Category Archives: Collections

Semester Recap: The Unbridled Beauty of Watercolor Renderings

To kick off a series of blog posts recapping the Spring 2014 semester, we figured we’d start with one of the most visually captivating: watercolor renderings from our very own Alexander Architectural Archive.

Earlier in the semester, Judy Birdsong’s Visual Communications studio paid a visit to the Archive to check out some of our working drawings in order to see how they have changed over the years. This is a completely fascinating progression, and one of my personal favorite things to view when I visit the Archive for my own research needs. However, a few weeks later, students were assigned a project requiring watercolor — and the watercolor renderings the Archive has are an absolutely incredible resource!

I was lucky enough to be given a similar exposure to the Archive’s watercolors by Curatorial Assistant Nancy Sparrow, and I’m here to pass on the unbridled beauty. If any of you happen to have been looking to improve your architectural watercolor skills, the Archive is an unparalleled resource!

Throughout final reviews, a similar version of the same comment often comes to the surface: accurately conveying an architectural idea heavily depends on the way you draw or render your final presentation graphically. With so much focus on computer generated renderings in practice today, watercolors are almost slowly being vaulted into the ranks of a lost art. These stunning examples from the Archive showcase immaculate talent that displays a clear understanding of color, shadow, contrast, and fine detail by the artist.

We hope the following high-resolution images inspire you in some way, whether out of pure admiration, or to pursue a new (or revived!) technique in the renderings you produce yourself. Click on the below photographs to view in beautiful detail!

I was floored by this beautiful rendering of the Flawn Academic Center, located just across the mall from Battle Hall. Nancy and I could not stop admiring the glass…

You can continue reading the rest of this article by Architecture & Planning Library GRA Stephanie Phillips over at the Battle Hall Highlights blog.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Posthumous Contribution: An Icon of a City

Plans for the redevelopment of Olin Park in Madison, WI from Frank Lloyd Wright’s work on the Monona Basin Project.

While searching for all of the items in Karl Kamrath’s Collection last semester, I was directly exposed to the vast depth and diversity of a successful architect’s personal library. From Alden Dow to Katherine Morrow to Richard Neutra, Kamrath’s collection spanned decades and encompassed elements of major movements and achievements in the 20th century.

While his collection contains some quintessential readings that were quite prolific (such as Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats and Other WritingsHassan Fathy’s Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egyptand Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Future of Architecture), there are also some limited publications of several design projects that Kamrath and his firm were associated with. As I sifted through special collections to find these professional reports, one caught my eye before I even noticed the Kamrath Collection stamp on the cover: The Monona Basin Project.

My interest directly stems from the report’s subject: a schematic master plan for the city of Madison, Wisconsin. As a University of Wisconsin graduate who spent five years in Madison, I was immediately intrigued by the possibility of being able to compare my visual of Madison with a plan dating back to 1967.

For anyone that’s either been a resident of the greater Wisconsin-Illinois area or happens to be a Frank Lloyd Wright buff, you know that Wright’s career began in Madison as a student at the University of Wisconsin. Though he never completed his engineering degree, he went on to realize many significant projects in Madison and the surrounding area, including the Robert M. Lamp House, Unitarian Meeting House, and Taliesin in nearby Spring Green, one of his most famous projects. However, Monona Terrace likely possesses one of the most interesting timelines of all of Wright’s works – and I’m here to share that story with you all!

You can continue reading the rest of this article by Architecture & Planning Library GRA Stephanie Phillips over at the Battle Hall Highlights blog.

Happily Buried in Music

A few of the 300+ postal bins of CDs from KUT.

Anyone who is a regular user of campus delivery for music deliveries from the Fine Arts Library will find great joy in news of a massive new acquisition of materials from a local Austin institution.

KUT-FM recently moved into their new KUT Public Media Studios, and in an effort to maximize their space, a decision was made to offload 40+ years of physical media. After a near fruitless effort to dispose of the items through a public purchase offering as required by state law, the collection was offered up for the Fine Arts Library — an offer which was quickly pounced upon by Libraries administrators.

FAL is now the proud repository of an additional 60,000 CDs (doubling the current circulating collection) and 4,000 vinyl records, all of which become accessible to the denizens of campus and visitors to the library…after, of course, an arduous effort to process the vast cache of materials is complete.

More about the acquisition here.

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Poet Adds His Voice

The Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection

On a steamy day in September, renowned poet and fiction writer Ken Fontenot welcomed Sean O’Bryan, Manager of Preservation and Gifts Processing at the UT Libraries, and I into his downstairs apartment. The walls in the living room and hallway were lined with bookshelves packed with brightly-colored poetry, poetry journals, writing guides, and stacks of chapbooks. This is a poet’s home, and Fontenot wants these bound words to feed our next generation of poets. Ken Fontenot received the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of Poetry Award for his 2013 In a Kingdom of Birds (Pinyon Publishing), his second book of poetry; he has also published translations of German poetry and a novel. The poetry began when he attended a reading series at Tulane, his alma mater, and seemed more possible when he made his way to the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection at The University of Texas at Austin Libraries.

In the 1980s Fontenot moved from his home in New Orleans to Austin and to UT where he would receive an MA in German Language and Literature. While here, he found himself at the Flawn Academic Center, in a room adjacent to what was then the Undergraduate Library, a room full of poetry. “You go on filling your jar of hope with yet more hope,” he wrote in A Kingdom of Birds. Ruth Stephan founded the Poetry Collection at UT Austin in 1965, and Fontenot realized amidst these books and poetry reading events that he was a poet. The influence of the Poetry Collection stayed with him.

Last year he decided he wants his collection to make poetry possible for other potential poets and readers. His donation will add hundreds of volumes and contributes to an ongoing revitalization of the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection, now on the 6th floor of the Perry-Castañeda Library, in collaboration with the English Department and the New Writers Project. Ken Fontenot, along with the UT Libraries, hopes that the sweet cacophony of verse he has added to the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection will feed you, poet. Revel in the work of Rosemary Catacalos, Kay Ryan, Cyrus Cassells, Ai, Louise Gluck, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and many more. You’ll see these titles added to the shelves over the next couple of months.

Fontenot’s fiction towers still in his apartment on other shelf-lined walls. These books, he says, he is keeping as he writes his second novel.

– Kristen Hogan, English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies Librarian

Engineering Nature

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What do the traditional academic fields of architecture, fashion, sports, engineering, biology, chemistry and military science all have in common?

The answer: they all share research interests in design and implementation of high tech textiles. This growing area includes biomimicry, embedded medical sensors, wearable electronics, camouflage, prosthetics and much, much more that will impact all our lives.

Because engineering plays an important underlying role in various aspects of technology, the Engineering Library has stepped up its collecting interests to include materials that specifically relate to this new era of high tech fashion and textile design.

To learn more about this fascinating field, use the Libraries’ scOUT tool to search for books and Academic Search Complete for new articles, as well as any of our specialized databases on how fashion and textile design is changing.

One of our favorite recent articles concerned developing a way to mimic the camouflage abilities of squid skin in fabric. So think of this the next time you eat calamari—there is more than good taste to this animal.

Below are some examples from our collections that show how this new area will impact all of our lives and demonstrate how the Libraries are keeping abreast of the brave new world of textiles.

Arduino Wearables [electronic resource] by Olsson, Tony.

Flexible composite materials : in architecture, construction and interiors, René Motro (ed.).

Textile futures : fashion, design and technology by Quinn, Bradley.

Bio-inspired engineering by Jenkins, C. H.

Bioinspiration and biomimicry in chemistry. [electronic resource] : reverse-engineering nature by Swiegers, Gerhard.

(Contributed by Susan Ardis, Head Librarian, McKinney Engineering Library)

Crawling Through Latin America

A 2006 web capture from the Colombian Ministry of Defense.

When libraries began to experiment with ways to migrate and adapt their traditional structures and skills to a technologic age, they came up with some novel approaches to information collection and preservation that are in a process of constant evolution. One such experiment begun in 2005 is still active and paying dividends today.

The Latin American Government Documents Archive (LAGDA) has been collecting, preserving and providing access to ministerial and presidential documents from 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries. In a process of crawling – the automatic downloading of webpages based on given criteria – the project has captured documents and information that could (and likely would) be lost over time due to neglect, changes in technology, changes in leadership or, in some cases, a willful desire to expunge the historical record.

The project is an extension of a decades-long effort by the Benson Latin American Collection to collect government print reports from Latin American countries, some of which date to the late 19th Century, and complements the work of the Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative.

Kent Norsworthy is a data curator and communications specialist splitting time between the Benson and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies who has been one of the primary drivers of the LAGDA project. He recently provided an interview on his work to “The Signal,” the Library of Congress’s blog on digital preservation, which you can read here.

Satisfaction

I guess we’re doing it right.

The President’s Task Force on Undergraduate Graduation Rates released its report yesterday, and amongst the recommendations, the Libraries found some happy news in an included student satisfaction survey:

According to the figure, students report the highest satisfaction levels with the university libraries. Indeed, for both of the library measures, about 95% of students report somewhat satisfied or better for these items.
Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) data (click on image to enlarge).

Now to work on that other 5%-7%….

The Libraries Afield: Launching the Guatemalan National Police Archives Website

Documents at the Guatemalan National Police Archive (AHPN). Photo courtesy Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, Guatemala.

University of Texas Libraries Director Fred Heath traveled to Guatemala in December 2011 to participate in the launch of a joint project between the Guatemalan National Police Archive (AHPN) and The University of Texas at Austin. Together, AHPN and the Libraries would provide public access via the web to records of human rights violations by government agents that were discovered in a military munitions dump in 2004.

This is Dr. Heath’s travelogue of his trip.

Our flight to Guatemala City, 5,000 feet up in the Central American highlands took two and a half hours.  Our destination was the National Police Archives, where on Friday we would celebrate with our colleagues, the recent opening of the AHPN website.  I had yet to write my brief remarks.

In the cramped rear coach seat of the Boeing 737, I held my laptop in my lap, with the screen tilted slightly forward to accommodate the encroaching seatback of the traveler in front of me, and edited my three-minute talk.  I was working from the draft I delivered the week before, when we first opened the web site of the Guatemalan National Police Archive.

Our next day — Friday, December 9 — would be International Human Rights Day, and AHPN director Gustavo Meoño had shrewdly decided to reciprocate the previous week’s events with a ceremony in Guatemala City celebrating the partnership between AHPN, administratively housed within the Ministry of Culture, and the University of Texas.

At 35,000 feet, I was not sure what to expect.  I did know that Christian Kelleher (program coordinator for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative), Karen Engle (director of the Rapaport Center for Human Rights and Justice) and Daniel Brinks (professor and co-director of Rapaport) would all address the audience at AHPN, projected to be some 200 in number, but I knew little about the attendees.  I also knew that all three of my colleagues would deliver their remarks in Spanish; so I was determined to keep my Anglo remarks brief.   As I wrote, I wanted to answer the question of why democracies elect to archive and preserve even the dark chapters of their histories, rather than deny or erase them.  I chose to use the example of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum, whose holdings allow researchers to address the issues of the transfer of presidential power in the aftermath of the assassination of John Kennedy, to study an epochal period in our own tumultuous civil rights movement, and to inquire into the dark chapter that was the war in Vietnam.  My hope was that in my brief remarks I could remind our Guatemalan audience that in a democracy it is necessary to study all parts of our past, in order to learn from our accomplishments, and avoid the recurrences of our missteps. Continue reading The Libraries Afield: Launching the Guatemalan National Police Archives Website

Plus ça change, plus c’est la caneck, caneck….

The Last Lonestar Showdown

On Thursday of last week, college football fans around Texas and many from around the nation gathered around the flat screen to watch the final episode in the third longest running rivalry in college football.  After this season, the two teams are unlikely to encounter each other again in the regular season as the Aggies head toward the Southeastern Conference and the Longhorns lock up annually with their heartland foes.

But even as the sports scene in Texas changes fundamentally, so much remains the same.   The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University remain the two flagship institutions of our state, and when it comes to teaching, learning and research, the two schools remain ever so closely aligned.

And our libraries are united in their determination to advance the core educational missions of the two universities.  The University of Texas System and the Texas A&M University System have united to fund and operate a common storage facility on property owned by Texas A&M.  There all the universities in both systems will be able to preserve their print copies in a shared resources in common facility that will ensure the preservation of the “long tail” of scholarly research while freeing up valuable central library space on every campus.  Full sets of journals now accessed electronically—such as JSTOR—will have their archive print instantiation in Bryan, Texas.

At the same time, the two flagships continue to work together to harness the power of digital technologies in support of research.  Combining their own powerful (but separate distinct) holdings of first century books from Mexico with other examples from Mexican partners, Spain, Brown University, Tulane, Harvard and elsewhere, the Los Primeros Libros project will eventually  enable scholars around the globe to access and study all of the 200+ surviving examples of printing in the Western Hemisphere.

So, as both schools rewrite the lyrics to their fight songs, where each disparages the other in the early stanzas, the librarians will resume the collaboration that makes their combined collections one of the state’s most important assets.

Hook ‘em /  Gig ‘em

 

Be a Fellow

Calling all scholars! The Harry Ransom Center has opened their annual Fellowship application period for 2012-13.

Who wouldn’t want to get their paws dirty digging through the personal papers of such luminary writers as Graham Greene, Anne Sexton, Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace? Or wile away the time wading through ephemera from Gone With The Wind, Spellbound, The Third Man or any number of other David O. Selznick productions? Or just bask in contemplative imagery from the massive Gernsheim photography archive? With more than 50 fellowships available annually, there’s no reason not to apply.

And the Libraries’ 9 million+ volumes and vast digital resources and special collections are here to support your work…as if you needed more motivation to follow the link below.

More information.