After five years of collaboration across campus, the University of Texas Libraries along with partners at the Harry Ransom Center and Blanton Museum of Art unveiled a new way to explore the university’s world-renowned cultural and research collections in one place. The Campus Collections search interface – accessible through the Libraries catalog – connects users with digitized materials from the Libraries, Harry Ransom Center and the Blanton Museum of Art.
The new service is part of a Mellon Foundation–funded project (2020–2025) to create a unified discovery platform for the university’s arts and cultural heritage holdings. While each partner institution continues to manage its own digital collections, the new interface allows researchers, students and the public to search across all three collections simultaneously – a first for the university.
The grant project team consisted of several Libraries staff across the organization, including Aaron Choate, Wendy Martin, Mirko Hanke, Devon Murphy, Melanie Cofield, Alisha Quagliana, Mandy Ryan, and Dustin Slater. As members of the Access Systems unit – which manages the Alma/Primo library services platform powering the Libraries’ catalog and discovery environment – Cofield and Quagliana collaborated closely with Metadata Analyst Devon Murphy and colleagues at the Blanton Museum and Ransom Center. Together, they worked to align descriptive standards and ensure system compatibility across institutions.
The service relies on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to synchronize records across systems, setting a baseline for shared metadata that includes titles, rights statements, identifiers and thumbnail links. The project’s success now positions the project partners to share their records more broadly through other aggregation platforms like TxHUB, operated by the Texas Digital Library.
Very few institutions have used the library catalog’s capacity to harvest metadata through OAI-PMH,” said Metadata Analyst Devon Murphy. “We really forged a new path to broaden the scope of discovery and access for our users.”
The Campus Collections search builds on the Libraries’ ongoing work to integrate more of the university’s digital assets into its discovery environment. Since launching Alma/Primo in 2020, the Libraries have harvested metadata from the Texas ScholarWorks institutional repository and the Libraries Collections Portal. These integrations allow users to find open-access research, digitized archives, maps, audio and video alongside traditional catalog materials.
The Access Systems team also oversees Alma Digital, a companion service used to manage licensed and restricted digital content such as streaming media and digital scores. Together, these tools create a more cohesive and accessible digital ecosystem for the university community.
The Campus Collections interface is now available for public use at search.lib.utexas.edu.
Each year during International Open Access Week, the University of Texas Libraries joins a global conversation about the equitable sharing of knowledge. This year’s theme – Who Owns Our Knowledge? – challenged us to consider how scholarship is created, shared, and sustained in the public interest.
Through Texas ScholarWorks, the Libraries amplifies the ideas of our campus community by providing open, long-term access to the research and creative works that shape our world. The digital repository showcases the vast and varied knowledge produced across the Forty Acres – from innovative language education to community-based research.
Among the open access collections available through the repository that we highlighted during this year’s recognition:
Hindi Urdu for Health: Language for Health Developed for the healthcare profession, this project expands communication and cultural understanding through Hindi-Urdu language learning. Designed for advanced learners and professionals, it offers materials that bridge linguistic skills with real-world applications in medicine.
Latino Research Institute Supporting interdisciplinary study of Latino populations in Texas and beyond, the Institute’s archive provides an invaluable resource for scholars, policymakers, and community advocates working to improve the lives of Latino communities across the U.S.
John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies A hub for activist scholarship, the Warfield Center advances critical race theory, Black feminism, and creative expression. Its digital collections reflect a commitment to civic engagement, cultural production, and the global study of Black life.
National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes Federally funded to close gaps in education and employment for deaf people, the National Deaf Center provides open, evidence-based strategies to improve accessibility and opportunity across communities.
Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) A cornerstone of Latin American scholarship since 1940, LLILAS connects disciplines and nations. Its repository collections include conference proceedings, scholarly publications, and papers that advance understanding of Latin America’s cultures and histories.
As we reflect on who owns – and who benefits from – our collective knowledge, Texas ScholarWorks stands as a testament to the power of open access to break barriers, foster collaboration, and make scholarship truly public.
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.
On September 10, Princeton University Library unveiled a new digital and physical exhibition, titled “Forms and Function: The Splendors of Global Book Making.” The exhibition is a feast to anyone interested in book history, and especially those who want to learn about how the formats of a “book” varied through time and space. It is also a rare opportunity for the public to view some of the least known hidden gems in Princeton’s collections.
The exhibition includes manuscripts and printed books from Western, Islamic, East, South and Southeast Asian, and Mesoamerican cultures. There are seventy-four items on digital display, and they represent many materials for book making that may not be familiar to a contemporary and Western audience, including bark, textiles, shell, lacquer, and copper. The earliest produced book on display is an Egyptian clay cylinder from the 6th century BCE, while the latest is an Indian artistic book made with copper plates from 2020.
Three “traditions” of book formats are featured in the exhibition: the codex tradition, the East Asian tradition, and the pothī tradition.
The codices, defined in the exhibition as “single- or multi-gatherings of sheets folded inside each other, with texts on both sides, sewn together, and usually attached onto covers,” gradually replaced scrolls, and became the preferred format for early Christianity but later spread to Central and South Asia and was also adopted by Islamic and Hindu traditions. The exhibit includes an extremely rare early Coptic manuscript of Gospel of St. Matthew, and a palimpsest parchment on which the text was once erased to allow reuse.
Figure 1: Georgian palimpsest
Also included is a Chinese edition of Missale Romanvm produced by the Jesuits in 1670 which was printed with woodblock but bound in a European codex format.
The East Asian tradition, which included the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures, demonstrates a wide range of mediums and materials to produce reading materials and extensive influence into other Eurasia regions. Among the bamboo slips and Dunhuang scrolls is an inner garment with over 700 “eight-legged” exemplary exam essays written on it, totaling more than half a million miniature characters.
Figure 2. Pulinsidun daxue baguwen sichou chenyi
Another rare item on display is a reproduction of ink rubbings that the late-Qing statesman, Duanfang (端方, 1861–1911), made from Egyptian and Greek objects during his diplomatic missions in the early 1900s.
Figure 3. Aiji wuqiannian guke
The pothī tradition, heavily influenced by the palm leaf, one of the earliest materials in the region used for writing texts, is no less diverse in terms of materials and formats that supported the texts. The exhibition features an earliest example of paper making from Nepal (1140), on which the popular Pañcarakṣā sūtra (Sūtra of the five protectresses) is written.
Figure 4. Pañcarakșā sutra (Sutra of the five protectresses)
Coming after the palm leaves, later materials, such as birch bark, gold, and paper, mimicked its progenitor’s shape. The loose pages were usually stacked to make a bundle. With Brahmanism and Buddhism, the format spread across South and Southeast Asia and reached the Mongols and Manchus through Tibet.
Figure 5. Coqbbertv (The emergence and migration of humankind)
Here is an example of a relatively understudied Dongba manuscript from the Naxi people, an ethnic minority living in China’s Yunnan province.
Beyond the main three themes, the exhibition also showcases some formats that different traditions share: single-sheet, scrolls, and accordion style. One of the highlights from this section is one of the earliest printed texts in the world, the Hyakumantō darani from Nara-era Japan.
Figure 6. Hyakumantō darani (A dhāraņī from inside a one-million-pagoda)
The work was commissioned by the court in 764. Printed Buddhist spells were inserted into mini pagodas. These short texts, also known as “mantras,” are verbal formulas and chants for various spiritual purposes. Currently, “tens of thousands of the pagodas and several thousand printed spells still exist.”
Last but not least, the exhibit shines light on even more materials that were used to serve as the media for texts. The hard surfaces of stone, metal, and bones were widely used across the globe. For example, a conch shell with Maya glyphs is on display in this section.
Figure 7. 1 Ajaw 3 Chakat (17 March, 761 CE)
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Martin Heijidra, Director of the East Asian Library at Princeton. The online version includes an interactive timeline and map, where viewers can click on the numbered titles of the items to go to their catalogue records, which has a brief but detailed description of the item and additional readings about the research on each of the items
Figure 8. A section of the interactive map
Online viewers can also download the PDF files of the accompanied catalogue and exhibition brochure. The digital exhibition not only provides an alternative for those who cannot see it in person, but it also gives it another form of life that will extend after the exhibition hall welcomes another array of objects.
Tian, Tian. “Duanfang’s Egyptian Rubbings: The First Egyptian Collection in Late Imperial China.” Antiquity 99, no. 406 (2025): 1129–42. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10098.
Galambos, Imre. “The Chinese Pothi: A Missing Link in the History of the Chinese Book.” The Medieval History Journal 27, no. 1 (2024): 152–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/09719458241231669.
