Category Archives: Open Access

Latino USA Radio Program Episodes Published

The digitized episodes have been made available online by the Benson Latin American Collection


More than 160 digitized episodes of Latino USA, the newsmagazine of Latino news and culture founded at UT in 1993, have been published by the Benson Latin American Collection. Published records include metadata and transcriptions for the episodes, which are available to the public on the open-access University of Texas Libraries Collections Portal. The publication and transcription of the episodes was made possible by a grant from the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP).

The selected episodes, which total 168, span the years 1997–2000. They are part of a larger archival collection held by the Benson—Latino USA Records, which documents the history of the radio program from early planning stages in the late 1980s through the program’s first seventeen years (1993–2010).

A newspaper page with the title On Campus features a large black-and-white photograph of people in a radio station. In the foreground, four people are in the control room—Christina Cuevas speaks on the phone, Frank Contreras holds a reel-to-reel tape, María Martin smiles and holds papers in front of a microphone on a boom stand, and Dolores García has headphones on and is smiling and looking at something. Behind the soundproof glass, a room with other people can be seen. On the wall are the words Latino USA. The people are smiling and looking into the room that is being photographed.
OnCampus feature on Latino USA’s 200th program. Latino USA Records, Benson Latin American Collection.

The newly published episodes consist of over 80 hours of material covering Latin American and Latina/o topics, including interviews with figures such as labor activist Dolores Huerta, singer Little Joe Hernandez, San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, and writers Claribel Alegria, Américo Paredes, and Sandra Cisneros. Prior to their digitization by UT Libraries, these episodes had only existed in a legacy audio cassette format known as DAT, which made them inaccessible to the public.

The published episodes are accompanied by complete transcriptions, funded with a grant from the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP). The transcriptions meet accessibility requirements of the digital collections platform, expanding access for the hearing impaired and people with better reading than listening knowledge of English.

Transcriptions can also provide expanded searching and digital scholarship opportunities for researchers and support additional use of these recordings in instructional settings. The transcriptions were provided by UT Austin’s Captioning and Transcription Services Team.

A stack of six audio tapes in clear plastic cases sits atop dozens more such tapes. Each one is labeled "LATINO USA" along with a number and other information.
Latino USA DAT audio tapes at the Benson Latin American Collection

The Latino USA Records at the Benson include nearly 900 program episodes that aired between 1993 and 2010, in addition to correspondence, photographs, ephemera, and other records documenting the program’s history. The Benson and University of Texas Libraries have digitized and transcribed additional episodes that they hope to publish in the future. Archival footage from the Benson was included in various episodes during the program’s 30th anniversary year in 2023, including a special episode dedicated to the anniversary and an episode that focused on the Benson. Latino USA’s special episode dedicated to the memory of the program’s founder, María Martin, also included archival footage and documents from the Benson.

Black-and-white close-up photo of journalist María Martin, who has dark hair, large hoop earrings, a beaded necklace, and a dark striped shirt on. She smiles broadly as she speaks into a large, metallic radio microphone that is suspended in front of her.
The late María Martin at the Latino USA studio. Latino USA Records, Benson Latin American Collection.

Over 30 Years of History

Launched on May 5, 1993, Latino USA is an award-winning weekly English-language radio journal created to fill a Latina/o-themed void in nationally distributed radio. It was initially produced by the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) in collaboration with KUT at the University of Texas at Austin. Radio veterans María Emilia Martin and Maria Hinojosa joined the staff in the roles of producer and host, respectively, while CMAS director Gilberto Cardenas acted as the program’s first executive producer (Martin and Hinojosa would both eventually serve in this role). Latino USA moved to Futuro Media Group in 2010.

The program was established at a time when the U.S. Latina/o population was one-third of what it is today. As Maria Hinojosa notes, the show traces the history of this immense growth, as well as that population’s participation in all aspects of politics, culture, and society.

A black-and-white photo of journalist Maria Hinojosa. She has long, dark hair and is wearing a white top with a collar. She smiles fully. One hoop earring is visible on the left.
Latino USA co-founder and journalist Maria Hinojosa, undated photo. Latino USA Records, Benson Latin American Collection.

Among the staff members who worked in this project are two graduate research assistants (GRAs), Fernanda Agüero, a graduate student at the School of Information (iSchool), and Rosa de Jong, a dual-master’s student at LLILAS and the iSchool. 

As LLILAS Benson Digital Initiatives GRA, Agüero worked on the project during fall 2024, giving her the opportunity to listen to a large majority of the Benson’s now-digitized collection.

“The Latino USA collection provides a distinct opportunity to observe the key events and cultural developments that defined Latin American identity through the turn of the 20th century,” Agüero said. “It covers significant moments such as the Elián González case, the Clinton-Gore campaign, and a large focus on the arts, including my favorite episode, which featured a compilation of Latin American female ballad artists. This collection serves as a historical record, allowing listeners to situate themselves within the specific timeframes in which these episodes were produced, offering insight into the political and cultural climate of the period.” 

In this black-and-white photo, a row of five people of diverse ages sits at a rectangular table, each with a microphone. At the far end, journalist María Martin looks at the others, leaning her head on her chin. In the center, media scholar Federico Subervi looks down, smiling. A young woman in the foreground is speaking into her microphone.
Undated photo, Latino USA Records, Benson Latin American Collection

De Jong, a Special Collections Graduate Research Assistant, singled out her highlights in the newly transcribed episodes.

“I especially loved the episodes focused on Tejano and Chicano traditions and cultural workers. One that stands out is titled Tejano Literary Traditions, which features interviews with literary icons Sandra Cisneros and Américo Paredes. In the episode, the authors talk about how their experiences growing up and living in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands shaped their work.” The newly transcribed programs also focused on Puerto Rico, says de Jong. “I was also impressed by the depth and scope of the reporting on Puerto Rico. Covering topics such as the Independence Movement, Puerto Rican political prisoners, and the 1999 Vieques Island protests, Latino USA episodes provide varied and rich accounts of the complex and evolving socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts both on the Island and within the diaspora. Two episodes that highlight this reporting are Latino USA Program 275, Week #39-98 and Latino USA Program 348, Week #51-99.”

Navigating the Data Landscape: An Open Source Workflow

Recent years have witnessed explosive growth in the volume of research publications (Hanson et al., 2024). In order to maintain the basic tenets of scholarship, stakeholders such as funders and publishers are increasingly introducing policies to promote research best practices. For example, the 2022 Nelson Memo directed federal agencies that dispense at least $100m in research funding to revise policies around making the outputs of federally funded research available. Concurrent with the evolution of these policies, research institutions are innovating and developing the necessary infrastructure to support researchers, for which the libraries are an essential component.

These stakeholders and various subgroups within them have a range of interests in tracking the publishing of research outputs. In order to make data-driven decisions around what services we provide in the libraries and how we provide them, we need data about our research community. There is a long history of tracking publication of articles and books, and the infrastructure for doing so is relatively well-developed (e.g., Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar). In this regard, we are well-positioned to continue monitoring these outputs in line with the new stipulations for immediate public access in the Nelson Memo. However, the Nelson Memo also stipulated that the research data supporting publications need to be shared publicly. Compared to open access publishing, open sharing of data is less developed culturally and structurally, which makes it all the more important to develop a workflow to begin to gather data on this front.

Predictably, the infrastructure for tracking the sharing of data is not nearly as well-developed as that for articles or books. While some of this is likely due to the relative lack of emphasis on data publishing, there are a variety of reasons why tracking data isn’t quite as easy for motivated parties. Journals, in spite of wide-ranging aesthetic and syntax standards, have relatively uniform metadata standards. In large part, this is because of the homogeneity of their products, across disciplines, which are primarily peer-reviewed research articles that are typeset into PDFs. This allows proprietary solutions like Web of Science and Scopus to harvest vast amounts of metadata (through CrossRef) and to make it available in a readily usable format with relatively little work required to format, clean, or transform. In contrast, research data are published in a wide variety of formats, ranging from loosely structured text-based documents like letters or transcripts to objects with complex or structured formatting like geospatial data and genomic data. As a result, there can be significant differences between platforms that host and publish research data, ranging from general to discipline-specific metadata and file support, level of detail in author information, use of persistent identifiers like DOIs, and curation and quality assurance measures (or lack thereof).

Horizontal bar chart comparing the frequency of different name permutations of UT Austin that were entered in UT Austin datasets. A total of eight different permutations were detected, ranging from 'University of Texas at Austin' to 'UT Austin.' The most common is to use 'at Austin' rather than some form of punctuation like a comma or hyphen instead of 'at.'
Comparison of annual volume of dataset publications. ‘All’ refers to the volume across all discovered repositories and is compared to our institutional repository, the Texas Data Repository, and two common generalists, Dryad and Zenodo.

While a few proprietary solutions are beginning to emerge that purport to be able to track institutional research data outputs (e.g., Web of Science), these products have notable shortcomings, including significant cost, difficulty assessing thoroughness of retrieval, and limited number of retrievals. In order to create a more sustainable and transparent solution, the Research Data Services team has developed a Python-based workflow that uses a number of publicly accessible APIs for data repositories and DOI registries. The code for running this workflow has been publicly shared through the UT Libraries GitHub at https://github.com/utlibraries/research-data-discovery so that others can also utilize this open approach to gathering information about research data outputs from user-defined institutions; the code will continue to be maintained and expanded to improve coverage and accuracy. To date, the workflow has identified more than 3,000 dataset publications by UT Austin researchers across nearly 70 different platforms, ranging from generalist repositories that accept any form of data like Dryad, figshare, and Zenodo to highly specialized repositories like the Digital Rocks Portal (for visualizing porous microstructures), DesignSafe (for natural hazards), and PhysioNet (for physiological signal data).

Horizontal bar chart comparing the total number of UT-Austin-affiliated datasets published in different repositories. Only repositories with at least 30 datasets are individually listed; the remainder are grouped into an 'Other' category. The Texas Data Repository has the most discovered datasets (nearly 1,250), followed by Dryad, Zenodo, Harvard Dataverse, the aggregated 'other', ICPSR, figshare, DesignSafe, Mendeley Data, the Digital Rocks Portal, and EMSL. No repository other than the Texas Data Repository has more than 400 datasets.
Comparison of total number of dataset publications between repositories. Only repositories with more than 30 UT-affiliated publications are depicted individually; all others are grouped into ‘Other.’

This work is still very much in progress. Perhaps equally important to the data that we were able to obtain are the data we suspect exist, but were unable to retrieve via our workflow (e.g., we didn’t retrieve any UT-affiliated datasets from the Qualitative Data Repository, even though we are an institutional member), as well as the variation in metadata schemas, cross-walks, and quality, which can help to inform our strategies around providing guidance on the importance of high-quality metadata. For example, this process relies on proper affiliation metadata being recorded and cross-walked to DataCite. Some repositories simply don’t record or cross-walk any affiliation metadata, making it essentially impossible to identify which, if any, of their deposits are UT-affiliated. Others record the affiliation in a field that isn’t the actual affiliation field (e.g., in the same field as the author name); some even recorded the affiliation as an author. All of this is on top of the complexity introduced by the multiple ways in which researchers record their university affiliation (UT Austin, University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Austin, etc.)

Horizontal bar chart comparing the frequency of different name permutations of UT Austin that were entered in UT Austin datasets. A total of eight different permutations were detected, ranging from 'University of Texas at Austin' to 'UT Austin.' The most common is to use 'at Austin' rather than some form of punctuation like a comma or hyphen instead of 'at.'
Comparison of the frequency of different permutations of ‘UT Austin’ that were entered as affiliation metadata in discovered datasets.

We also have to account for variation in the granularity of objects, particularly those that receive a PID. For example, in our Texas Data Repository (TDR), which is built on Dataverse software, both a dataset and each of its constituent files receives a unique DOI – each file is also recorded as a ‘dataset’ because the metadata schema used by the DOI minter, DataCite, doesn’t currently support a ‘file’ resource type. We thus have to account for a raw data output that will initially inflate the number of datasets in TDR by at least two orders of magnitude. The inverse of this is Zenodo, which assigns a parent DOI that always resolves to the most recent version, with each version of an object getting its own DOI (so all Zenodo deposits have at least two DOIs, even if they are never updated).

The custom open source solution that we have developed using Python, one of the most common software languages (per GitHub), offers the flexibility to overcome the challenges posed by differences between data repositories and variations in the metadata provided by researchers. Our approach also avoids the shortcomings of proprietary solutions as it offers transparency so that users can understand exactly how dataset information is retrieved, and it is available at no cost to anyone who might want to use it. In many ways, this workflow embodies the best practices that we encourage researchers to adopt – open, freely available, transparent processes. It also allows others (at UT or beyond) to adopt our workflow, and if necessary, to adapt it for their own purposes.

OA Week 2024 Recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Education Fellows Launch Cost-Free Italian Language Textbook

Exemplifying an embrace of affordable education, 2023 Open Education Fellows Dr. Amanda Bush and Silvia Luongo have successfully completed their fellowship project by creating Giornate Italiane, an Italian language textbook now available on Pressbooks. 

Authored entirely by Dr. Bush and Professor Luongo, this textbook carries a Creative Commons license, providing students with free access and eliminating the need to purchase a paid resource. Consequently, their course is now cost-free in terms of course materials, offering substantial financial relief to students.

The Open Education Fellows program, supported by the University of Texas Libraries, encourages faculty to develop open educational resources (OER) that enhance learning accessibility and affordability. 

The creation of OER textbooks ensures that all students, regardless of their financial situation, have equal access to essential learning materials. This initiative aligns with broader efforts to alleviate the financial burden of higher education and supports a more equitable academic environment.

New Open Access Initiatives and Annual Report Highlights

Welcome to our semi-annual update on the University of Texas Libraries’ (UTL) commitment to supporting open access (OA) publishing. In this update, we’re excited to announce several new OA initiatives available for the UT community to utilize, alongside a glimpse into the significant cost savings achieved through our OA agreements.

Cogitatio Press

Cogitatio Press offers a range of five OA journals covering diverse fields such as Media and Communication, Politics and Governance, and Urban Planning. Launching late this year, their ‘Ocean and Society’ journal will provide a platform for ocean-related research. The best part? UT Austin corresponding authors can publish in these journals without incurring Article Processing Charges (APCs), thanks to our agreement with Cogitatio.

Free Journal Network (FJN)

FJN, a non-profit organization, focuses on supporting diamond OA journals, ensuring no fees for readers or authors. Their mission includes facilitating journal coordination, sharing best practices, promoting FJN journals, securing funding for journal enhancement, and advocating for improvements in scholarly publishing. We’re thrilled to collaborate with FJN in advancing open access initiatives.

Institute of Physics (IOP)

UTL has secured a Read and Publish deal with the Institute of Physics (IOP), granting the UT community access to all IOP journals. Moreover, UT Austin corresponding authors can publish OA in IOP journals without bearing APC costs, contributing to the dissemination of impactful research across disciplines.

Bloomsbury Open Collections

Bloomsbury is pioneering a collective funding model for OA books, akin to the successful Subscribe to Open model for journals. We’re proud to support the African Studies + International Development collection, which aims to make 20 frontlist titles available immediately upon publication. This initiative underscores our commitment to promoting diverse voices and perspectives in scholarly literature.

Peer Community In

Peer Community In (PCI) is a scientist-led initiative to provide a reviewing and recommending service for pre-print articles; similar to the peer review process for journal articles. Those recommended pre-prints can then be submitted to the Peer Community Journal or a PCI friendly journal which will accept the recommended pre-print article with waived or expedited peer review. We are excited to support this unique publishing model that aims to provide additional value around pre-prints as an important part of the OA ecosystem.

Understanding UT Austin Corresponding Authors

You might wonder, what exactly is a UT Austin corresponding author? In essence, they’re the primary point of contact for communication regarding an article. While typically a senior researcher such as a faculty member, this role isn’t exclusive and can be fulfilled by any UT Austin affiliate involved in the research. For OA agreements offering direct author benefits like waived APCs, eligibility is contingent upon the corresponding author’s affiliation with UT Austin.

Annual Report Highlights

In our latest annual report, completed last fall, we celebrated significant milestones achieved through our OA agreements. Notably, these initiatives resulted in over $600,000 of cost savings through waived or reduced APCs. This substantial figure underscores the tangible impact of our commitment to open access publishing and reflects the growing momentum towards equitable and accessible scholarly communication.


As we continue to champion open access initiatives, we invite the UT community to explore these new opportunities and join us in advancing knowledge dissemination for the betterment of academia and society at large.

For more information on these initiatives and our ongoing efforts, please visit our OA LibGuide.

Thank you for your continued support and engagement in fostering a culture of openness and accessibility in scholarly publishing.

Open Education Week 2024 Recap

The Libraries once again recognized Open Education Week (March 4-8) with events and activities intended to raise awareness of open educational resources and their application across campus, foster collaboration, and empower learners and educators alike.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are openly licensed materials that can be:

  • Retained
  • Reused
  • Revised
  • Remixed
  • Redistributed

OER can make a huge difference for students, especially in terms of cost savings. In the 2022-2023 academic year alone, students saved over $1.8 million dollars because OER was prioritized over paid course materials.

The highlight of the Libraries’ Open Education Week 2024 was a virtual panel discussion featuring educators and students who gathered to share their perspectives on the transformative potential of open educational resources (OER) in widening access to quality education. From exploring innovative pedagogical approaches to discussing the role of technology in enhancing learning experiences, the panel provided invaluable insights into the evolving landscape of open education.

Tocker Open Education Librarian Heather Walter amplified the celebration and recognized faculty and student OER advocates throughout the week on web platforms. Dr. Jocelly Meiners (Spanish and Portuguese) received a spotlight for championing open educational resources (OER) and  collaborating with faculty to integrate OER into their courses and promoting awareness of open access principles among students and colleagues. And student advocate Marco Pevia (COLA, Spanish and Linguistics) received a nod for his collaboration with faculty to incorporate OER into courses, participated in open access advocacy efforts, and engaging in projects aimed at expanding access to knowledge.

Walter also used her social media prowess to promote the message of Open Education Week, sharing updates, resources, and insights on Instagram which provided glimpses into the vibrant events taking place, encouraging broader participation and sparking meaningful conversations around the importance of openness in education.

Even though Open Education Week 2024 has drawn to a close, the Libraries continues its commitment to fostering a culture of openness, accessibility, and collaboration in education. Through ongoing initiatives, partnerships, and advocacy efforts, the Libraries strives to empower learners and educators to embrace the principles of openness and drive positive change at UT.

Happy Open Education Week!

Today marks the start of Open Education Week! Open Educational Resources are openly licensed materials that can be: 

  • Retained
  • Reused
  • Revised
  • Remixed
  • Redistributed 

OER can make a huge difference to our students. In the 2022-2023 academic year alone, students saved over $1.8 million dollars because OER was prioritized over paid course materials. 

However, as important as these resources might be, they’re often overlooked or misunderstood. Are you curious about OER? Check out this infographic to learn more. 

And if you’d like to learn even more about OER, here are our upcoming OE Week activities: 

Monday March 4th – Friday, March 8th: Come visit our blog for a daily post spotlighting OER work happening here at UT Austin.  

Tuesday, March 5th, 12pm-2pm: Tabling event in PCL Lobby. Come by to chat with a librarian about OER. 

Friday, March 8th, 1pm-2pm: OE Week Virtual Panel. Our joint student/faculty panel will discuss their experiences with adopting, implementing and even creating OER. The event is free, but you do need to register.

Scholars Lab Hosts First Open Science Summit

The doors of the new Scholars Lab at the Perry-Castañeda Library swung open for the first Texas Open Science Summit, held on Wednesday, September 20.

Hosted by the Libraries, this summit was organized as a call to action for the advancement of open science in recognition of the Year of Open Science, a move by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to advance national open science policies across the federal government in 2023.

The Summit marked an initiatory gathering to highlight the commitment of advocates in the campus community to openness, collaboration, and the dissemination of knowledge. The event took place both in-person and virtually, to ensure accessibility to a wide audience.

The event served a diversity of ideas and perspectives to attendees, with participants from various disciplines and backgrounds coming together to explore the benefits of open science practices and individual experiences in the application of those practices. It offered a platform for sharing success stories, discussing challenges, and brainstorming solutions, all with the ultimate goal of promoting transparency and accessibility in research.

The summit provided inspiring keynote addresses and panel discussions featuring local and national experts in open science, including representatives from Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) and NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) program.

These thought-provoking sessions covered a broad spectrum of topics, from open-access publishing to data sharing and reproducibility. Participants left inspired and armed with practical insights to implement in their own work.

Attendees were also introduced to the university’s new Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) – funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – which has recently been launched to promote open source and open science opportunities to students, faculty, staff and researchers at UT.

Those who attended expressed that the Summit was a resounding success in reaffirming the global scientific community’s dedication to open science principles. Participants left the event with a deeper understanding of open science practices and a shared commitment to making research more transparent and accessible.

The Missing Link: Peer Learning for Linked Data

Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of initiatives by GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) using Linked Open Data technologies to enhance access to their collections. From nation-wide collaborative campaigns, such as the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Wikidata Pilot, to paradigm-shifting implementations, such as the transition of the Library of Congress cataloging operations to a hybrid MARC and BIBFRAME environment, the growing availability of tools, ontologies and platforms are finally allowing cultural heritage institutions to explore the promises of linked data.

Librarians and archivists see the potential in Wikidata as a pragmatic solution for managing local authorities in a linked data environment; Wikidata is increasingly used for research and increasingly integrated into software applications, including Library Service Platforms like Alma/Primo.

The UT Linked Data Learning Group, an informal community of practice at The University of Texas at Austin, composed of professional staff working in archives and libraries, convenes monthly to address the need for pragmatic ways to integrate linked data into routine workflows. We collaborate to build knowledge, skills, and institutional support for linked data initiatives in our respective institutions.

In 2022, group efforts focused on building knowledge and skills around Wikidata. Some members of the UT Linked Data Learning Group have been exploring and using Wikidata in various projects in recent years. This group aspired to leverage those members’ knowledge and skills to train other staff through a hands-on peer learning experience, with intentions to expand awareness and surface opportunities for integrating Wikidata into existing and future work. To that end, group members designed and delivered a 2-day virtual Wikidata Workshop on January 12-13, 2023.

Workshop Outcomes

Goals achieved:

  • Staff familiarity with Wikidata and Linked Data
  • Enhanced linked data ecosystem relevant to Texas Cultural Heritage
  • Expanded impact of Handbook of Texas diversification efforts (adding & enhancing Wikidata entries about Texas women)

Building a community of practice – campus representation among 36 registrants:

  • UT Libraries Content Management unit
  • UT Libraries Access Systems unit
  • UT Libraries Branch & Borrower Services unit
  • UT Libraries Stewardship department
  • UT Libraries Alexander Architectural Archives
  • UT Libraries Benson Latin American Collection
  • Harry Ransom Center
  • Briscoe Center for American History
  • Tarlton Law Library
  • Texas Digital Library
  • School of Information

Hands-on peer learning to build new skills:

  • 21 active editors contributed to Wikidata throughout the workshop. Some continued with contributions after the workshop.
  • 31 new items created in Wikidata for entries represented in the Handbook of Texas
  • 74 existing Wikidata items updated with data from the Handbook of Texas
  • 835 new references for Wikidata statements citing the Handbook of Texas as a source
Infographic of workshop outcomes

Individuals involved in designing and delivering the workshop: Melanie Cofield, Head of Access Systems, University of Texas Libraries (UTL); Brenna Edwards, Manager for Digital Archives, Harry Ransom Center; Paloma Graciani-Picardo, Metadata Librarian and Head, Printed & Published Media, Harry Ransom Center; Katie Pierce Meyer, Head of Architectural Collections, UTL; Michael Shensky, Head of Research Data Services, UTL; Yogita Sharma, Alexander Architectural Archives team member, UTL; and Elliot Williams, former DPLA Metadata Aggregation Outreach Coordinator for Texas Digital Library.

Open Education News

We may have put a bow on Open Education Week, but the work of OER continues, so we recognize a few achievements in those efforts.

University of Texas at Austin faculty member Dr. Jeanette Okur’s OER textbook, Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! received an honorable mention in the OER category for the 2023 MAFLT LCTL Innovation Award, a national award recognizing outstanding, innovative, and transformative uses of technology in the teaching of Less Commonly Taught Languages. The award committee commented that Jeanette’s work stood out “because of the impressive quality of the materials and focus on contemporary issues.” Congratulations to Dr. Okur both for the award, and for her work in promoting OER.

UT faculty members Dr. Josh Frank and Guillermina Ogando Lavin have published the first edition of their OER textbook, Business in Hispanic Life and Culture. The textbook was completed as part of the Open Education Fellows Program, and is intended to promote both Spanish language learning and business world knowledge. The OER Working Group, along with University of Texas Libraries, celebrates Dr. Frank and Professor Ogando Lavin’s accomplishment and continued work in developing OER.