation and pride of our users to maintain a library of the first class that is dynamic, relevant and ready for future possibilities at The University of Texas at Austin.
If you’ve spent much time in the past decade or so traveling in Texas, you might have noticed the increasing ubiquity of wind farms cropping up along spartan stretches of highway across the state. If a new project involving a fellowship recipient in residence at the Libraries holds any promise, you might soon see more solar panels along your travels, as well.
Last August, the university welcomed a new Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) fellow, Emily Beagle, who spent the fall splitting time between the Research Support & Digital Initiatives at the Libraries and the Webber Energy Group in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Beagle was one of a group of four cohorts in a Data Curation for Energy Economics track for CLIR who are working at various energy institutes and libraries across the country. Beagle’s specific project work throughout the fall related to a renewable energy project funded through The Ray (at The Ray C. Anderson Foundation in Georgia) — one that could potentially bring solar power generation to those long stretches of Texas highway.
The Ray began as a project specific to an 18-mile stretch of I-85 southwest of Atlanta as an exploration of ways “to create a regenerative highway ecosystem” through a reconsideration of the land and communities surrounding our collective highway system. The Ray has already deployed several pilot technology projects along the route including solar-powered vehicle charging, a tire safety check station and solar-paved highways, and the component of the project tasked to the Webber Group was to investigate the placement of solar photovoltaic panels along the right-of-ways nationwide to provide additional energy to the power grid. To do so, the group had to consider the over 45,000 miles of roadways that make up the U.S. interstate network.
Narrowing the scope down to a manageable sampling required the research group to come up with some exclusionary criteria, removing swaths from consideration like protected areas (e.g. National Parks and Forests), and focusing on locations close to existing transmission lines, adjacent spaces that are large enough to accommodate development, and locations near exits to make them easy for maintenance access. This allowed them to use existing environmental data for the available space to determine where voltaic clusters would be most efficient and effective.
The Webber Group’s work on The Ray project began in March before Beagle arrived, but that worked out well for her contribution to the project, which involved the development of a data management plan, prepping data for sharing and preservation in repositories like Texas ScholarWorks, and validating reproducibility in findings. She has worked closely with Libraries colleagues to develop and implement the data plans for the group, while also providing ongoing assessment of the process and the effectiveness of Libraries’ tools and resources as an embedded member of the project team.
Working throughout the fall, the group was able to create a report for the foundation in December, and develop an online tool — the Solar Potential Map — that shows the best options for locating panel installations along roadways across the U.S. With the potential for a significant national infrastructure investment under discussion, components conceptualized through a project like The Ray could eventually become a reality. The Ray has already piloted one cluster of solar panels along I-85, and now they have the data to support an expansion of the idea on a much larger scale.
Beagle will continue her stint as a CLIR fellow through the spring, coordinating with her peers in Mechanical Engineering to supervise graduate student work on data-intensive research projects and use that interface to inform and develop data management resources and services at the Libraries. She’ll also using the knowledge she’s gained from the fellowship residence to co-teach workshops for other researchers on campus.
She isn’t the first CLIR fellow the Libraries have hosted — there are currently two Postdoctoral Fellows for Data Curation in Latin American and Latina/o Studies at the Benson Latin American Collection: Edward Shore (continuing from 2017) is overseeing a project to preserve and digitize rare historical documentation on quilombos, communities organized by fugitive slaves in colonial Brazil, and Jennifer Isasi (2018) is working with Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert A. Palacios to contribute to collections as data efforts, educational resources and digital scholarship initiatives at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. And 2017 fellow at the Benson, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, recently completed her term working to develop the repository and interface for the digital Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, a collection of records relating to the national police of Guatemala. 2013 CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in Medieval Studies Ece Turnator took part in a collaborative bid between the Libraries, the English Department and research units on campus — including the Texas Advanced Computing Center — to create a global gateway to all the digital resources currently available on the Middle Ages, the Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP).
“The CLIR program has been of great value to the Libraries by allowing us access to trained scholars and researchers with perspectives informed by current trends in the interrelationship between libraries and community stakeholders,” says Vice Provost Lorraine Haricombe. “Their presence provides an opportunity to bridge between unit-level research and scholarship and library resources and services, and to use that bridge to improve and elevatewhat we do.”
The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program offers recent Ph.D. graduates the chance to help develop research tools, resources, and services while exploring new career opportunities. Host institutions benefit from fellows’ field-specific expertise by gaining insights into their collections’ potential uses and users, scholarly information behaviors and current teaching and learning practices within particular disciplines.
Beagle says the fellowship experience so far has played out as advertised, but in unexpected ways.
“Being split between Engineering and the Libraries, I was expecting that my duties for both would be very different and not have much overlap,” she says. “But I have been pleasantly surprised at how much I have been able to collaborate between the two groups and how much work in one area has informed a project in the other.”
“It has been very rewarding to work with the Webber Energy Group, UT Libraries and The Ray on a project with real world applicability. I hope to someday see solar panels along the interstate and be able to think ‘I was a part of that.’”
“You girls and guys are outstanding, and I pray that you all continue to believe in expanding the minds of us easily forgotten because sometimes it’s books that begin new journeys or just plain, old relief from the journey we chose to walk.” –testimonial from Daniel, an Inside Books Project recipient (via KUT.org)
For those who’ve lost their freedom, the seemingly small act of reading a book can be a lifeline to hope from inside prison.
A new exhibit in the Scholars Commons at the Perry-Castañeda Library examines the work of a local nonprofit and the positive impact that work is having on the lives of incarcerated individuals.
The Inside Books Project (IBP) is books-to-prisons collective founded in Austin in 1998. People incarcerated throughout Texas send requests to IBP for free literature, and volunteers respond with a package of books and personalized letter. In exchange, many recipients have sent art, poetry, prose and other narrative materials testifying to their experiences in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. This ever-growing archive of materials is held at the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and a digital collection is in progress at insidebooksproject.omeka.net
The IBP Archive Project is coordinated by aems emswiler, a student in the dual Information School (MSIS) and Women’s and Gender Studies (MA) programs at UT. aems has worked with IBP since 2012 and as an Archival Fellow at the Texas After Violence Project since 2017.
The exhibit was installed by UT Information School students and Society of American Archivists (UT-SAA) members aems emswiler and Alyssa Anderson, and long-term preservation of the collection is supported by a UT Student Government Excellence Fund Grant. It will be on view in the Perry-Castañeda Library during regular hours through February 22.
Interested in learning more about the archive project or possibly being involved? contact: aems@texasafterviolence.org. There are volunteer and internship opportunities for iSchool studies, in particular SAA-UT members, archives track students, and students who are invested in diversity, inclusion, and social justice in archives.
“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.
Turkey, or the Ottoman Empire, has long occupied the political and strategic sights of the West. Today’s news often focuses on the constitutional amendments—in some cases styled as reforms––that the Erdoğan government has pursued. In Western academia and media, these maneuvers are most often read as an “Islamist” approach to governance; they may be more accurately labeled neoliberal, and indeed follow patterns shared with other eras of reform and significant political change in Turkish history.
In recognition of the contemporary significance of Turkish political change and development, UT Libraries’ “Satire After the Young Turk Revolution” online exhibit brings to the fore poignant political cartoons featured in the bilingual (Ottoman Turkish-French) weekly magazine Kalem. Kalem was founded following the Young Turk Revolution in the early 20th century, a movement that sought to implement significant political and social reforms in the late Ottoman Empire. These reforms and the political issues raised at the time would continue to roil Ottoman society through the First World War and into the formation of the Turkish Republic.
The cartoon images have been selected for this exhibit because of their accessible meaning, illustration of the top issues of the time period, and aesthetic value. Kalem magazine was chosen for this exhibit because it represents UT Libraries’ rare Ottoman collections that are ripe for digitization to increase access for the public.
This exhibit will be of interest to those fascinated by pre-WWI Europe, the Ottoman Empire, satirical and political cartoons, and French publications in the Middle East. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students of the Middle East, early 20th century Europe, and popular art and literature across cultures.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
Increasingly simple and cost-effective digital technologies have made capturing and distributing oral histories a robust and growing field for archivists and for researchers, and, by extension for students and scholars seeking primary source, personal narratives to augment their understandings of history. One of the most compelling South Asian oral history projects is the 1947 Partition Archive. The Archive’s mission is to preserve eyewitness accounts from those who lived through the exceptionally turbulent and violent period when the Indian subcontinent gained independence from Britain, divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and millions of people migrated from India to Pakistan, from Pakistan to India, from India and Pakistan to other parts of the world. The work of the Archive is especially pressing: it has been 72 years since Partition and those still alive and able to directly recount their stories are increasingly rare. As such, the core of the Archive’s work is to use its digital platform to encourage and motivate more interviews.
Using the power of “the crowd” to create content as well as to fund itself, the 1947 Partition Archive is demonstrably transparent in its methodologies; of particular use to those new to video oral histories is their “Citizen Historian Training Packet” which walks a novice through best practices for interviewing, strategies for good video capture, recommendations for incorporating still images into videos and even how to employ social media to generate interest (and potentially more interviews!). The Archive has gathered over 5000 interviews so far and uses a very persuasive interactive map (StoryMap) on its front page to document the scale and scope of migration while simultaneously indexing the interviews; on the map itself, try searching a city either in “migrated to” or “migrated from” to generate a list of interviews, many with detailed text summaries that can be easily shared through social media, email, etc.
A handful of video interviews are available on the front page of the Archive’s website and raw, unedited recordings are available upon request.
Recently the Archive has partnered with Stanford University Library to preserve and archive the recordings. To date, approximately 50 interviews are available through streaming on the site and (contingent on funding) one can hope for more to be available soon. On the Stanford site, one can navigate by language, author, place & date of recording, but those just beginning to explore the subject may find the “Today’s Story” a good place to start.
The stories bravely shared through the 1947 Partition Archive are simultaneously compelling and devastating in their intimate descriptions of destruction, of violence, of loss. And yet, they also provide hope: all interviewees survived the ruin that was Partition and the very act of sharing their stories demonstrates a hope for and generosity towards future generations to learn from the past.
Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.
Icy, ethereal dream pop from the Pacific Northwest. Kat Terran’s ghostly vocals haunt and swoop high above her band’s north wind din of swirling looped guitars and bass/drum drone. Classic 4AD followers take note.
Award-winning jazz pianist/vocalist leads her top-notch trio through a thoughtful batch of standards. Tickling the ivories à la Monk while crooning like Sarah Vaughan, thirty-something Fulton champions bebop and bravely marches it forward into the 21st century.
Near the Parenthesis/ Music for the Forest Concourse
From the excellent Oakland electronica label n5MD comes this natural world-inspired ambient theme album. San Francisco-based artist Tim Arndt filters his soft piano through leafblown beats and pulsing synths. To be aurally absorbed as an autumn dusk falls – ask your doctor if Near the Parenthesis is right for you.
Vancouver, B.C.’s powerhouse gospel trio strips it all down to the very essence of soul with roots-rock producer/multi-instrumentalist Steve Dawson at the helm. Dense rich harmonies uplifted over a backporch stomp. Whether believer or skeptic, the listener is promised joy, peace, and transcendence.
This side project of Jesus & Mary Chain guitarist Mark Crozer and drummer Loz Colbert thrills with a filled to the brim imperial pint-sized EP of bittersweet Brit-pop. Not quite shoegaze, not quite psychedelia, just amped-up, fuzzed-out rock and roll glory.
Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He writes poetry, is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, and releases lo-fi guitar-heavy indie pop as DAILY WORKER.