Jessica Trelogan was brought in last year to fill the new position of Data Management Coordinator in order to build, maintain and enhance the data services deployed by the Libraries.
This February will be the one-year mark for me here at UTL. I can’t believe how quickly the time has flown! Looking back, though, I can see why: our Research Data Services unit has been busy. We’ve accomplished a lot in a year, including a website overhaul, a GIS pilot, a move to a new department, and a bunch of workshops and consultations.
Perhaps most exciting of all is the launch of the Texas Data Repository (TDR), which we are shouting loudly about this month. This long-anticipated new service has been the result of a huge amount of effort by our friends at Texas Digital Libraries (TDL), who have been working toward it since Fall of 2013. After initially identifying a need for a repository service to handle small to medium-sized research data, they settled on the open-source Dataverse platform, developed and used by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and they decided to roll it out as a consortial service for TDL members. The Dataverse Implementation Working Group (DIWG) were hard at it for over a year, piloting, testing, assessing, and, at last, launching the service this month.
I am especially excited to be managing our local instance of it here at the Libraries. Thanks to the highly flexible Dataverse platform, each local institution that takes advantage of the service gets to decide how much control to give users. We’ve decided to give our users full control, meaning anyone from the UT-Austin community can log in with an EID, deposit data, and decide how much, with whom, and when to share it. I have high hopes that this new service, which complements our publication repository, Texas ScholarWorks, will help our research community comply with funder mandates for data sharing and archiving, get credit by facilitating reliable data citation, and promote open and reproducible research.
I look forward to getting the word out this spring about the Texas Data Repository, along with all our other research data-related services. One way we plan to do so is through a workshop series we’re launching called Data and Donuts. You’ll find us talking about research data every Friday this semester at 3pm at the Libraries (mostly at PCL). Oh yeah, plus there will be donuts!
Handwritten note from President Johnson to the Pugwash Conference regarding the avoidance of nuclear war.
The Prague Spring Archive project — a collaboration between the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library — has been made live at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/prague-spring-archive. The project aims to make important primary documents on the Prague Spring openly accessible to a wide and inclusive audience, connecting the University of Texas at Austin with an international community of scholars and researchers.
The project began in 2014, when CREEES Director and Slavic Department Chair Dr. Mary Neuburger met with Assistant Director of Research and South Asian Studies Liaison Librarian Mary Rader to discuss an effort to broaden opportunities to access historical primary resources located in the LBJ Presidential Library’s archives.
In 2015, with funding from a US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers grant and the Texas Chair in Czech Studies, digitization work on an initial selection of archival boxes was completed by undergraduate and graduate students from CREEES and the UT Libraries. Digitization work is ongoing, with new materials being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.
The Prague Spring was one of the key events in both the Cold War and 20th Century Czech history. The LBJ’s collections chronicle the United States’ perspective of events leading up to, during, and following the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, including declassified cables, intelligence reports, letters, and memoranda exchanged by ambassadors, diplomats, intelligence officers, and politicians. Eight archival boxes are currently available digitally through Texas ScholarWorks, with more being worked on and prepared for addition to the repository. Many additional materials that have not yet been digitized are available to researchers in the reading room of the LBJ Presidential Library, as well.
The Prague Spring Archive portal has been designed to replicate the original archival structure of the physical materials in the LBJ Library within a digital framework, allowing the user to “read” and explore the archive on their computer. The portal was designed to appeal to both academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A primer on the Prague Spring in the form of an interactive timeline is one of the site’s features aimed at users not already thoroughly familiar with the events surrounding the incident. A module that will include materials aimed at high school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will also be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.
To help maintain the archival integrity of the materials in their digitized format, extensive metadata was created to accompany the materials within the Texas ScholarWorks repository. The metadata allows the materials to be easily searched by researchers working with the materials within ScholarWorks, and can be downloaded by anyone through the repository. Full-text of the documents will soon be added in XML format to accompany the archival PDFs, increasing searchability and providing an additional resource for working with the documents—making digital humanities practices such as text mining or sentiment analysis easier to accomplish, for example.
Cable Regarding United States Place in Czech Crisis.
The Prague Spring site has been an important aspect of embedded librarianship at the UT Libraries. Ian Goodale worked with graduate students in Mary Neuburger’s graduate seminar, REE 301: Introduction to Russian and East European Civilizations, to have the students contribute text for incorporation into the online portal. The students also selected key documents from archival folders to be highlighted on the portal and provided input on the site’s design and features throughout its development. Professors Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja contributed their input on design and content, helping to write descriptions of archival materials and select key documents to profile. The finished portal was then presented to the class for additional feedback, and more of their content will be added shortly.
The Prague Spring Archive portal is an attractive, easy to navigate resource that will continue to grow over time. New content and features, in development, will expand its scope and elevate its impact. Utilizing digital humanities tools and collaborative approaches to leveraging local expertise, the project creates context for important, unique primary source materials and shares them in an open access environment for use by local, national and international scholarly communities.
Due to the Geology program’s size, prominence, and traditional emphasis on field science, The Walter Geology Library’s thesis and dissertation collection has always been a central factor in providing research assistance. Prior to the 1980’s, many of these works remained essentially unpublished, and even those that were eventually published were highly condensed, leading researchers back to the original for full access to the complete data set.
When the Texas ScholarWorks digital repository was unveiled in 2008 as the new home for graduate research, we felt it would be advantageous to move as many legacy theses as possible into this new, open, and fully accessible format. A secondary consideration was preservation, for these works are in editions that rarely exceed ten copies, and many have loose plates, glued in photographs, and sometimes low quality paper and binding.
Our strategy was to begin in 1897 scanning the theses of deceased graduates, and to use our extensive alumni network to track down living authors and get their permission to share their work. To date we have been able to produce hundreds of scans of works from the pre-digital era. Is this effective? One recent story serves to illustrate the potential.
Abdullah Homoud Tariki, born in 1919 in Zelfi, Saudi Arabia, got a bachelor’s in geology from Fouad University in Cairo, and in November 1945, just two months after the end of WII in the Pacific, found himself in Austin Texas, entering graduate school in the Department of Geology. Apparently he was the first Saudi Arabian to study geology in the US, and, as best we can determine, the first Saudi Arabian to write an academic thesis on Saudi Arabia. He received his MA in August 1947, and, after a short stint in Houston, returned to Saudi Arabia. In a career filled with firsts, he later became the first Saudi Oil Minister, and, (reportedly based on his understanding of the Texas Railroad Commission’s structure and purpose), one of the original founders of OPEC. He was outspoken, and later involved in a number of disputes with Prince (later King) Faisal, which got him sacked, and earned him the title “The Red Sheikh”, according to some middle east sources. He died in Cairo in 1997.
Meanwhile, Mr. Tariki’s poor thesis sat mostly undisturbed on the shelves, having been checked out only a few times over the decades. Recently, a Saudi Arabian graduate student asked to see the thesis. He was born in the same village as Tariki, and claimed him as the founder of the Saudi geosciences technical infrastructure. As far as he knew, no one in Saudi Arabia had ever seen Tariki’s thesis. We decided to add it to our scanning project, and it was posted in late October of 2016. The Geology of Saudi Arabia, now almost 70 years out of date, has demonstrated that with easier access and a wider audience, digitizing such older scholarship brings new life to old texts. In the two months since its release, Mr. Tariki’s neglected thesis has been downloaded more than 50 times around the world. We are thrilled to be able to extend the reach and impact of our student’s work in this way.
Karl Kamrath (architect). Farnsworth & Chambers Office Building, Houston, Texas. Undated. Pencil, colored pencil and crayon on trace paper. 11 7/8 x 25 1/8 in. Karl Kamrath Collection, Alexander Architectural Archives.
Houston architect Karl Kamrath had an opportunity to meet Frank Lloyd Wright when he visited Taliesin in June of 1946. The encounter had a profound effect on Kamrath’s architectural designs as he began creating Organic architecture, integrating human habitation with the natural environment.
The archive provides insight into the prolific Texan’s work, much of whose modernist design aesthetic paid homage to Wright, and includes some of Kamrath’s award-winning projects such as the Kamrath residence of 1939, Temple Emanu-El in Houston, the Houston Fire Alarm Building, M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute, and the Contemporary Arts Association in Houston. The archive also includes a number of volumes from Kamrath’s personal library that shed further light on his influences.
Karl Kamrath grew up in Austin and earned his bachelor’s degree from The University of Texas. In 1934, he moved to Chicago, where he worked for the architectural firm Pereira and Pereira, the Interior Studios of Marshall Field and Co. and the Architectural Decorating Company.
In 1937, he and another former graduate of the university, Frederick James MacKie Jr. opened their own architectural firm, MacKie and Kamrath in Houston, Texas. MacKie and Kamrath were among the first Houston architects to follow a modernist approach to design for which they received national recognition.
Kamrath left the firm from 1942 to 1945 to serve as a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers. Shortly after his return in 1946, Kamrath met Wright and immediately became an advocate of Wright’s Usonian architecture style.
Kamrath became a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1939 and was elected to fellowship in the institute in 1955, and at various times served in an adjunct capacity at the University of Oklahoma, The University of Texas, Texas A&M University and the University of Oregon. He was also a founder and served on the board of the Contemporary Arts Museum from 1948 to 1952.
A year ago, Rachel E. Winston joined the staff of the Benson Latin American Collection, taking on an entirely new post with the library as its Black Diaspora Archivist. The position is still one of few of its kind in the world, representing heightened attention in academia on diversity area studies, and a desire to collect the cultural history of an underserved population.
As African & African American Studies has joined the predominant fields at the university, the need for bibliographer support from the Libraries became increasingly clear. Winston’s work will involve enhancing existing resources at the Benson related to the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, but will also push her to work with campus faculty and researchers to develop new collections in support of scholarly currents.
“I think in our present moment, black scholarship and the term ‘Black Diaspora’ has gained a lot of prominence mainly because we’ve reached a point where it can’t be ignored anymore,” says Winston. “So, the presence of black people, the contributions of black people, the impact of black people and black labor in societies worldwide has been there, has happened, but has been erased, has been ignored, has been forgotten and has been left out — intentionally and unintentionally — and so I think we’ve reached a point where the silence has become loud. People see the gaps and see the voids and there’s been more of a concerted effort to address that and to fill it.”
Winston’s initial focus has been on the work of processing a large set of materials given to the university by Dr. Edmund W. Gordon and Dr. Susan Gordon, which arrived at the university around the same time she joined the Libraries. “Black intellectuals are underrepresented in archives. This project says that we value the contributions of Black intellectuals, professionals, and artists, and that we will promote their use. I can’t think of a better fit for our first Black diaspora collection.”
Through almost a century of collecting in Latin American, the Benson naturally amassed materials related to the Black Diaspora, but Winston’s presence will allow for the development of a more cohesive approach to building upon those existing resources and the research that has already sprung from them.
“I think as time goes on, we’ll begin to see Black Studies integrated much more throughout different disciplines. Black Studies itself will continue to be necessary. There’s such important work that’s being done. But I do think that the black presence throughout different disciplines will become more recognized and more commonplace. We’ll be able to really take the conversation further in a lot of places. It will be accepted, and we can go from there.”
Winston isn’t taking the work for granted. Taking on a nascent area of study that has been historically marginalized presents challenges in a variety of areas, including the development of a collections strategy, targeting and locating relevant materials and finding the financial support to build an archive.
The Black Diaspora archive recently received a boost in the form of an endowment provided by civic-minded Austinites Darrick and Chiquita Eugene. Their support will aid Winston at a time when budgets might not favor new initiatives, but she feels the significance of the task ahead of her.
“It’s hard work. It’s important work. But I foresee that the impact of black people and the contributions of black people will be much better known.”
Two years ago, I began writing end-of-year blog posts about my time at UT Libraries. As you may recall, my name is Rosa Muñoz and I am a senior majoring in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. I wanted to give my last update before I graduate in May.
These four years at UT have flown by. It feels like just yesterday I became a Longhorn, went off on my own, and experienced what it was like being the first to attend college in my family. Now I am a semester away from graduating, and one step closer to making my dreams become a reality. Something I never thought I was capable of achieving. I have gained so much knowledge from working at the Libraries and by spending a great amount of time here. I have also been incredibly lucky to have had made such amazing relationships with not only my fellow classmates, but also with the staff from the UT Libraries who are like family to me now. Throughout my time at UT they have been such an enormous help to me and my studies. With their help I was able to make one dream of mine come true, which was to study abroad in Australia for a semester. I have learned that with the right guidance and resources anything is possible. No dream is too big or impossible to achieve. This is what UT Libraries has taught me. After 5 months, I am finally back in the states and could not be any happier to share what my experience was like abroad.
The Forty Acres has opened doors for me that never seemed attainable, and that is something I am going to miss. The UT Libraries will always be a second home. Since freshman year it is the place I go to study for my exams, pull “all-nighters” cramming for exams and final essays. I am proud to say that throughout my time at UT, I have been a part of helping renovate UT Libraries to make it an even better place. Not only has UT Libraries been useful to me while in the states, but it was also very useful to me abroad. When I needed to find certain research articles I would log into the UT Libraries databases on their website with my UT information, and use that as help for my assignments abroad.
I plan on taking a year off to figure out what I want to do before applying to graduate school. I hope to work in a lab during that time off to gain more field experience and find some clarity in selecting which career route I want to pursue in psychology. It has been tough getting to where I am now, but I know that everything will fall into place. My last spring semester is not going to be easy, but just like freshman year I will be in the library getting work done.
As a senior I can say that UT Libraries has shaped me. I have utilized almost everything that the libraries has to offer, such as study spaces, computer and printing access, writing and research assistance, access to an abundance of information, and so much more. I have one semester left to fully take advantage of these resources, and I am excited to see what else will be added. I will forever be grateful for what UT Libraries provided for me. Please consider making an end of year contribution to the UT Libraries to help support us.
Contemporary application of technologies demands reimagination of libraries as creative academic spaces instead of just learning hubs. For the campus community, the Libraries are committed to delivering essential services in the most efficient way possible; a recently-launched cloud printing system is another step in this direction by the Libraries’ IT department, and we take pride in it.
In only two months, this service has redefined a significant part of user experience both online and onsite. The print stations are already experiencing periods of capacity use, and future expansion of the service is a likely reality. With the new and smarter cloud printing system, the requirement of printing more efficiently has been addressed. All printers within the UT Libraries system are now connected to a cloud printing portal — MyPrintCenter. It can be accessed by UT students, faculty and staff to upload documents that they need printed without having to be physically present near a computer within the Libraries. Users may select an uploaded document at any Library printer and collect the printouts at their convenience within a 24-hour period. As an alternative to the cloud printing portal, print jobs can be sent to the system via a simple email. The system also integrates a smartphone application — Pharos Print — into the printing service to augment its usability and mobile access for users.
That was simple.
Through better aligning our technological initiatives and muscle with our patrons’ behavior patterns and needs, IT at UT Libraries is dedicated to achieve a user-centric vision. We are exploring a number of exciting projects, aiming to hone and implement agile and innovative technologies to expand the UT Libraries systems with an eye toward the next advancement to benefit Libraries’ users.
Sarah Fahim is a graduate research assistant working in the UT Libraries’ IT department – Online Experience Team. She is working toward her graduate degree in Advertising at the Moody College of Communication.
Sharir dancers. Photographer: Jonathan Leatherwood.
Choreographer, dancer, artist and teacher Yacov Sharir recently donated his archive to the Fine Arts Library. Sharir moved to Austin in 1978 where he founded the American Deaf Dance Company and was hired on as faculty at UT shortly thereafter. He developed a dance program that has become a model for universities across the country, founding the university’s professional company-in-residence, the Sharir Dance Company, in 1982, which became Sharir+Bustamante Danceworks (SBDW) in 1998.
The lengthy project of processing the collection of materials from Sharir’s professional career required the persistence of graduate researcher Katie Van Winkle, an advanced degree candidate in the College of Fine Arts.
Van Winkle took time to answer some questions about the project and her impressions of the experience.
Tex Libris: How did you get involved in processing the Sharir archive?
Katie Van Winkle.
Katie Van Winkle: I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Performance as Public Practice (PPP), a program in the Department of Theatre & Dance. When I began my studies in the fall 2013, a fellow PPP student named Cassidy Browning was working with Dr. Sharir as a research assistant. Cassidy moved on to dissertation work, and recommended me as a replacement, just as Beth Kerr (Theatre & Dance Librarian in the Fine Arts Library) and Dr. Sharir established the archive project.
I have found always physical and digital archives invaluable in my work both as a scholar and as an artist–but I have almost zero training in archival work. At UT, I participated in a one-day workshop with the American Theatre Archive Project (ATAP), and a theory-based course on “Archive and Ephemera.” Instead, I have some experience in inventing and implementing technological solutions for arts management: for example, as a Dramaturgy Fellow at Center Stage in Baltimore I developed an early prototype of the National New Play Network’s New Play Exchange (http://nnpn.org/programs/new-play-exchange) through a Dramaturgy-Driven Grant from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.
What did the process consist of? What was the scope, and how much in terms of materials and types of materials were there?
KVW:The Sharir/Sharir+Bustamante Dance Collection is a gift archive from Dr. Sharir to UT’s Fine Arts Library. It consists of video documentation of many hundreds of dances between 1977 and 2015, as well as paper documentation (programs, photographs, press clippings, etc.) of the work of the American Deaf Dance Company, the Sharir Dance Company, and Sharir+Bustamante Danceworks. A large selection of this archive has been digitized by Anna Lamphear and Katie Thornton and other staff members of UT Libraries’ Preservation and Digitization Services. The digitized collection is hosted on Texas ScholarWorks.
This symposium celebrates the public launch of the first phase of the digitization process: the videos! The paper archive will be digitized in 2017 as phase two of the project.
Dr. Sharir’s office contained 671 individual video objects. Since the earliest was dated 1977, and the latest 2015, these objects embody four decades of video technology: U-matic (3/4″), VHS, Hi8, Betacam, Digital Video Cassette and Mini DV, DVD, and born-digital files stored only on hard drives: .mov and .mp4.
Some of these 671 objects were labeled with titles and dates and choreographers and other pertinent information; some were not labeled at all. Some of the objects documented multiple dances, some from multiple events with multiple choreographers or dance companies participating; others documented a single dance.
The major challenge we faced was how to balance efficiency and depth of coverage. We wanted to ensure that the digital collection represented as many unique dance works as possible, without wasting time digitizing duplicate tapes, but the inconsistency of visible information made this difficult. Also challenging: there was no way to tell if the physical object had degraded beyond use without playing/digitizing it at the PCL.
Here’s the sequence of my work:
In the fall of 2013, I created an inventory of most of the video items (we discovered more later on). I ordered the items chronologically (as far as possible), gave each a unique number (0001-0671), and made a spreadsheet detailing all “metadata” available at that point. Depending on the item, this could include: unique number, date, item format and brand, event title, individual dance titles, event type (rehearsal or performance), run time, dance companies, choreographers, venues and sites, videographers and their notes, performers, designers, musicians, composers, other collaborators, and notes.
Sharir and I then began selecting “batches” of video items to send to the PCL, 20 at a time. We prioritized based on questions like “how old is this tape?” (older objects got priority); “how significant is this event/dance?” (Dr. Sharir, of course, was the expert of this); and “have we digitized any version of this event/dance before?” (new/unique pieces got priority).
In January 2014, I delivered the first batch of 20 tapes to Anna and Katie in the PCL, where they worked their magic using lots of devices that I do not recognize or understand! I continued to deliver and pick up batches of tapes through the summer of 2016.
Anna and Katie digitized 398 video objects between January 2014 and September 2016. WOW.
After they uploaded each batch to the libraries server as .mp4 files, Dr. Sharir and I watched each digitized video. While he watched the dances closely, reminiscing about his fellow artists and considering the quality of the videography and lighting, I filled in the blanks of my spreadsheet, based sometimes on in-video credits and sometimes on Dr. Sharir’s recollections.
Once he watched the video through, Dr. Sharir decided whether or not to accession it into the digital collection. He based this decision on the significance of the dances represented, the quality of the video (for instance, some videos lacked audio, and some had degraded over time), and whether we had coverage of the event in the collection already. We generally chose to accession subsequent nights of the same dance program, a collection-level acknowledgement that live performance changes in every reiteration.
About halfway through the watching process, Dr. Sharir’s co-artistic director José Luis Bustamante delivered three crates filled with beautifully organized files of programs, press clippings, and season announcements. I am so grateful for this gift! Matched with Dr. Sharir’s files, it has allowed me to create a four-decade production history, and provide extensive credits and notes for almost every item in the digital collection.
Once an item is chosen for the digital collection, I upload its .mp4 file to TexasScholarWorks, and add in all its metadata. On TexasScholarWorks, UT folk and the general public alike can search and browse the collection, view streaming video, and download the videos to their own drives. Each video is protected by a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States).
I take the digitized tapes to Beth Kerr at FAL, and she adds them to the physical Sharir collection located in off-site storage. This physical collection contains all digitized video objects, whether accessioned or not into the digital collection. It also contains all the video objects we decided not to digitize (usually because they were clearly duplicates of something we already had accepted).
You worked closely with Dr. Sharir on this project; did he provide any impressions about the digitization/digital preservation of his work?
KVW: I don’t want to speak for Yacov, but I know he is tremendously grateful for the opportunity to share his work with the global public and with future generations. (He is also grateful to regain all that shelf space in his office!)
He has found great joy in “re-view”ing his choreography and dancing over the decades, and in responding again to the work of the many extraordinary artists he worked with and presented/produced here in Austin and elsewhere.
He shared many jokes and memories with me. Certainly the most poignant and somber touched on the lives of his artist colleagues who had died between the filming of the dance in the 1980s or 1990s, and the day we watched it again in 2015 or 2016. The Sharir Dance Company, like so many arts organizations, lost beloved members to the AIDS epidemic. We felt sometimes that we were watching ghosts dance.
How long did the project take?
KVW: 3 years and 2 months since I began my work as (part-time) archivist. (But the project isn’t done yet—we have phase 2 still to complete). Add in more time before that (I don’t know how much) for Beth and Yacov’s work getting the project up and running and funded.
Did you discover anything in the process that was either unexpected (either in the materials or cataloging), and can you reflect on the accomplishment and its value to the broader world?
KVW: My favorite moment in the inventory process was discovering a VHS tape with no labels except two sticky notes reading: “This is the one you’ve been waiting for. UNCUT UNRULY UNHOLY.”
Having never participated in a archival process of this scope, I had no idea just how much time this work takes. It’s a major undertaking.
Yacov is a treasure: of the dance world, of Austin and the UT faculty, of the Department of Theatre & Dance. His career has been hugely significant and influential, from his pioneering, inclusive work with Deaf and hearing dancers; to his artistic and production collaborations with artists like Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, Deborah Hay, David Dorfman, Doug Varone, Margaret Jenkins, Tina Marsh, Allison Orr…the list goes on.
Documenting and preserving dance has always been difficult. Yacov’s work is perhaps particularly suited to a digital life because he was a pioneer of the integration of digital media and live performance, beginning in the early 1990s and continuing in his collaborations with dancers, musicians, computer programmers, and biomedical and wearable-tech engineers today. (Check out [3D Embodied] and AdMortuos for the most recent examples in the collection):
It has been a privilege—and a real pleasure—to help make this important piece of dance history available to the public. I grew up and discovered theatre and dance here in Austin, and I’m proud to contribute to the preservation of the city’s cultural history.
Imagine this — your student just returned to campus from Thanksgiving Break and realized that finals are just around the corner. What do they do? Panic? Eat more mashed potatoes or pie and try to forget about it? I’ll never argue with more pie, but when your student calls to talk about this stressful time, tell them that instead of panicking or eating their feelings, they can take advantage of services offered within the libraries.
University Writing Center at PCL.
PCL houses several partner organizations who offer great services to students:
The Writing Center (in PCL) offers help at any point in the writing process. Tell your student that good writers seek feedback! Appointments here
The Sanger Center’s Public Speaking Center is now open in PCL – their consultants can offer suggestions on any presentation or speech assignment. Appointments here
Tutoring for intro-level Calculus, Biology, and Chemistry courses is now available in PCL’s UFCU room. See the schedule
The UT Libraries house many new services for students, but librarians have always been available to help with research. Students can ask us questions about finding sources of information, about choosing or narrowing a topic, about when and how to cite sources, and about which sources of information are credible. We are available to help in several ways. Your student can:
If your student has an assignment that involves technology, we can help with that too! They can:
Visit one of the library Media Labs at PCL or Fine Arts Library to use specialized software
Check out equipment like video cameras and microphones at PCL or Fine Arts Library
We know that finals are stressful, so we want to help with your student’s work AND help them de-stress. With dogs! We have therapy dog study breaks a few times at the end of the semester:
Ernesto Cardenal at the Benson Latin American Collection.
The Benson Latin American Collection recently announced the acquisition of the archive of poet, politician, priest and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal, and in celebration of the partnership, hosted an event to honor the man and his legacy.
Roundtable discussion of Cardenal at the Benson.
LLILAS Benson director Virginia Garrard-Burnett led a discussion of Cardenal’s impact with novelist and former Nicaraguan vice president Sergio Ramírez, scholar Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, historian Douglass Sullivan-González and political scientist Eric Selbin, and Cardenal followed with readings from several of his poems for an overflow crowd.
The archive features rare editions of Cardenal’s writings, translations of his poetry, interviews, photographs, videos, newspaper clippings, documentaries about his life and work, and hundreds of letters to and from key protagonists of Nicaraguan culture and politics.
