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.
The witch trials of Europe in the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, resulted in the prosecution, often violent, of over 100,000 people. Studying this history and understanding its causes—which were multifaceted, and incorporated elements of religious persecution of alleged heresy, superstition, and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants—is an important way we can understand the motivations of past atrocities and learn from them to avoid similar violence and intolerance in the future. The Witches: Survey of Scottish Witchcraft project at the University of Edinburgh is one project that makes this history more broadly accessible and understandable both to scholars and the general public.
The site itself contains an excellent introduction to the history of witch trials in Scotland. It states:
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Scotland went through a series of changes to the state and church which fuelled the Scottish witch hunt. As a result of the Reformation, when Scotland broke away from the Catholic Church and moved towards Protestantism, the church went through an upheaval of religious belief and became much more interested in what ordinary people did and believed.
This concern led to great concern from Church and state about people’s religious beliefs and practices, deviations from behavior expected by the Church and society (such as not attending Church on a Sunday), and witchcraft. More than 4,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, and confessions were often evinced using torture. Of people accused of being witches it is estimated that around 2,500, or roughly two-thirds, were executed, with the majority of those executed (about 85%) being women.
The main map on the site’s landing page, showing locations where witches in the database lived.
The site’s most striking feature is a map showing accused witches’ residences and details about their case and personal lives, including their occupations. This provides an intuitive and visually appealing way to explore the dataset, and allows for free exploration of the data without digging into the spreadsheets and metadata underlying the map. Users can also search the complete dataset used to make the map, exploring the same by searching for an accused’s name. In addition to these exploratory tools, the site also features a very helpful introduction that explains many details of the dataset and provides further background information, as well as a number of additional visualizations. Particularly affecting is the Story of Isobel Young visualization, which chronicles the life and death of one woman who was accused of witchcraft and executed.
The Story of Isobel Young visualization.
The site also provides a host of references that provide scholarly background on the history of witch trials in Scotland. There are also a number of resources, including a GitHub repository for the project’s website and the CSV files used to make the map. It also provides lists of accused witches, trials, people involved, and memorials and sites of interest within Scotland that users may wish to visit.
The Witches: Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site offers a robust but inviting introduction to this period of European history. I encourage you to explore the site for yourself and find out what it has to offer.
Iton 77 is one of the prominent literary magazines of literature, poetry, and culture in Israel.[1] The UT Libraries has cooperated with the publishers of Iton 77 since 2013 and recently finished the digitization of 391 issues, bringing almost the whole run online.[2] Additional issues will be digitized or added as digitally-born files in the near future. This is the most complete digital archive of Iton 77 currently in existence. Being a searchable, full text archive, openly accessible to the public worldwide with no restrictions, it promises to be a valuable resource for scholars as well as for the general public.
Established by the late poet and editor Yaakov Besser in 1977, the magazine is now celebrating 48 years of commitment to literary work. Many Israeli poets and authors published their first texts in Iton 77, and it is still a desired platform for emerging and experienced writers alike. Published works include poems, short stories, book reviews, literary criticism and research, opinion editorials, essays, and works in translation. Wide representation is given to Israeli writers who write in languages other than Hebrew, such as Arabic, Russian, and Yiddish. Being a pluralistic platform, Iton 77 is open to alternative narratives and opinions, acknowledging the importance of historical contexts while discussing the complicities and difficulties of Israeli existence. Current editors are Yaakov Besser’s son, Michael Besser, and ‘Amit Yisre’eli-Gil’ad.
Upon the acquisition of some print back issues of the magazine in 2013, UT Libraries and the Iton 77 publishing house discussed a future online visibility for the publication, and the possibility for hosting the digital issues on the UT Libraries digital repository – now known as Texas ScholarWorks or TSW. Like many other digital repositories, TSW was established to provide open, online access to the products of the University’s research and scholarship, and to preserve these works for future generations. In addition, TSW is also used as a platform for digital content that is not necessarily created on campus, but is rather a product of cooperation with off campus content owners, such as the Iton 77 publishing house.
TSW provides stable and long-term access to submitted works, as well as associated descriptive and administrative metadata, by employing a strategy combining secure backup, storage media refreshment, and file format migration. Conveniently and helpfully, all works submitted to TSW are assigned persistent URLs, – permanent web addresses that will not change overtime.
All scanned issues of Iton 77 have been OCR-ed for full-text searchability and can be downloaded either as text or PDF files. Currently issues are sortable by date and title, with sorting by author and subject in the works. With the permission of UTL and the Iton 77 publishing house, most of the content is mirrored and indexed on the Ohio State University Modern Hebrew Literature Lexicon.
The total number of downloads of all issues to-date is 241,947. Issues are viewed and downloaded from every corner of the globe. Not surprisingly, most of the users are from Israel, with the United States and Germany in second and third place. Other Hebrew readers connect from many other countries, including Egypt, Japan, Togo, and Syria.
The most popular issue since going online in TSW with 6194 downloads to-date is the double issue from January 1987, called the ‘decade issue.’ It celebrated some of the most prominent Israeli authors, poets, and essayists of that time, such as Yitsḥaḳ Aṿerbukh Orpaz, Aharon Meged, Erez Biton, A.B. Yehoshua, Dalia Rabikovitch, Anton Shamas, Shimon Balas, and many others.
We are excited about this partnership to bring Iton 77 to a global audience in this stable open access format and encourage all to browse and use it!
In December 2024, after classes came to a close, I took a brief trip to Istanbul, Türkiye, with the hope of acquiring pivotal Arabic-language journals that had been published in Egypt. I’ve written for the TexLibris blog before on the importance of looking for essential research materials in unexpected places, such as Arabic in Türkiye. This trip was yet another example.
So, what were these texts that I traveled across the Atlantic in order to secure for the UT Libraries researcher community? One of them is مجلس النواب مجموعة المضابط (Majlis al-Nuwwab: Majmu’at al-Madabit/Meeting Minutes of the House of Representatives). I acquired 18 volumes of this title, representing the record of the discussions and decisions taken by a House of the Egyptian Parliament in the late 1920s and 1930s. This title had been on my radar ever since I acquired مجلس الشيوخ مجموعة المضابط (Majlis al-Shuyukh: Majmu’at al-Madabit/Meeting Minutes of the House of Lords) a few years ago. That title consists of the records of the House of Lords of the Egyptian Parliament from the 1930s to the 1950s. My goal was to complement the House of Lords collection with the House of Representatives’ records from nearly the same time period so that UT Libraries is able to offer researchers a comprehensive record of Egyptian Parliamentary activity from the early 20th century. These types of government records may seem fairly mundane, but they are, in fact, remarkably difficult to locate outside of official copies kept at the Egyptian National Archives. In North America, UT Austin is one of four holding institutions for Majlis al-Shuyukh: Majmu’at al-Madabit, and one of five holding institutions for Majlis al-Nuwwab: Majmu’at al-Mudabit. I am eager to see the scholarship that arises from the presence of these crucial and rare titles at the UT Libraries, and I encourage scholars from other research institutions to consider visiting UT Libraries to consult these materials.
The second title that I acquired is الموسوعة الجنائية (al-Mawsu’ah al-Jina’iyyah/Encyclopedia on Criminal Law) by legal scholar Jindi Abd al-Malik Bayk. This work, published in the 1930s, is an encyclopedia of Egyptian criminal law structures and standards. It chronicles the historical development of criminal law, doctrinal formation, and the rules that came to be adopted in modern Egyptian criminal law. This title also includes the substantive case law that underpins some of the key assumptions and orientations for criminal procedure and criminality in Egypt.
The third title, الدنيا المصورة (al-Dunya al-Musawwarah/The Illustrated World), was published between 1929-1932. It was a weekly journal from the famous Dar al-Hilal publishing house, responsible for numerous impactful intellectual and popular periodicals in early 20th century Egypt. Edited by Emil and Shukri Zaydan, al-Dunya al-Musawwarah was renowned for its caricatures and the artists behind them, as well as for its plethora of photographs. It also featured influential articles by foundational litterateurs and political commentators, such as Fikri Abaza (فكري أباظة). UT Austin is now one of a only a handful of North American institutions with any holdings of this important title. al-Dunya al-Musawwarah complements our existing collection of early 20th century Arabic periodicals that I have been building since joining UT Austin 10 years ago. Other notable titles include البلاغ الأسبوعي (al-Balagh al-Usbu’i/The Weekly Calling), الهلال (al-Hilal/The Crescent), المصور (al-Musawwar/The Illustrated), and الكواكب (al-Kawakib/The Planets).
As I continue my work to maintain our existing collections and expand upon them, it is my hope that complementary titles such as these—titles that work together and extend the knowledge already present in the UT Libraries’ collections—will make crucial connections for UT Austin researchers and beyond. I invite anyone interested to learn more about these materials and/or our Middle Eastern Studies collections to reach out for a consultation.
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.
Before we had Spotify playlists, we had the mixtape. Scrawled handwritten track lists; the precise practice of hitting PLAY and REC at the same time; the dread of ejecting the cassette from the player to find the tape had been pulled into a tangled mess and using a pencil to carefully respool it.
A screenshot from the About section of The Mixtape Museum.
The Mixtape Museum (MXM) is a digital archive project and educational initiative committed to the collection, preservation, and celebration of mixtape history. The project seeks to both further mixtape scholarship and foster public dialogue, raising awareness of the artistry and far-reaching impact of mixtapes as a cultural form.
While mixtapes are the anchor point, these memories are also about people and places, relationships and phases, marking connections between a cultural era and the personal eras of our lives. The Collection reveals how music indexes experiences and moments in time, and also attests to the way particular objects can become imbued with layers of meaning and cultural significance. Even in the digital space of the MXM, I am struck by the affective resonance of the physical cassettes themselves, each containing a story that stretches beyond the tape wound inside it.
In addition to the Memory Collection, the MXM includes a News section of related articles and public events, and a Mixtape Scholarship Library featuring key texts in the field. Appropriately, there is also a Listen section, which takes visitors to the Mixtape Museum Soundcloud page, where today’s creators might upload their tracks instead of passing out their tapes.
Aligned in a sense with the ethos of the format it highlights, the MXM operates from a simple WordPress site—a platform with a relatively low barrier of entry for producing digital content. The project was founded by scholar, arts administrator, and community archivist Regan Sommer McCoy, who serves as Chief Curator, supported by a group of advisors and institutional collaborators.
As I browse the collection my own mixtape memories surface—a tape gifted to me by a former best friend that I played on repeat during my freshman year of high school; my painstaking efforts to create the perfect mix to let a crush know the way I really felt about him. Does the MXM spark a mixtape memory for you? The project welcomes submissions to the archival collection and invites a variety of formats. Contributors have the option to make memories public or keep them password protected, respecting the boundaries of each offering.
Want to learn more about mixtape culture and history? Several of the titles featured in the MXM are available from the UT Libraries:
Scholars and graduate students from institutions across the country gathered at the Benson Latin American Collection for the Spanish Paleography + Digital Humanities Institute. The immersive three-day program provided intensive training in reading and transcribing Spanish manuscripts from the 16th to 18th centuries while introducing participants to digital humanities tools that enhance historical research.
Funded by LLILAS’s U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Program and the Excellence Fund for Technology and Development in Latin America, the institute sought to equip researchers with specialized skills to navigate colonial texts, visualize historical data, and foster a collaborative academic community. The event was spearheaded by LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert A. Palacios, and brought together a cohort of graduate students and faculty members specializing in history, literature, linguistics, and related disciplines.
The institute focused on three key objectives: providing paleography training, introducing participants to digital humanities tools, and fostering a collaborative research network. Participants engaged in hands-on workshops to develop their ability to accurately read and transcribe colonial manuscripts. They also received instruction on open-source technologies for text extraction, geospatial analysis, and network visualization. The program fostered a community of scholars who will continue sharing insights and resources beyond the institute.
Participants had the opportunity to work with historical materials, including royal documents, inquisition records, religious texts, and economic transactions. Case studies were examined through paleography working groups, where scholars collaboratively deciphered difficult handwriting styles and abbreviations.
To apply their newly acquired digital humanities skills, each participant developed a pilot research project using Spanish colonial manuscripts. These projects utilized handwritten text recognition (HTR) technology, geographical text analysis, and data visualization tools to enhance historical inquiry. The final day of the institute featured a lightning round of presentations, allowing scholars to showcase their preliminary findings and discuss future applications.
This year’s participants hailed from universities across the U.S., including the University of Chicago, the University of North Texas, Columbia University, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of California-Santa Barbara, Purdue University, City College of New York, West Liberty University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of California-Merced. The interdisciplinary nature of the group enriched discussions, providing diverse perspectives on archival research and manuscript interpretation.
A highlight of the institute was the introduction and use of the handwritten text recognition (HTR) model the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office trained and recently launched on 17th and 18th century Spanish handwriting preserved at the Benson. This innovation is expected to significantly accelerate the study of colonial-era documents and democratize access to these historical resources.
Additionally, the program provided a comprehensive list of recommended paleography resources, including books, digital collections, and online tools to support continued scholarship in Spanish manuscript studies.
Palacios is leading an online Spanish version of the institute for participants worldwide this spring and fall. He will be leading another onsite institute June 4-6, 2025.The demand for the LLILAS Benson Spanish Paleography + Digital Humanities Institute in the Colonial Latin Americanist field underscores the growing interest in merging traditional archival research with computational methodologies. By equipping scholars with both paleographic expertise and digital tools, the institute is paving the way for innovative research on the Spanish Empire and its historical records.
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.
In 2019 I have written about Footprints, a project that aims to track the circulation of printed ‘Jewish books’ around the world as it is evidenced through provenance research.[1]The Library of Lost Books is a “citizen science” (aka crowd sourcing) international project that similarly to Footprints, aims to trace books looted by the Nazis from the library of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums) and track their journey around the world through provenance data. Operating from 1872 until it was closed down by the Nazis in 1942, the Higher Institute was dedicated to the study of Jewish history and culture, as well as rabbinical studies in Liberal Judaism.[2] The original library is reported to have around 60,000 volumes, but only around 5,000 of them have been rediscovered since the war. The Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture in Jerusalem, with support from the German Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) and the German Ministry of Finance (BMF), has created this platform not only for the purpose of tracing the lost books, but also to commemorate and educate about the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, its scholars, and its students.
The Library of Lost Books website features a database, an interactive map, and an online exhibition detailing the history and legacy of the Higher Institute. A great place to begin is with “The story of the missing books” and its three chapters (with optional narration). Chapter one gives the background story of the Higher Institute, its founders, and its academic landscape. The Higher Institute represented a modern current within Judaism, namely Liberal Judaism, that emphasizes universal values — personal freedom, individuality, and social responsibility. Chapter two describes the last years of the Higher Institute before it was shut down. It shows a chronology of systematic discrimination according to the Nazi ideology, explains why and how the books were moved out of the library, and brings detailed biographies of students and employees, some of whom kept working at the library as forced laborers until their deportation to concentration camps, while others managed to escape. This chapter also details the rescue efforts of part of the books before 1942. Chapter three details the fate of the books after the war; it explains how they were transferred to [nowadays] the Czech Republic, or were scattered in various libraries in Berlin. Yet, some books were relocated to the United States or Russia.
The project owners are using “citizen science” (aka crowd sourcing) in their quest to identify the missing books. Users are encouraged to look at books in their local libraries or second-hand bookstores, cross-reference their findings with the virtual library, and share their findings through the platform, using a “lost and found” form. In order to support this provenance research, the project offers ‘hunting supplies’, including a detailed checklist that includes stamps, accession numbers, call numbers, and paper labels that might be found in or on the books. The goal is to virtually reunite the found books through the Library of Lost Books; the project owners specifically state that “physical copies will remain in their places where they were discovered, as that is also a part of their story.”[3]
The platform is also a teaching tool for educators. It includes learning units for students about pre-war Jewish life in Berlin, Nazi looting practices, provenance research, the importance of cultural heritage, and the roll of libraries in the pre-internet era. Besides English, all content on the platform has versions in German and Czech, as it is suspected that most of the books ended up in either Germany or the Czech Republic (although some were already located also in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel).
From the database view, one could browse the few thousands of books that were already identified so far. Browsing options are by book titles/authors/publication year, by owners (past and present), and by individuals or institutions that found the books. Clicking on a book entry, one gets full tracing information: gallery of associated images, supportive provenance evidence, and a timeline of related events, showing how the book traveled through time and various owners. See for example the eventful life of the title Zekhor le-Avraham : sheʼelot u-teshuvot – through interactive map. This book was published in 1837 in Istanbul, acquired by the Higher Institute (year unknown), looted in 1942, salvaged after the war, resurfaced in Jerusalem (year unknown), acquired by a private donor for UCLA in 1963, and currently held by UCLA. Similarly, thousands of books that were looted from the Higher Institute resurfaced years after the war and are now reunited again in the virtual library of lost books.
“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.
The Israeli Cinema in the 20th Century exhibition provides a concise survey of Israeli cinema from its beginnings up until the end of the 20th century, while highlighting the UT Libraries Israeli Cinema & Film Collection. Teaching and learning through filmic content provide valuable insights into historical events, cultural contexts, social issues, and artistic expressions. Textual content documents the evolution of film theory, criticism, and production. By preserving this body of knowledge and the intellectual heritage of filmmakers, critics, and scholars, the collection supports the research of Israeli society through cinema and film.
This is the Land (Barukh Agadati, 1935)
The exhibition starts with a short overview of the filmic production in Israel from its beginnings in pre-1948 Palestine until the end of the 1990s. It then divides into five sections: the first describes early beginnings through the 1950s, while the remaining four sections are organized by decades (60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s). Each section describes cinematic trends or phenomena, and shows how historical events were analyzed through films in that period of time. From early beginnings (as early as 1911) the filmic production promoted the Zionist project, and later on, well into the early 1960’s, it was utilized to support and promote the heroic Israeli ethos of ‘a few against many.’ During the years, the Israeli cinema has matured; from the 1960’s and on, it moved away from the national narrative, and developed a more critical treatment of societal processes, while venturing into genres such as satire, comedy, experimental, and personal cinema. As the young state developed and experienced major military conflicts, political shifts, and social and demographic changes, filmmakers reacted to those events in their work, dealing with topics such as the Israeli-Arab conflict, ethnic tensions, and queer life experiences from a personal point of view.
Hill Halfon Doesn’t Answer (Assi Dayan, 1976)
While the exhibit highlights images of DVD covers from the Israeli Cinema & Film Collection, the broader collection includes many other items that could tell the story of Israeli cinema. UT Libraries collects everything that is or about Israeli cinema and film, including pre-1948 items, in all languages and in all formats. As would be expected, the collection is comprised of Audio-Visual content in various genres (features, documentaries, shorts, TV series) and on various media (VHS, DVD, streaming), but it also includes textual materials, either in print or digital, such as books, periodicals, film festival catalogs & programs, film screening programs, film school publications, original scripts, exhibition catalogs, promotional/commercial publications, theses and dissertations, instructional materials, film industry documentation, governmental reports, and ephemera. The entire collection is discoverable through the UT Libraries catalog.
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.
The banana has been used in many forms of art, ranging from paintings to sculpture, and demonstrated its popularity in iconography throughout the years. Why are bananas so popular, both as a fruit and as a modern emoji? One digital exhibit seeks to spread context behind the banana by organizing visual depictions of the fruit through Latin American artworks.
Banana Craze, a bilingual digital research project created by Juanita and Blanca Solano and translated by Banana Link, showcases the dark past and present of the banana industry, and how it has shaped the regions affected by the plantations. The database is available for viewing in both Spanish and English.
Before the globalization of the banana, the fruit itself was hardly eaten outside of its native regions. As the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) established plantations throughout Latin American countries and the Caribbean, bananas became a monoculture industry in itself, now being the number one sold fruit around the world.
The Banana Craze website itself is not only a visual spectacle, but it also features organizational tools so that the viewer can dive deeper into individual artists as well as explore the art on a timeline to provide historical context. For example, the images of this gold leafed banana plant can be found in Mariá José Argerenzio’s entry in the alphabetized index. Maria is an Ecuadorian artist who created the installation to emphasize the extraction of two major resources from Ecuador, bananas and gold, linking Spanish empire colonialism to more modern day practices that exacerbate the region’s environmental health and disparities in wealth.
The viewer can also explore the artworks by other subcategories, such as violences, ecosystems, and country location. Violences is one of the three thematic ways to view the website through the curatorial lenses of the exhibit creators. This framework exercises the function of a digital art exhibit, allowing viewers to explore the history of banana culture with selected artworks.
Building such an interactive online exhibit requires the use of a digital tool that is catered to accessible viewership. The meticulous metadata for each artwork blends seamlessly with each page, allowing me to search and view specific content, while keeping me immersed in the overall project. The multipage exhibits provide context and can function either as a digital archive or art database, depending on how I chose to begin my journey. I appreciated that I can view all the images and documents on the site without downloading any attachments. This provided for a seamless viewing experience.
The exhibit was a visual feast for the eyes. Its contrasting colors are electrifying, almost bordering on jarring, and produces an effective look as I went on to view the art and how they symbolize the practices that have affected the people, the land, and the traditions of Latin America and beyond.
Want to learn more about the history of bananas or protest art? Check out these resources from the UT Libraries:
This is a fun blog post and a quirky yet incredible important interventional art project. Great work bringing it to everyone’s attention through this post, Tina!
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.
