All posts by tex libris

Memory, Archives, and the Power of Storytelling with Cristina Rivera Garza

On April 14, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection welcomed acclaimed author Cristina Rivera Garza for an evening of reflection, conversation, and celebration marking the acquisition of her literary archive. Rivera Garza – Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” and a MacArthur Genius Fellow.

The event drew a full house to honor the arrival of Rivera Garza’s papers and the stories they preserve. Attendees had an opportunity to view a curated selection from Rivera Garza’s archive, which includes manuscripts, letters and documents related to her writing and the life of her sister, Liliana, whose murder and legacy are the focus of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” Rivera Garza’s prize-winning memoir.

Rivera Garza opened the evening with a brief talk about the process that led to the placement of her papers at the Benson. She recalled the moment, following the completion of her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer, when she realized she lacked the tools to properly preserve Liliana’s letters, notes, books and other ephemera. Conversations with Benson staff helped her transition from caring for the materials privately to entrusting them to an institutional home.

She dedicated her remarks to her late father, Antonio Rivera, who recently passed away. Tracing his extraordinary life – from his Indigenous roots and refugee migration during a historic drought to earning a PhD in agricultural sciences in Sweden – she honored his devotion to memory and preservation. Antonio, like Liliana, saved everything: letters, photographs, telegrams and even short stories. Rivera Garza credited him with instilling the values of legacy and documentation that ultimately inspired her literary work.

Rivera Garza described archives as sacred, transformative spaces where “the living and the dead interact,” likening them to cemeteries that enable spiritual communion and emotional resurrection. She recounted the profound experience of opening the boxes of Liliana’s belongings, which included handwritten notes, origami-folded letters and scribbles in book margins – tangible remnants that allowed her to reconstruct her sister’s story and, in doing so, become a writer.

She closed her remarks with a call to action, framing archives as instruments of “restorative justice.” Though they may not always bring perpetrators to court, archives preserve truth, resist forgetting and bear witness to gender violence and femicide. In an era of disinformation, she argued, archives remain steadfast between oblivion and collective memory. Her parting wish: “Let archives do their breathing, and allow them to revive ourselves.”

The evening continued with a dialogue between the author and Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante, director of the Center for Global Media at the Moody College of Communications. The conversation explored the author’s writing process, the decision to withhold Liliana’s image from the English-language cover and the role of feminist mobilizations in shaping a new vocabulary for justice. Rivera Garza shared that much of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” was informed by telephone conversations – intimate, unrecorded calls during the pandemic – with Liliana’s friends, whose memories form the emotional scaffolding of the book.

The discussion touched on broader issues of gender violence and femicide in Mexico and beyond. With an impunity rate for femicide exceeding 95% in Mexico, Rivera Garza described her writing as a way to confront silence, institutional erasure and the bureaucratic labyrinth faced by those seeking justice. She discussed the language born of feminist movements that made her book possible and necessary – a language that gives voice to victims rather than perpetrators.

With themes spanning grief, justice, family history and the evolving role of archives in a digital age, the evening served as a powerful reminder of the significance of preserving stories – especially those often left untold. Rivera Garza’s archive joins the Benson’s vast literary collections, ensuring that her words, and Liliana’s, will continue to inspire, provoke and bear witness for generations to come.


Watch video from the event.

Libraries Celebrate Comics at BIPOC PoP

This March, five University of Texas Libraries staff members joined the vibrant and growing community of creators and scholars at the annual BIPOC PoP Symposium, an event that brings together writers, artists, gamers, students and academics to celebrate and build community around popular culture.

Sponsored by UT’s College of Liberal Arts and organized by staff from the campus’s own Latinx Pop Lab, BIPOC PoP offers UT Libraries a valuable opportunity to engage with creators and audiences whose work reflects the diversity of voices in contemporary storytelling. This year marked the second consecutive invitation for the Libraries to host a table in the exhibition hall.

Librarians Tina Tran, Gina Bastone, Adriana Cásarez, Yi Shan and Ana Rico shared a selection of graphic novels and comics from the Libraries’ collections – including paperback comics, zines, large-format art books, and young adult titles. These materials showcased the depth and variety of the Libraries’ long-standing commitment to collecting comics and graphic novels, particularly in the Perry-Castañeda Library’s popular and well-used collection.

Visitors expressed surprise and excitement upon learning about the comics collection at PCL, with many students vowing to stop by the library soon. Faculty members discussed potential class visits, underscoring the value of the collection as a teaching tool. A highlight of the event was meeting acclaimed comics creator John Jennings, who graciously signed the Libraries’ copy of After the Rain, which is now available in the collection (view in the catalog).

Libraries staff also made connections with local artists and small publishers, with an eye toward expanding the Libraries’ holdings of zines and independently produced comics in the near future.

As always, BIPOC PoP was a joyful celebration of creativity, community, and shared enthusiasm for the stories that shape our cultural landscape. TheLibraries is grateful to the Latinx Pop Lab and the Department of English for the invitation, and we look forward to returning next year.

Scholars Lab Series Launches with Talk on Data Storytelling and Visualization

The Scholars Lab Speaker Series at the University of Texas Libraries welcomed renowned data visualization expert Dr. Alberto Cairo on February 10 for a thought-provoking discussion on the intersection of visualization, art, and insight. Cairo, the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami, engaged an audience of students, faculty, and researchers in a conversation about how data storytelling can enhance both comprehension and communication.

During his talk, “Visualization: An Art of Insight,” Cairo explored the aesthetic and analytical dimensions of data visualization, emphasizing that effective visuals go beyond aesthetics to provide clarity, context, and meaning. He shared examples from journalism, scientific research, and public policy to illustrate how well-crafted visual representations can inform, persuade, and even challenge assumptions.

Cairo discussed how data visualization is not merely about following set rules but rather a reasoning process that carefully considers content, audience, and purpose. He emphasized that designing a visualization is an intentional, iterative dialogue, requiring deliberate choices about how information is encoded—using length, area, angle, or color—to effectively represent data.

Cairo illustrated how data visualization can reveal trends, exceptions, and broad patterns, pointing to, and underscored the challenge of balancing showing vs. explaining data, using the cone of uncertainty in hurricane forecasts as an example of how misinterpretation can arise without adequate context and annotation.

Finally, he urged designers to move beyond software defaults, encouraging thoughtful refinement in visual composition, from color choices to line breaks, to create clear and effective graphics. His insights reinforced the idea that data visualization is both an analytical tool and a form of storytelling, shaping how people understand and engage with information.

The event, held in Perry-Castañeda Library’s Scholars Lab, was the first installment of the new Scholars Lab Speaker Series, launched to highlight emerging trends in digital scholarship. Audience members had the opportunity to engage with Cairo in a Q&A session that followed the talk.

The event also marked the commencement of International Love Data Week 2025, celebrating the significance of data in modern research and decision-making. For more information on upcoming events and resources, visit the UT Libraries’ official website.

Illuminating Explorations: Music and Childhood Culture

Hannah Neuhauser, 2025 PhD in Musicology, Butler School of Music


“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.

Music is a portal and can unlock a door to a fantastical sonic landscape, brimmed with mystic, melodic magic. We turn a page and open ourselves to discovering an entirely different realm, full of magic and mystery. Dangers may lurk around each corner, giants may want to gobble us up for lunch, and at times, the path may be so utterly twisted that we almost lose ourselves. Suddenly, the darkness becomes light, and in silence, we find ourselves back in the safety of our childhood bedrooms. The lion’s roar – a radiator. The pitter pattering of tiny Wild Things – the rain outside. Yet within a small, singular space, we traveled to another world and returned on the other side changed. In Throw the Book Away (2013), Anne Doughty remarks that regardless of how much a child reads, it is the experience of self-reliance and youthful agency that will ensure a protagonist’s survival in an unknown labyrinth. They must hear the warnings, read the signs, and act on their own. 

Cover image of the score book Songs and a Sea Interlude by Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak, from the opera Where the Wild Things Are.

This exhibit recreates these aural portals. However, instead of reading a book, we invite you to immerse yourself in the experience of children’s music. The Music and Childhood Culture Spotlight Exhibit seeks to inform scholars of the rich history of children’s music by highlighting hidden gems from the UT Austin library collections. Did you know A.A. Milne commissioned his own songbook for Winnie the Pooh in 1929? Or that Carole King wrote a children’s television special called Really Rosie in 1975? It was a huge hit and we have the score, which you can check out to sing to your younger friends! Selections also range from audio recordings like Danny Kaye’s narration of Tubby the Tuba (1947) to Oliver Knussen’s operatic score of Where the Wild Things Are (1982) and a wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship from Mozart’s influence on childhood labor (Mueller) to the rise of Young People’s Records (Bonner). 

Cover image of the score book Really Rosie by Carole King

Music is a psychological tool to study emotional regulation “without rules or limitations, it is pure assimilation” and media can stimulate fantasy for children to pretend “as if” they are something else (Gotz et, all, 2005 p.13). Numerous scholars discuss the sentimentality and destruction of child development due to media dependency, but children will always make their own ideas of media to understand, transgress, rebel, and connect with their surroundings (Parry, 2013). Here, in this exhibit, we seek to highlight the positive attributes of musical media that allow children (and our inner child) to enact their own creative cultures through their imaginations and identify the “traces” of media that we value. 

Cover image of the book Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood by Adeline Mueller

I hope you enjoy these discoveries as much as I did. 


Works Cited 

  • Doughty, Amie A. Throw the Book Away: Reading versus Experience in Children’s Fantasy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013. 
  • Gotz, Maya, Dafna Lemish, Hyesung Moon, and Amy Aidman. Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children. Routledge, 2005. 
  • Parry, Becky. Children, Film, and Literacy. London: Palgave Macmillan, 2013.

Haricombe Establishes Distinguished Lecture Fund

The University of Texas Libraries is happy to announce the establishment of the Lorraine J. Haricombe Distinguished Lecture Fund, adding to the transformative legacy of Vice Provost and Director Lorraine J. Haricombe, who will retire later this year.  This parting generosity is emblematic of a leader who has exemplified the values of curiosity, diversity, and community engagement throughout her extraordinary tenure.

The Distinguished Lecture Fund will support an annual speaker series, bringing renowned experts to campus to inspire critical thinking, enrich dialogue, and showcase the breadth of UT Libraries’ resources. Funds distributed from the endowment will provide programming support, including speaker stipends, travel expenses, event logistics, and other related costs.

This initiative reflects Lorraine Haricombe’s vision for fostering intellectual exploration and building connections across disciplines. Her commitment to innovation and education will continue through this fund to uplift students, faculty, and the broader Austin community for years to come.

A contribution to the Lorraine J. Haricombe Distinguished Lecture Fund ensures that her legacy of inspiration lives on, creating opportunities for impactful conversations and the exchange of ideas well into the future.


If you are interested in supporting this fund, visit the UT Libraries Giving Page to make your contribution today.

Support Knowledge, Inspire Futures: Year-End Giving to UT Libraries

As the calendar readies its turn toward a new year, it’s the perfect moment to reflect on the causes that inspire us—those that ignite curiosity, foster innovation, and unite communities. The University of Texas Libraries stand as a pillar of these values, shaping lives and driving academic excellence.

Your year-end gift to the Libraries is more than a donation; it’s a profound investment in education, discovery, and the transformative power of knowledge. Contributions help sustain vital resources, from state-of-the-art technology to groundbreaking collections, ensuring students and scholars can achieve their potential.

Why Give?
Giving is more than generosity; it’s about creating meaningful impact. A tax-deductible year-end gift to UT Libraries aligns your philanthropic vision with your financial goals while making a lasting difference.

This year, there’s a unique opportunity to honor a leader who has exemplified these values. As UT Libraries prepares for the retirement of Director Lorraine J. Haricombe in 2025, we celebrate her extraordinary legacy with the creation of the Lorraine J. Haricombe Distinguished Lecture Fund.

A Legacy of Inspiration
The Distinguished Lecture Fund will support an annual speaker series, bringing renowned experts to campus to inspire critical thinking, enrich dialogue, and showcase the breadth of UT Libraries’ resources. This enduring initiative reflects Lorraine Haricombe’s commitment to curiosity, diversity, and community engagement.

Your contribution to this fund ensures that her vision continues to uplift students, faculty, and the broader Austin community for years to come.

Be Part of Something Bigger
Join us in supporting a legacy of learning and discovery. Whether you’re reflecting on the libraries’ impact on your life or investing in a brighter future for others, your year-end gift can help UT Libraries thrive.

Visit the UT Libraries Giving Page to make your contribution today. Together, we can honor a visionary leader and champion a future where knowledge knows no bounds.

Building a Bot: An Exploration of AI to Assist Librarians

Recognizing the looming impact of artificial intelligence on the current landscape in higher education and libraries, the University of Texas Libraries has been experimenting with an AI-driven chatbot that could eventually augment library staff to ensure continuous availability of assistance at times when our staff are not available.

The project, which serves as a research initiative rather than a production service, explores the potential of artificial intelligence to enhance user experience.

This exploration has been spearheaded by Hannah Moutran, a recent graduate and Library Specialist, in coordination with Aaron Choate, the Director of Research & Strategy at the University of Texas Libraries.

Choate has been instrumental in organizing an AI interest group aimed at educating library, archives, and museum staff about the potential and applications of AI. Moutran, whose academic research has focused on AI implementations, was a perfect fit for leading the chatbot project, which emerged from discussions among the principals in the interest group.

The chatbot, envisioned as a backup for the “Ask a Librarian” service, is being tested to understand its capacity to provide uninterrupted assistance when human staff are unavailable. To build this system, Moutran analyzed chat logs from the fall 2022 semester, gaining insights into the types of questions users asked and the responses provided by librarians. This analysis revealed that users were often referred to other librarians, departments, or websites for more detailed information.

The chatbot’s development has been guided by a series of in-depth interviews with five librarians from the “Ask a Librarian” service. These interviews uncovered several design priorities for the AI system, including transparency about its nature and data usage, the accuracy of information provided, and alignment with the library’s mission of fostering human connections. Ethical considerations were front and center in the design, ensuring that users know when they are interacting with an AI rather than a human.

To address these concerns, the development team chose the Voiceflow platform and the Claude language model. This combination allows the chatbot to offer controlled responses by providing users with links to library resources rather than attempting to answer questions directly. The system also incorporates disclaimers, user memory, and predefined rules to ensure that the chatbot aligns with the library’s values and operates within ethical boundaries. It is a deliberate design choice meant to avoid the common pitfalls of AI-generated misinformation.

In addition to providing general library support, the team has integrated an AI flow specifically designed to assist users with research. This tool can help users brainstorm topic ideas, generate initial search links, and even provide citation and writing assistance. The AI can also connect users with specialized librarians based on the nature of their inquiry, giving a brief explanation of each librarian’s area of expertise to help guide users toward the most appropriate contact.

While the pilot project has shown promise, the developers are clear about the experimental nature of this tool. While it offers new ways to assist users, there is no immediate push to implement it in its current form. The focus is on exploration—understanding how AI might improve library services in the future, rather than rushing to deploy it as a finished product.

“This project isn’t about replacing human librarians,” explained Choate. “It’s about providing a tool that can fill gaps when staff aren’t available, allowing librarians to focus on more complex and human-centric tasks.”

One of the most significant aspects of this project is the freedom granted by the Libraries to experiment without the immediate pressure of launching a production service. This flexibility has allowed Moutran and Choate to focus on the chatbot’s ethical design and explore the long-term role AI might play in library services.

Presented by Moutran as a Capstone project for the School of Information, the chatbot has received valuable feedback from testers, highlighting the importance of trust and verification of AI-generated information. And her work with the chatbot has provided valuable insights into conversational design, user experience research, and prompt engineering.

As the chatbot continues to develop, the project remains a research initiative with the potential to reshape how libraries use AI. With a focus on transparency, ethics, and user support, the chatbot may one day serve as a supplementary tool for both users and librarians, increasing access to library services and freeing staff to focus on more complex inquiries.

Access the prototype: UT Libraries Assistant Chatbot Demo

OA Week 2024 Recap

Open Access Week 2024 at the University of Texas Libraries provided an engaging platform for exploring Open Access (OA) issues and celebrating community-focused approaches to knowledge sharing. With the theme Community over Commercialization, the week featured events, blog posts, and social media highlights aimed at fostering awareness of OA principles and practices.

A centerpiece event during the week was an informative panel on the evolving landscape of open access, addressing both faculty and student interests. The discussion focused on the importance of community-driven models and equitable access to research outputs.

The week’s blog posts at the Open Access blog served as a rich resource, covering topics like the “OA Initiatives Annual Report,” which celebrated the Libraries’ recent successes in supporting OA publishing and international partnerships, and “Theses, Dissertations, and Embargoes,” which offered guidance to students on managing access to their research. Another post on “Preprints” detailed how these early research outputs promote rapid knowledge sharing, and the final post, “Open Access Business Models,” discussed sustainable funding pathways for OA initiatives.

Throughout the week, the Libraries shared a series of social media posts to spotlight OA topics and resources, including a Sticker Shock price comparison, and a Highlighting Diverse Collections featuring open resources, which provided followers with easy-to-understand overviews and encouraged engagement with OA resources available through Libraries, as well as Tocker Open Education Librarian Heather Walter’s pithy meme-ified posts (1, 2, 3) that are a favorite with the Libraries’ more youthful followers.

In alignment with OA Week, the Libraries also announced “Important Changes Coming to Public Access for Federally Funded Research,” signaling a new phase in research accessibility. This announcement addressed policy updates stemming from the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Nelson memo, outlining upcoming shifts in how federally funded research will be shared with the public, underscoring the Libraries’ role in helping researchers navigate these changes.

Together, these events, posts, and resources underscored  the Libraries’ commitment to advancing open access and fostering a collaborative, community-oriented approach to scholarly communication. Open Access Week 2024 effectively highlighted the Libraries’ ongoing efforts to ensure that research is accessible and impactful for both the academic community and the broader public.

Primeros Libros Triennial Takes Place in Oaxaca

The 2024 Primeros Libros Triennial Partner Meeting and Symposium, held at the Francisco de Burgoa Library in Oaxaca on October 10–11, brought together scholars, librarians and cultural heritage experts to celebrate and examine the legacy of early Mexican printed books and their impact on understanding the colonial period.

The Primeros Libros de las Américas project is a collaborative digital initiative to preserve and provide access to the first books printed in the Americas during the 16th century. It emphasizes the creation of a comprehensive digital corpus to promote global access and scholarship. With contributions from institutions across Europe and the Americas, the project embodies the shared heritage of colonial Mexico and serves as a vital resource for understanding the history of print, culture and language in the New World.

Day 1 of the gathering opened with a keynote lecture, “The Christian Doctrine in Mixtec by Fray Benito Hernández (1567-1568): Its Historical and Current Context,” delivered by a panel of experts, including bilingual educators, psychologists, and philologists. The presentation highlighted efforts to preserve indigenous Mixtec texts through interdisciplinary research.

Panel discussions throughout the day explored the artistry and subversion in 16th-century Mexican prints, including analyses of the unique Franciscan Library’s “Warnings for Indian Confessors” and the survival of anti-colonial Nahuatl codices.

A virtual presentation from the Biblioteca Statale di Lucca shed light on the discovery of rare early American prints in European collections, illustrating the transatlantic reach of colonial print culture.

The second day delved deeper into the lives of early printers, such as Pedro Ocharte and the Calderón family, with a spotlight on technological advances in printmaking during the colonial era. Discussions also explored the circulation and reception of printed works across the Americas, including a case study of an indigenous sacristan in Zacatecas who risked punishment to preserve knowledge.

The symposium also included a visit to the Juan de Córdova Research Library and concluded with a book presentation on the history of engraving in Mexican print. Scholars and participants hailed the event as a critical platform for fostering collaboration and preserving the shared heritage of the Americas.

For more information about Primeros Libros and ongoing preservation initiatives, visit primeroslibros.org.

NEH-Funded Project Pioneers AI Solutions for Spanish Colonial Texts

Work on the “Unlocking the Colonial Archive” project – which was funded through the NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions program,  a collaborative initiative between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council – has been completed. 

Dr. Kelly McDonough, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Dr. Albert A. Palacios, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator and lecturer in the School of Information, co-led the three-year initiative. With $149,915.00 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the project has focused on transcribing digitized Spanish colonial materials in the Benson Latin American Collection and its post-custodial partners, addressing linguistic challenges in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies, and sharing innovative workflows with the scholarly community.

Key activities include the development of HTR models for Spanish calligraphic styles from the 16th through the 18th century, the establishment of a publicly accessible data repository for transcriptions of Benson collection materials, and the organization of paleography and digital humanities institutes that benefitted scholars from over 15 countries and 20 U.S. states.

Project dissemination has been extensive, with presentations and keynote speeches at conferences and institutions across Latin America and the United States, highlighting the use of artificial intelligence in historical research. 

You can read more about the program activities here: https://apps.neh.gov/publicquery/AwardDetail.aspx?gn=HC-278116-21 and read the final project white paper here: https://hdl.handle.net/2152/129230.