One of the more complex questions we encounter in area studies is how we define a nation. Is it lines on a political map? A shared territory? For Palestinians, traditional maps can often feel inadequate, showing borders and divisions but failing to capture the full, lived reality of a people. The remarkable digital-born project, Country of Words | بلدمنكلام : A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, by Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin) rethinks the very idea of a map. Instead of depicting political boundaries, it offers a form of literary cartography.
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At its heart, Country of Words is an interactive, web-based atlas that visualizes the vast geography of Palestinian literature. When you visit the site, you are met with a world map dotted with points and featuring an accompanying timeline. Each dot represents a location—Gaza, Jerusalem, Beirut, but also Paris, Santiago, and Iowa City—that appears in a work of Palestinian fiction or poetry. Clicking on a dot reveals an excerpt from the literary work set in that place, presented in both its original Arabic and in English translation.
The accompanying timeline summarizes essential events in Palestinian history and allows you to read essays on how these historical moments influenced and were shaped by key works of Palestinian literature. Additionally, you can look at an overall network visualization; a variety of visualizations of biographies, historical events, publishing histories, and publishing networks; and audio interviews with key current and recent Palestinian literary figures.
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The project is the work of Prof. Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh and her team at Freie Universität Berlin. It grew not from a desire to create a simple database, but rather from a potent intellectual argument. The project contends that for a people so often defined by exile and displacement, literature itself has created a “country”—a homeland of memory, imagination, and shared experience that transcends physical borders. This atlas makes that homeland visible.
As a librarian, I see this as a powerful tool for teaching and research. It allows students to literally see the global reach of the Palestinian experience. For scholars, it is a dynamic data visualization that can spark new questions about place, identity, and literary networks. It is a beautiful, poignant, and profoundly human entry point into a rich literary tradition. It invites you to wander through this country of words and discover the stories that connect a people, wherever they may be.
To dive deeper into the literary world mapped by the project, here are a few key works from the UT Libraries’ collections that speak to the themes of place, exile, and memory:
غسانالكنفاني، الأثارالكاملة. The complete collection of a foundational writer of modern Palestinian literature, Ghassan Kanafani. Included is his novella, Men in the Sun, about Palestinian men seeking to cross a border in a water tanker. It is a searing allegory of the search for life and dignity in the face of statelessness.
After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives by Edward Said. A landmark book of essays and reflections paired with photographs by Jean Mohr. Said, a major figure in postcolonial studies, meditates on the nature of Palestinian identity in exile.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Isabella Hammad’s second novel centers on Sonia, an actress who journeys back to Palestine and joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Enter Ghost offers a vivid portrait of contemporary Palestine and explores themes of exile, belonging, and the deep bonds formed through family and collective struggle.
“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.
As a part of my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, I was back in Delhi in early 2025, continuing research on “hidden archives,” namely the unpublished materials found in institutional settings (places like the Prime Minister’s Museum and Archive at Teen Murti or the National Archives of India) as well as private papers still kept in family homes. My fellowship allowed me to expand and nuance the work I regularly support here at UT such as the digital archiving projects related to 20th century politico-literary figures but also to delve a little deeper into UT Libraries’ growing distinctive collection related to South Asian popular and pulp fiction.
In research, like in crime thrillers, you never know where seemingly random clues might lead.
Cover of 65 Lakh Heist.
Early into my stay in Delhi, a colleague from the Fulbright office called me up to invite me to join him in attending a literary “salon” where I could meet some new people. The event was to welcome a visiting Greek poet, translator, and editor wherein she would read and discuss her poetry at the home of a prominent Indian literary editor. Poetry? Editors? “Salon”? I was in.
In addition to the lovely verse and food which both flowed freely throughout the evening, I was delighted to make multiple new acquaintances at the gathering. As we went around the room introducing ourselves—one person an activist, one a publisher, another a poet, and so on–one person identified himself as a translator at which point his jovial colleague interrupted him to reveal that he was also an author of pulp fiction. As I’ve been building UT’s pulp fiction collection for over 10 years now, my ears perked up and I set my sites on meeting this translator/author as soon as the group dispersed for more casual one-on-one conversation.
The author was lovely and humble about his own work and kindly asked me about which authors were included in UT’s pulp fiction collection. I started listing off the names—Ibne Safi, Ved Prakash Kamboj, Om Prakash Sarma, Anil Mohan—but when I got to Surender Mohan Pathak he casually asked, “oh, SMP? You want to meet him? My partner has helped edit and publish his work.” I tried not to reveal my excitement. Surender Mohan Pathak, with over 300 published novels to his credit, is one of the biggest, if not actually the biggest, authors of Hindi pulp crime thrillers. Yes! Yes, yes! I would in fact like to meet him.
With arrangements made through the generosity of new colleagues, a couple of weeks, multiple WhatsApp chats, and SMS texts later, I was greeted at the elevator gates to his Noida apartment by none other than Surender Mohan Pathak himself.
SMP with the author in his home office.
Over the course of the next hour or two, as I sat starstruck and in rapt attention in SMP’s home office, surrounded by a lifetime of memorabilia and shelves and shelves of his publications. SMP graciously answered all my questions, generously telling me about his pathway to becoming a writer, the challenges he has faced in getting published, and his expectations about his legacy. The highlights from this chance meeting, “Surender Mohan Pathak in His Own Words” are now available in the UT Libraries Digital Exhibits. It was nothing short of an honor to have been able to meet such a legend and I remain tremendously grateful to the kindhearted help of my new network of fellow fans.
Fans and rasikars of pulp fiction don’t just reside in India, however. A new faculty member to UT recently shared his admiration for the genre and our collection thusly,
SMP memorabilia in his home office.
[The collections] allowed me to reconnect with my own culture, which I could not even do in India. Given that English was the primary medium of instruction in the schools I attended, I ended up reading Rushdie before Premchand… [in the South Asia collections such as and including UT’s]… some of my most memorable moments have involved getting lost among the library stacks, and then suddenly stumbling upon a rare classic in [non-English Indian languages]… My intellectual life is much richer than it would have been otherwise. As I often mention to my friends, it is a different experience because “a different part of my brain lights up”, when I’m reading a [vernacular] novel, despite the fact that English was the first language that I learnt to read.
I invite everyone to explore the South Asia Popular and Pulp Fiction Collection, in a language of your choosing—Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Telugu, English–and consider what these mysteries, romances, and thrillers can teach us about research as well as about ourselves.
Launched in November 2022, Digital Beninisn’t necessarily a new digital project, but it is an important one that continues to shift how we understand and access African cultural heritage, in this case cultural objects from the Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria).
At first glance, it’s an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly interface that showcases more than 5,000 artifacts looted from Benin during a notorious 1897 British military campaign, an enduring symbol of colonial violence and theft. While this alone would make the project a valuable resource, a great strength of the project lies in how it highlights connections: between museum-held objects and their places of origin, between Western classifications and indigenous Edo terminology, between archival documents and the Benin objects themselves. It’s not just a database, but a dynamic tool for recontextualizing history.
Digital Benin connects the global locations of Benin artifacts across 130 institutions in 21 countries, most of which were looted during the colonial period and are now located in Western museums. Each object record includes high-resolution images, metadata, provenance information and translations in both English and Edo. Notably, you can trace how looted items moved from British soldiers in 1897, through art dealers and collectors, and into major museum collections.
Above is a screenshot of the Network Explorer tool, which allows users to explore connections between people, entities, objects and archival documents.
One of the most powerful aspects of the project is the “Ẹyo Otọ” section that highlights the Edo object classification system. Instead of relying on Western museum categories (like “pottery” or “bronze”), Digital Benin introduces a controlled vocabulary based on Edo knowledge systems. For example, you’ll notice distinct categories like Akhẹ Amẹ (water pot) or Akhẹ Osun (Osun shrine pot). These designations reflect the original, indigenous understanding and use of the object.
Object records are organized by the Edo object classification system under the “Ẹyo Otọ” section. Here are all the records for Iyeọkhọkhọ hen figures used on female altars.
The design of the site is equally impressive, with extensive documentation on the project development, data acquisition and management, and the Edo controlled vocabulary. The Italian studio Calibro, known for projects like the open source data visualization tool RAWGraphs and The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, built custom visual tools and interfaces for the site.
Good design intersects with dynamic function in the “Paper Trails” section of the project, which connects the individual Benin objects to archival documents like letters, catalogues, photographs and newspaper clippings that mention them. You can click through the documents, read transcriptions and follow specific objects as they are referenced over time.
The Archival Documents database shows a flyer for a demonstration advocating for the return of the Benin Bronzes. The archival record links to the specific Uhunmwu-Elao, or commemorative head, mentioned in the document.
A unique strength of Digital Benin is its overall approach to this work. The project is led by Nigerian and international scholars, deeply grounded in local knowledge, oral traditions and indigenous frameworks. It models a powerful kind of digital restitution by not just returning information to descendant communities, but empowering them to define how that knowledge is structured and shared. This value is embedded into the project as a whole, shaping everything from the site’s design and data organization to its commitment to centering Edo perspectives and reclaiming cultural authority.
Everyday Knowledge in Early Meiji Japan from UT Libraries’ Collections
“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 Braisted Collection
This exhibit highlights a selection of items from the Braisted Collection on Meiji Japan. The Braisted Collection was gifted to the UT Libraries by the late Professor Emeritus of History, Dr. William R. Braisted (1918–2017) in 2000. A Maryland native, Braisted was the son of an American naval officer and spent many of his early years in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and mainland China. He attended the Shanghai American School for part of his high school. Later, he received a BA from Stanford University and eventually an MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1950. Braisted started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 1942 and retired in 1988,[1] and he was the founder of the East Asian Collections at UT Austin. Impressed by what he saw at the coastal elite institutions, especially the Harvard-Yenching Library, Braisted started advocating for and later became involved in building a working collection for Asian histories at the UT campus. In the 1950s, Braisted persuaded the History Department to provide funds to build the collection, when the University Libraries did not have an independent acquisition budget and relied on departmental funds to purchase materials. The first purchase order for Japanese materials was placed in 1953.[2] Before the first Asian Librarian, Dr. Tamie Tsuchiyama (1914–1984), arrived at UT in 1967, Braisted was instrumental in selecting and building UT’s East Asian collections.
The donation included many pre-20th-century materials, which were likely acquired by Braisted during his Fulbright trip to Japan from 1955 to 1956. At that time, Braisted was interested in researching the intellectual and political histories around the “Japanese Enlightenment” during the Meiji Restoration, and his attention specifically dwelt on a group of intellectual elites known as the “Meiroku club.” In popular historiography, the Meiji Restoration in 1868 marks the beginning of Japan’s “modern” era, when a group of rebellious and reformist Samurai overthrew the Edo Bakufu and “restored” the country to the rule under the Meiji Tennō. However, in their political outlooks, the Meiji political elite championed political, social, and military reforms modelled after the post-Enlightenment West. The Meiroku club, around whom Braisted built this collection, was a leading group of educators, politicians, and scholars who contributed to the reformist discourses during the early Meiji years.
Braisted’s research into the club ultimately culminated in his translation of the entire run of the Meiroku Zasshi 明六雑誌, the magazine edited and published by the group. For this project, he collected works written by the major figures in this intellectual circle, including Katō Hiroyuki 加藤弘之 (1836–1916), Nishimura Shigeki 西村茂樹 (1828–1902), Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 (1835–1901), Nishi Amane 西周 (1829–1897), and Mitsukuri Rinshō 箕作麟祥 (1846–1897).
Beyond works by these luminary figures, the Braisted Collection also included many books that were popular during the era, including textbooks, handbooks, news magazines, compilations of laws, parliamentary papers, etc. Last but not least, Braisted also meticulously collected Japanese scholarly monographs on the history, culture, diplomacy, and politics of the Meiji era.
This Exhibit
The Meiji era was a period of confusing and competing ideologies and thoughts, and many intellectuals shared an urgency and impulse to influence and educate the “masses” while a nationwide school system was being designed and built. This exhibit showcases some of the products of this dynamic moment in Japanese intellectual and cultural history. Many of the books were either produced to educate the general literate populace or to provide practical knowledge for everyday use. Also, books produced in this era appeared in different physical formats and had different appearances, as machine-powered printing technologies were making their way into Japan, while centuries-old woodblock printing still persisted.
Let’s start with the material hybridity of the books in this exhibit. Although post-Enlightenment wisdom from Europe flooded into Japan in the 1860s, industrialized book production did not move that quickly. Most of the books published in this era, as we see in this collection, were continuously made and bound in the traditional wasō 和裝 format and printed by woodblocks. Many continued to receive the iconic yellow cover from the Edo era, though some of those that were rushed to the market, for example, the news magazines, did not. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, industrialized printing became more widely available to Japanese publishers. Moveable type letterpress hence replaced the woodblocks to become the most prevalent way to print. However, many of the books still preserve the physical appearances one would expect to see in a woodblock, such as the frames that surround the texts and the vertical, right-to-left textual arrangement.
Before metal types became widely available in the late nineteenth century, woodblocks remained the primary way that Japanese books were made. As a versatile and flexible medium, woodblock can reproduce many different types of texts and images. An interesting example in this exhibit is the woodblock reprinted Dutch physics textbook, titled in Japanese Kakuchi mondō 格致問答 (Questions and answers in studies of the physical world). The book was published in the Netherlands by letterpress in 1814. Its Japanese publisher, Mitsukuri Rinshō, however, reproduced it by woodblock using his own handwriting.
FIGURE 1 First page in the main body of Kakuchi mondō
During the majority portion of the Edō era, the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to maintain trade relations with Japan. Although they were physically confined on a small island called Dejima outside of Nagasaki, European knowledge, mediated by the Dutch merchants, penetrated into the Edō intellectual scene. A field called rangaku 蘭学 (Dutch Learning) emerged, but such studies were largely confined to medicine and natural studies. Mitsukuri was appointed by the last Shogun to lead the short-lived Bakufu office/school, Bansho shirabejo 蕃書調所, to study and collect Dutch books. The other Dutch book on the language’s syntax and grammar was also published by Mitsukuri in a similar manner.
Last but not least, this exhibit also includes a field manual for farmers from the Edō period, Seiu benran 晴雨便覧 (A convenient companion of sun and rain), dated to 1767. It includes sophisticated illustrations and diagrams informing farmers how to make decisions on agricultural activities. It was a ground-breaking work not only as a primer for understanding weather conditions but also to teach readers how to predict weather, considering both local geography and meteorological phenomena.[3]
FIGURE 2 Page 5a, vol. 1 in Seiu benran
The Meiji intellectuals’ push to educate the Japanese mass was also reflected in their efforts to establish schools across the country. The literacy/vocabulary primer, Tangō zue 単語図会 (Illustrated vocabulary) was published by one of the earliest normal schools established by the reformist Meiji elite. Its compilers were concerned that the Japanese children lacked an authoritative and systematic source of vocabulary of the new era. The vocabulary introduced in it range from everyday items from clothes to books, natural phenomena to new scientific notions. The book was produced using woodblocks and printed in color.
FIGURE 3 Page 6a in Tangō zue
The anthology Meiji bunhan 明治文範 (Model essays of the Meiji era) was compiled for students in Japan’s emerging normal schools in the early twentieth century. Normal schools themselves were complicated institutions. The student body of a normal school was often made up of teenagers and those in their twenties, and they would be assigned to schools at different levels after graduation. The anthology included in this exhibit was aimed at cultivating a baseline literary capability for the country’s new teachers. The essays included traditional literary poetry, an excerpt of the Meiji constitution, and newspaper articles.
[1] Braisted 1947 report, Faculty-Staff Teaching Staff Personal Faculty Files, Biographical Data, Box/Vol/Ser no(s) 4S 77, UT Department of History Records, University of Texas Archive, Austin, TX. A detailed account of Braisted’s early intellectual journey can be found in William R. Braisted, Diplomats in Blue: U.S. Naval Officers in China, 1922-1933, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), Preface.
[2] Susan Napier, “The Japanese Collection at the University of Texas,” The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, vol. 27, no.3, 49–51.
[3] Yoko Ogasawara 小笠原洋子, “Edo jidai no hitobito no daiki genshō ni taisuru ninshiki ni tsuite: minyō seiu benran saikō江戸時代の人々の大気現象に対する認識について : 『民用晴雨便覧』再考,” Otya no mizu tiri お茶の水地理, v. 38 (June 1997), 1¬–9.
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.
Meryl Brodsky, Information & Communication Librarian and Juliana Kasper. Juliana Kasper received a Master’s in Information Studies from UT’s iSchool in 2024 where she conducted interdisciplinary research on Autonomous Vehicles using PIA requests. She now works in records and information management as a Records Analyst for the Texas state government.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides the public the right to request access to records from any federal agency. Federal agencies are required to disclose information requested under the FOIA unless it falls under one of nine exemptions which protect interests such as personal privacy, national security, and law enforcement.
The FOIA requires agencies to post some categories of information online, including frequently requested records. FOIA is part of informing the public about government activities. The first step you should take if you think there is agency information you need, is to see if it is already available online. It may be in a FOIA Library, or a FOIA Reading Room posted on an agency website. As an example, here’s a link to the Electronic Reading Room from the National Archives: https://www.archives.gov/foia/electronic-reading-room.
You will need to know which agency produces this information. Here is a list of federal agencies: https://foia.wiki/wiki/Agencies_Landing_Page. Each federal agency is a separate entity. There is no central office. For example, you must determine if you need information from the Department of Education or whether what you’re really looking for is local information about schools. You can request information from federal, state and local government agencies.
Once you’ve identified which agency has the information you are looking for, you must send them your FOIA request in the manner in which they specify. It could be a letter or an email or an online form. You need to make your request very specific. Structure your request so that whoever responds can easily find the information and get the information to you. In addition, you must specify the format in which you wish to receive your information. https://www.foia.gov/how-to.html
If you need to make multiple similar requests, it is valuable to build out a template to batch them. You can plug in words/terms based on the specific request. For example: “I am requesting [INSERT RECORD TYPE i.e: emails, meeting minutes] the [DEPARTMENT, AGENCY, OFFICE, ETC.] has collected on [INSERT SPECIFIC, SEARCHABLE TERM] related to [INSERT TOPIC OF INTEREST]. I aim to obtain records documenting [INSERT MORE CONTEXT/RELEVANT DETAILS ON THE SEARCHABLE TERM] related to [TOPIC] from [Month Date Year to Month Date Year].”
Agencies generally process requests in the order in which they are received. However, the information you seek may not be available immediately, depending on its complexity. Complex requests may be large or they may require searching for records from different locations or from different time periods. FOIA requests can take longer than a semester, so if you are interested in this information for a class project, you may need to start early, or use data that’s already available.
Sometimes there are fees for photocopying or other services. For example, the CIA has their fee schedule right on the FOIA page, though their information is generally free for academic pursuits.
You may even need to follow up to see where your request is in the process. Most of the agencies list people to call. Do not hesitate to get in touch with them. Getting access to public information is your right, even if you are not a citizen. However, it may take some effort. You might receive the response of “no responsive information” to a request. Sometimes the agency doesn’t keep the information you requested, especially if the information comes from a public/private partnership.
The Population Research Center on UT’s campus has restricted information on population health and well being, reproductive, maternal and infant health, family demography and human development and education, and institutions. This restricted information is generally private, but you may be able to access it for research purposes. If your research falls into this realm, you may apply to use their data, but you should first contact an Administrator to see if your proposal is feasible. Using this type of data requires a duty of care to protect study participants, even if the data is unrestricted public information. The data may be used if it is required for a research project, and the researcher keeps the data secure. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/prc/
Texas Public Information Act (TPIA)
The Texas Public Information Act (TPIA) allows citizens to access government records held by public agencies. Information granted by TPIA is circulated but may not be readily available to the public.
While FOIA requests are open to the general public, TPIA requests are only available to citizens. TPIA can often release information faster, since the documentation has already circulated. Under the TPIA, governmental bodies are required to respond to PIA requests of all forms— you can even send them one written on a napkin and they have to respond to it.
Austin makes municipal information available. For example, you can request information on reported incidents involving driverless vehicles. Go here to learn more. The FAQ is also helpful.
The City of Austin also maintains an Open Data Portal. You can find out graduation rates of local schools here: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/city-of-austin-schools-with-data
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
