On Monday, August 14, the U.S. Mint released a quarter commemorating Mexican American journalist and activist Jovita Idar (b. Laredo, 1885–d. San Antonio, 1946) as part of its American Women Quarters program. In conjunction with this release, the Benson Latin American Collection recently published three issues of two newspapers that are associated with Idar. Together, these publications represent some of the earliest examples of Mexican American journalism.
The newly published items include two extremely rare issues of Evolución, a newspaper founded by Idar in 1916 and published until 1920. These issues document international and regional events such as the Mexican Revolution and World War I, as well as local topics such as containment of the flu outbreak in Nuevo Laredo and regional union organizing. There is also a single issue of El Progreso, a Laredo-based newspaper operated by the Idar family.
The Benson has received several requests for material related to Idar during the COVID shutdown and in recent months. In 2020, a cell phone snapshot of the October 26, 1918, issue of Evolución appeared in an episode about Jovita Idar on the PBS show Unladylike. Aware of the significance of these newspapers, Benson Special Collections staff sent them for conservation treatment and digitization as soon as possible.
El Progreso is at the heart of a story about Jovita Idar standing up to the Texas Rangers, who wanted to shut down her family’s paper. According to an oral history with descendant Aquilino Idar and his wife Guadalupe, when the Texas Rangers showed up at the El Progreso print shop, Jovita stood at the door and refused entry. The Rangers left but returned early the next morning and used hammers to destroy the press (oral history held by UT San Antonio Special Collections).
The two issues of Evolución recently received conservation treatment as part of the UT Austin Campus Conservation Initiative (CCI). The program, backed by Provost Sharon Wood, allows paper conservator Rachel Mochon to treat items from the Benson and other campus entities, including the Harry Ransom Center, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Blanton Museum of Art.
This issue of the Spanish-language newspaper “Evolución” was restored by the UT Austin Campus Conservation Initiative. The large vertical crease down the middle shows where the once-torn item has been restored. Benson Latin American Collection.
Other Benson items that have received treatment include a sixteenth-century land claim produced by an Indigenous community in Mexico, one of the first dictionaries of an Indigenous language published in the Americas, and a scrapbook from a Brazilian mining operation.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries 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.
Segregation By Design is a compelling personal project by Adam Paul Susaneck, an architect based in New York City. Through spatial analysis, demographic data, historical photos, and extensive research, Susaneck effectively illustrates “how the American city was methodically hollowed out based on race.” It offers an insightful perspective on an important issue that has shaped the country’s history and continues to impact its present. The project’s goal is threefold: to create a print “Atlas of Urban Renewal,” to create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion, and to raise awareness through social media.
Screenshot of the Chicago, Illinois page on Segregation By Design.
The website offers a preview of what the print atlas will look like. 180 municipalities that received federal funding from the 1956 Federal Highway Act have been analyzed, and so far, there are 14 cities profiled. Each city has multiple sections, such as “Freeways & Urban Renewal,” “Redlining,” and “Transit.” Focus is given to specific highways, neighborhoods, environmental impacts, or buildings.
For example, the “Chicago: Dan Ryan Expressway (I-90)” section includes an animated swipe map juxtaposing aerial photos from 1938 and 1984 illustrating the “path of destruction” and displacement when the I-90 highway was built in the 1960s. It explains that over 81,000 people, many of whom were BIPOC or recent immigrants, were displaced.
Video still from Chicago: Dan Ryan Expressway by Segregation By Design.
Likewise, the “Chicago: Bronzeville” section profiles a neighborhood decimated by “urban renewal.” Before and after photos of buildings are combined with Susaneck’s transposed line drawings of buildings over present-day photos, masterfully visualizing and mapping redlining of the area.
Redlining is a discriminatory practice that systematically denies services such as mortgages, insurance loans, and other financial services to specific area residents based on race or ethnicity.
Redlining map of Chicago with selected comments from the redlinign notes from Segregation By Design.
Yet another section, “Chicago: Pekin Theater,” focuses on the first black-owned theater in the United States, which was appropriated by the city through eminent domain, a process that left large swaths of the neighborhood cleared for “urban renewal.” The lot has been vacant since 1940.
Established in 1905, the Pekin Theater was the first Black-owned musical theater in the country from Segregation By Design.
The project’s second goal is to create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion. Susaneck states, “As state governments continue to mindlessly widen freeways, community groups in cities across the country have formed in opposition. This project aims to support these groups by creating easily digestible graphics to spread awareness.” One such project is Stop TxDOT I-45 in Houston, Texas. Their mission is “to challenge the status quo of transportation policy and to fight for all people in Houston to be able to participate in the decisions that affect health, safety, and mobility in their communities.” Similarly, the “Houston: Flooding” section of Segregation By Design discusses the environmental impact of highways and urban sprawl and how nonwhite residents are disproportionately affected by natural disasters.
Houston, Texas, proposed I-45 expansion from Segregation By Design.
Susaneck is accomplishing his third project objective of raising awareness through social media. In fact, Segregation By Design first caught my eye with an Instagram post that highlighted a striking map of Atlanta followed by bird’s-eye images of highway construction clearance from 1956 to 1990. The caption is lengthy for Instagram but is engaging. Susaneck describes the images in it: “The first image shows the freeway right of way overlaid on the 1936 HOLC redlining map and a 1960 aerial photo. The subsequent images show the destruction wrought by freeway construction.” Susaneck then explains who was affected by the highway construction, gives the names of neighborhoods decimated, and expounds on the history of redlining. Instagram lends itself to the graphic nature of his work, the dynamic swipe maps (often used to illustrate before and after destructive events), then-and-now comparisons, and augmented photos highlighting the significance of buildings as well as homes and communities that have been demolished.
A 1960 aerial photo with a 1936 redlining map and freeway right of way overlayed, Segregation By Design.
For readers not on Instagram who still want updates, you can sign up to receive new entries via email, including high-resolution images and maps. Supporters can contribute to this largely self-funded project through the subscription-based platform Patreon.
Segregation By Design uses engaging infographics and directness to help explain the complicated policies contributing to systemic racism in our country. It’s invaluable in making these issues more manageable and understandable. I look forward to adding the Atlas of Urban Renewal print version to the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) Map Collection.
Due to generous donor support to a Hornraiser campaign for foreign acquisitions trips, I was recently able to travel to Canada to attend the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and purchase books for the UT Libraries’ collections. In addition to meeting with vendors and participating in the international community of librarians, zine makers, booksellers, and publishers at the book fair, I collected materials that continue to grow the UT Libraries’ collection of Francophone zines and literature, further developing our collection of rare and distinct materials related to global leftist movements past and present.
The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair is North America’s largest anarchist book fair, and has been held since 2009. Attracting visitors from all over the continent, the fair included over 80 vendor tables where attendees could browse and purchase materials and discuss non-commercial publishing and distribution directly with content producers. Vendors ranged from established presses like AK Press and PM Press to individual creators selling their zines and other materials. The book fair also featured a diverse range of speakers and workshops, including offerings such as an introduction to anarchist thought, a talk on Mastodon and federated social media, and a panel discussion about the book Black Metal Rainbows recently published by PM Press.
A small selection of books and zines purchased at the bookfair.
The book fair offered many opportunities to acquire materials we would not otherwise have access to, and to speak directly with publishers, writers, and artists and to learn about the processes and motivations behind why certain books or zines were written and made. A couple of my favorite acquisitions for the UTL library include a global history of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union founded in 1905 that is still active today, and a zine-bibliography highlighting resources on the transfeminism movement. The trip also gave me a valuable opportunity to build our holdings of Francophone materials from North America, expanding our corpus beyond materials published in Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, thereby making our holdings even broader globally than they already were.
Additional books and zines acquired at the book fair.
Beyond all this, the trip allowed me the opportunity to represent UT Austin internationally to a diverse group of vendors, artists, and colleagues, and I’m grateful that I was able to serve the Libraries in such a capacity. I look forward to continuing to build our distinctive holdings and further expand UT’s collections to include diverse ideas and voices.
Librarian Ian Goodale standing at the entrance to the bookfair.
Libraries’ staff regularly excel beyond their day-to-tay accomplishments, and are recognized as high-level experts in their fields through awards, grants, appointments to professional organizations, and publications of professional import. Here we recognize a sample of recent achievements.
This year, two University of Texas Libraries librarians received Texas Digital Library (TDL) awards in recognition of outstanding contributions to digital libraries. Digital Scholarship LibrarianAllyssa Guzman received the Individual Impact Award for her work on the Diversity Resident Program and Scholars Lab. And Head of Scholarly Communications Colleen Lyon received the TDL Service Award for work contributed to the TDL consortium.
Adrian Johnson, head of user services at the Benson Latin American Collection, has been working closely with a local non-profit Cine las Americas since 2015, and serves on the organization’s Advisory Board.
Metadata Analyst Devon Murphy was awarded the DLF Cross Pollinator Award to attend ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) in London, UK this year, where they presented on the “Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources,” on which she is a co-editor/author. Murphy also has an article in “Ethics of Linked Data,” a collection brings together contributions that explore ethics in linked data initiatives. They have been invited to be a metadata instructor for the Summer Educational Institute, a project between ARLIS/NA (Art Libraries Society of North America) and VRA (Visual Resources Association).
Alice Batt (University Writing Center) and Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning ServicesMichele Ostrow contributed a chapter to the publication “THE TALES WE TELL: Applying Peripheral Vision to Build a Successful Learning Commons Partnership.” Writing Centers and Learning Commons: Staying Centered While Sharing Common Ground, edited by STEVEN J. CORBETT et al., University Press of Colorado, 2023, pp. 145–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.399537.16. Accessed 14 June 2023.
Michele Ostrow continued service in positions on multiple Association of College & Research Libraries’ groups: Publications Editor, the ACRL Instruction Section (July 2022-2024); Member of the ACRL Instruction Section Communications Committee (July 2022-2024); and Member of the ACRL University Libraries Section Nominating Committee (June 2022-July 2023).
Mary Rader, Head of the Fine Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team co-organized the fall 2022 SAI seminar series, “Hidden South Asian Archives” which included 6 external speakers and highlighted the Sajjad Zaheer Digital Archive. She also received the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for 2023-2025, and was awarded a 2023 President’s Outstanding Staff Award.
This July, Performing Arts Librarian Molly Roy was the featured presenter at EFF-Austin’s monthly meet-up and speaker series. In this public talk, entitled “A Moving Seen: Explorations in Surveillance Art,” Roy shared some of her research into how dance and choreography might help us understand contemporary surveillance culture. Several members of the UT community were in attendance, including faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni. EFF-Austin is an independent nonprofit civil liberties organization concerned with emerging frontiers where technology meets society.
When I arrived in San Marcos Zacatepec in rural Oaxaca, it was dark outside. A kind Chatino-speaking woman cooked me food: chicken soup with homemade tortillas. Dr. Anthony Woodbury from the UT Department of Linguistics and I had been traveling since early that morning, first arriving in Mexico City from Austin and then Puerto Escondido after a several-hour layover. We had to take a bus for several more hours to get to San Marcos Zacatepec, a town in the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca mountains and the first I would visit during my trek. This was the setting for the community outreach and research work I would be undertaking during spring break.
The Chatino-speaking region of Oaxaca is breathtakingly beautiful. All three communities that I visited are nestled in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range. Zacatepec is at the lowest altitude of all the Chatino-speaking communities that I visited, so it can get fairly hot during the day. However, San Juan Quiahije, another Chatino community, is several thousand feet higher up the mountain—cooler during the day and quite cold at night.
Although it wasn’t as lush as San Marcos Zacatepec, there was a beautiful view of the mountains from my balcony in San Juan Quiahije.
I am a dual-degree master’s student in Latin American Studies and Information Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, working to become an academic librarian with a subject specialty in Latin American and Indigenous Studies. I had come to Oaxaca with a clear goal in mind: to teach several workshops on archival access and navigation for the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), a digital archive at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Dr. Susan Kung, AILLA’s coordinator, invited me to take part in a project with Dr. Emiliana Cruz, professor of anthropology at CIESAS–Mexico, and Dr. Anthony Woodbury, professor of linguistics at UT Austin. As part of the project, I spent my spring break in three Chatino-speaking villages: San Marcos Zacatepec, San Juan Quiahije, and San Miguel Panixtlahuaca. Several local language activists and teachers in the community wanted to be able to use the materials in AILLA to learn Chatino and listen to oral histories and stories in the language.
I agreed to go without hesitation, thrilled to participate in a project that brings together archivists, academics, and Indigenous community members around cultural materials represented in AILLA’s collections. I had hoped that, by getting access to these materials, Indigenous communities might be able to use them for projects related to the revitalization of their language and traditional cultural practices.
The Chatino Language Documentation Project is the subject of this 2015 article in Life & Letters magazine, which features reflections from several linguist researchers.
I soon learned that each town experienced different issues regarding their fluency in the Chatino language and ability to access AILLA. The vast majority of the population speaks a variant of Eastern Chatino, a language represented by several collections in the archive. San Marcos Zacatepec, however, differed significantly from the other two towns: For one, it is a very small village with poor internet access. Secondly, most of the community members no longer speak Chatino. There are only about 300 speakers left in the town and all of them are elderly. In contrast, the language proficiency is strong in both San Juan Quiahije and San Miguel Panixtlahuaca. While the primary issue in Zacatepec was access to the internet, there did appear to be a connection between a lack of ability to speak Chatino and the teachers having less interest in accessing the archive to find materials to use with schoolchildren.
San Miguel Panixtlahuaca has educational murals in the center of town. This one shows a rainbow with the names of different colors in Chatino.
Community Workshops & the Technology Gap
In total, I taught five workshops on how to access and navigate AILLA in various spaces for different audiences: one small-group workshop at a community member’s house and another at a middle school in San Marcos Zacatepec; one each at a middle and a high school in San Juan Quiahije; and a final one at a public library in San Miguel Panixtlahuaca. Two of the workshops were conducted by myself and the other three were conducted with Dr. Cruz.
Each workshop had its own dynamic. For the first workshop we conducted in San Marcos Zacatepec, we played a game during which an older speaker would say a word in Spanish and the children had to say the word in Chatino. Some of the kids actually knew more Chatino than I thought they did, but it still felt like older members of the community were more invested in what was happening than the children were. In addition, without an internet connection or access to a space for our projector, it was not possible to demonstrate the use of the archive.
The second workshop in San Marcos Zacatepec was held at a private home with a small group of people. This session included Christian, a ten-year-old who brought his Chatino de Panixtlahuaca writing workbooks with him. Everyone was serious about learning how to use the archive and engaged throughout the session. I even saw one person making a PowerPoint with AILLA instructions as I walked the group through how to register for an account and navigate the Chatino language collections.
I taught Christian how to look at the AILLA collections of many different languages across Latin America.
Unexpectedly, the experience gave me insight on how to effectively organize workshops that connect communities to information resources, a key skill for any academic librarian. Although Dr. Cruz was with me at the middle school in San Juan Quiahije, I taught the workshop at the high school there by myself. This meant coordinating a session with around 40 high school students by myself. This was the first time I had taught a workshop to such a large group of people. It was challenging and I was a little nervous, but the experience was exactly what I needed to become a better information professional.
One issue that became glaringly clear was that technological requirements can be a huge barrier to access for rural Global South communities. In the middle school in San Marcos Zacatepec, there was no internet, so we were not able to actively demonstrate the archive. Although San Juan Quiahije and San Miguel Panixtlahuaca had much better internet, we still experienced technological problems. For example, in San Juan Quiahije, we quickly found out that a majority of the middle school students did not have email addresses, so we had to spend part of the workshop teaching them how to make Gmail accounts. At the high school in San Juan Quiahije, there were issues with power outlets not working. I learned that archivists need to be prepared for anything, be creative, and really reflect on the sort of technology that a community might have access to.
Murals with the names of fruits and vegetables were on the walls at the Chatino Culture Museum in San Miguel Panixtlahuaca.
The Need for Continuity
Despite the numerous technological problems, this project provides us with a positive example of how archives can engage with communities whose materials are represented in AILLA’s collections. As I reflected on my experience, I realized that this cannot be the end of our relationship with the Chatino-speaking community. Rather, to ensure that these efforts are successful, this should be seen as the beginning of many more projects along these lines. The experience vindicated my belief that communities whose materials are represented in archives must have access to them, and that we should do whatever we can to facilitate that access.
LLILAS Benson is a proponent of projects that emphasize horizontal relationships with the communities and organizations represented in its archives and collections. As such, LLILAS Benson’s digital resources and digital initiatives hold a great deal of promise for future collaboration of this kind.
Eden Ewing is a dual-degree master’s student at LLILAS and the iSchool.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries 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.
One day when I was familiarizing myself with the history of Japanese Canadians, I encountered this lovely, small online exhibition. It is built on 36 PDF files of digitized letters selected from the Joan Gillis fonds, housed at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. The exhibition, beautifully titled “I know we will meet again,” tells a dark and brutal episode in Japanese Canadian history from 1942 to 1948.
The letters were written by young Japanese Canadians to Joan Gillis (1928–2019, more info on Gillis), a white teenage girl they shared elementary and middle school years with before being forcefully removed from their homes in British Columbia to various locations in interior Canada during WWII. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government seized fishing boats and confiscated cameras and shortwave radios owned by Japanese Canadians. In January 1942, the Canadian federal government passed an order to remove Japanese Canadians from coastal British Columbia. By March 1942, about 22,000 Japanese Canadians were dispersed to areas east of the Rocky Mountains and were not granted freedom until 1949. During their forced removal, the Canadian government also seized, confiscated, and sold Japanese Canadian properties left in BC, including lands, houses, farms, etc.
The letters detail the harsh childhood and teenage years that Gillis’ Japanese Canadian friends had to endure. All the letters in this exhibition have been scanned, transcribed, annotated, and geo-coded, thereby making it easy to explore the letters’ content by author, theme, location, and time.
For example, when we choose to browse by subject, we are directed to a beautiful and effective visualization of the subjects discussed.
Figure 1. Color-coded subject visualization
As a person with mild color vision deficiency, I have to commend the curators’ apparent thoughtfulness in making the spectrum easier to see. Click on the little colored circles, then the associated subject will be highlighted in each letter.
Likewise, one can open up a transcript and see every sentence’s annotated subject on the right.
Figure 2. Annotated letter transcript.
Maps help users grasp the extent of the dispersal of the letter writers as each letter is encoded with coordinates. One can zoom in and out to see the physical distance between the letter writers. One suggestion I would have is to mark Gillis’ location as well, just to give viewers a sharper sense of how far they have been dispersed.
Figure 3. An overview of the letters’ locations.
Figure 4. A zoomed-in and city-level view of the letters’ original locations.
The curators have enhanced the exhibition through suggested themes which include essays that reference snippets from the letters. These essays give historical contexts in which the letters were produced. For example, in the essay on “Communications,” the curators discuss how the correspondence between Gillis and her friends was censored by the Canadian authorities. Under “Labour,” one will find more information about sugar beets farming that many letter writers’ families “volunteered” to engage in, although the letters make clear this “volunteering” was the only option other than labor camps and the splitting up of families.
Last but not least, I love the notes under “About the Collection.” The Land Acknowledgement is specific and lists all Indigenous lands that are mentioned in the collection. There is also a deep reflection of publicizing materials that were meant to be private and intimate. In particular, how the wartime censorship adds another layer of complexity to the nature of this correspondence. The curators’ own personal reflections communicated their own positionality towards the project and personal growth in a profound and touching way.
The project is built with open-source tools. The content management tool, CollectionBuilder is a set of static web templates for online collections created and maintained by librarians at the University of Idaho. The transcriptions are prepared with Oral History as Data, also a static web tool based on Github Pages and Jekyll to analyze and visualize transcripts, also by the same group at the University of Idaho.
I love the collection not only in the sense it teaches me about a dark episode in history effectively but also demonstrates how such a project can help each of us grow by reflecting on our own positions in relation to the history documented in the project.
Yi Shan is East Asian Studies Librarian at the University of Texas Libraries.
Annah Hackett is the Information Literacy Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries.
In Undergraduate Studies (UGS) library instruction sessions, the librarians of Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) work with undergraduate students on the research skills they will need to succeed at the University of Texas. Of particular note are discussions about source analysis: Is this the type of source I need? Is it credible? How can I place it in context within my thesis? Most of this instruction is classroom-specific, but TLS always seeks to tie these skills to the broader context of the information students will encounter in the “real world.”
So when Alanna Bitzel – Texas Athletics Student Services Assistant Director for Supplemental Instruction, Writing and Academic Enrichment – asked if I would be interested in leading an information literacy session as part of the new Summer Writing Bridge Program, I saw a unique opportunity to demonstrate how information literacy skills can benefit student-athletes both in- and outside the classroom.
Under Bitzel’s leadership, the Summer Writing Bridge Program provides an opportunity for student-athletes to connect with academic resources on campus, including the Libraries, tutoring services, and the Writing Center. The purpose of this program – now in its first summer – is to empower student-athletes to utilize these resources as they balance their challenging course schedule and athletic responsibilities.
Bitzel sees one of the major concerns student-athletes will encounter is how to navigate endorsement deals. Since 2021, NCAA student-athletes have been permitted to enter contracts with companies who seek to use their name, image, and likeness (NIL) to endorse their products. This is an exciting opportunity for students to make money and connections while they are still in college. However, this opportunity also comes with potential pitfalls. Specifically, students might be so excited to be offered a paycheck that they contract with companies whose values don’t align with their own. To avoid this, student-athletes need to research and analyze the companies who are offering them an endorsement deal. In other words, they need information literacy skills.
Nine of the students enrolled in the Summer Bridge Writing Program came to the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) recently to work with a representative of the Writing Center and myself. For some of the attendees, this was their first visit to PCL. I started off by inviting the students to partake in something that I consider an essential tool in critical thinking: homemade cookies. Once they had filled their plates, I then asked them to consider a fictional situation. What would they do if a company selling vitamins and supplements to athletes sought to contract with them for their NIL in their next media campaign? Specifically, what information would they want to know about the company, and where they would find that information?
In a lively group discussion, we worked our way through researching other “brand ambassadors” for the company, checking for FDA approval, seeing if there have been any major scandals concerning the company in the media, and reading the “About Us” page on the company website. I then told the students that their research had revealed that the head athletic trainer at another university had endorsed this company in the past. In my fictional scenario, this person was professionally successful but did not have an educational background that enabled them to say whether a vitamin or supplement would help or harm a person. This led to a conversation about professional and educational expertise.
Eventually, the students agreed that they would not accept this endorsement. For one thing, I had forgotten that athletes using supplements is problematic, if not strictly against the rules. That librarian error aside, the students agreed that the lack of FDA approval (professional standards) and the fact that the other brand ambassador did not have a medical background (educational expertise) made this endorsement too risky to accept. One student-athlete said that she would also ask the head athletic trainer at UT what they thought about the company, which is another way of seeking information from experts in the field.
Having agreed that we would look elsewhere for our endorsement deals, we rounded off the session by looking an actual research assignment from a UGS class. We discussed how they would use the same skills and analysis from the NIL prompt to research the topic given to them by this UGS professor: determine what expertise in this particular situation looks like, use critical thinking skills to figure out what types of sources they needed, and analyze the sources for credibility. Information literacy skills are essential for success both inside and outside the classroom!
The session with the Summer Writing Bridge Program was a fun way to connect with a group of students outside of how I usually interact with them in a UGS classroom. It also gave me an opportunity to show students how information literacy works “in the wild”.
While we spend most of our time supporting undergraduates through their classroom assignments and projects, it is always important to remind them that the skills they learn here at UT can guide them throughout their lives and that librarians are here to help them learn what questions to ask, with or without cookies to make the process more fun.
Kiana Fekette came to the Libraries a couple of years ago and was recently named Head of Digitization. Learn a bit about this North Carolina transplant.
What’s your background, and how did you come to work at the Libraries?
It’s a very long, somewhat complicated story of how I got to UT Libraries! Academically, I have BA in Archaeology with a double major in History and an MA in Anthropology with a focus in archaeology. More broadly, I went to university knowing that I absolutely loved history and books but wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do until I happened into a student position within my university’s special collections library as a conservation lab assistant. I knew then I wanted to pursue book and paper conservation but several major life events got in the way and I found myself working for Internet Archive after getting my undergraduate degree. Several years and one master’s degree later, we moved to Austin to be closer to my husband’s family. I wanted to work in something to do with cultural heritage but didn’t have any one specific goal in mind which is how I ended up looking for different library and archive positions.
What’s your title, and talk a little bit about what you do?
As of very recently (May 24th) I am the Head of Digitization within the Digital Stewardship and Preservation unit. Prior to this, I was the Digital Reformatting Coordinator and I started in 2021. As I am still transitioning into my new role, the majority of my responsibilities have stayed the same. I coordinate and execute the digitization of collections materials which include audio-visual and book/paper items. Our unit works closely with library staff members and patrons to make our collections materials more widely accessible by offering them in a digital format.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
Knowing that so many people – both library staff and patrons – rely on the variety of resources produced by digitization. We’re not just taking high quality scans of items to keep on some random, inaccessible hard drive; our goal is to help others with the pursuit of knowledge and to ensure that these items are available for use across time and space.
What are you most proud of in your job?
Despite the small size of our unit, I am proud of the fact that we’re able to produce such a large quantity of archival-quality material for the library.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
Any time the libraries staff is able to get together as a group is always such a fun time to meet new people and catch up with old friends. It’s always refreshing and reassuring to be in a space where you can truly feel the support for one another.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I’ve moved around a lot – first as a military kid, then as a nomadic adult. I’ve lived in Oklahoma, all over central North Carolina, Washington state, Hawai’i, Massachusetts, Ireland, and now Texas. My family is originally from central Pennsylvania (if you can pronounce Schuylkill and Yuengling, or have ever been to Knoebels, please come and find me – I’m sure we have lots to talk about!).
Dogs or cats?
Both! (I have two cats and a dog at home)
Favorite book, movie or album?
Book: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Movie: The Princess Bride or Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Album: I don’t necessarily have a favorite album but my favorite musician is Andrew Bird
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
I enjoy cooking but I also get very bored with food very easily so I’m always willing to go out to get something I wouldn’t otherwise cook. One of our favorite spots is Turnstile on Burnet Road. They’re both a coffee shop and a full-service bar with great breakfast tacos and truly incredible burgers.
What’s the future hold?
I have no clue, and I’m perfectly okay with that! I’m finally settling down in one spot for the first time in quite a while.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries 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.
Zines have long been a medium for weirdos, freaks, and outcasts on the margins, which means they’ve been a staple of queer expression. The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) has been digitizing and preserving queer zines for twenty years!
First of all, what are zines? Zines are DIY publications, usually staple-bound and made with printer paper. They’re cheap and easy to produce, and most zine makers give them away for free or sell them at low prices to recoup costs. This allows them to bypass mainstream publishers, so zines are often a medium for marginalized and radical voices.
Zines developed out of Science Fiction fan culture in the 1930s. In the 1970s, the onset of photocopying technology coincided with the rise of punk music. Punk fans (who often overlapped with Sci-fi fans) latched onto zines as a way to write about their favorite bands, share stories, and build community. As such, zines have always been a venue for outsider expression and radical politics. In the 1990s, feminist and queer zine makers really took hold of the medium. Punk communities might have been made up of outcasts, but they weren’t immune to misogyny and homophobia. Women and LGBTQ punks experienced marginalization and discrimination within their scenes, and zines provided a much-needed space to voice these experiences and find other like-minded queers.
So a project like QZAP is pretty revolutionary! This searchable database is run by a collective based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it is and will remain free and open to use. QZAP’s goal is to create a “living history” so they continue to accept new submissions from contemporary queer zine makers. They hold a broad definition of “queer,” too, recognizing that identities and language change over time. Zine makers submit their physical zines to QZAP, and collective members, usually librarians, archivists, scholars, and graduate students, scan the zines and create the metadata. Like zines themselves, QZAP is a DIY enterprise!
QZAP’s homepage features a rotation of different zine covers. This featured zine is about the representation of Black Lesbians in the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
QZAP allows users to browse zines, which is one of my favorite ways to explore their collections. With so much interesting and obscure content, browsing QZAP’s collection is a fun, serendipitous experience. QZAP also has an Advanced Search option for users to find zines by author, place of publication, or year of publication. I’ve used QZAP when working with Women’s & Gender Studies classes so students can see a broad set of queer zines over time. While the website’s look and feel are pretty simple and the technology is a bit dated, students respond enthusiastically to the content. I think QZAP’s simple design and stable technology have made it a sustainable project, especially because it is run by a volunteer collective independent of a university or institution.
Here’s a screenshot of a digitized zine and its metadata record in QZAP. I like that the metadata is so prominent next to the digital object.
One of my favorite things about QZAP is that it uses a specialized metadata schema just for zines called xZINECOREx, based on the more common DublinCore schema. Cataloging and describing zines are challenging. They often don’t have a title page with publication information. Sometimes no author or creator is listed, or the author goes by a pseudonym. Maybe they have a publication date, but often they do not.
A sample record using the xZINECOREx metadata schema.
Given these complexities, libraries and archives handle describing zines in all sorts of ways. The xZINECOREx schema provides a standard that can be used across institutions and by independent projects like QZAP. QZAP contributes metadata from its collection to the Zine Union Catalog, which aims to be a single place to search for zines across multiple libraries, archives, and independent collections. Because zines are ephemeral, this catalog is a great resource for scholars interested in the history of zines.
A digital collection like QZAP is vital to preserving the history of these rare, hard-to-find publications, yet there remains great value in studying physical zines. The physical objects provide the reader with a unique, tactile experience. This is especially important for LGBTQ+ history, which is so often erased or hidden. Reading a personal, first-hand account from a queer punk in the 90s – from the actual paper zine that person made by hand – is visceral and powerful. It’s an experience hard to replicate in an online setting. If you find QZAP intriguing, I encourage you to stop by our Zine Collection on the 5th floor of the Fine Arts Library. Our collection has many queer zines, including many published in Texas, and dates back to the 1990s.
Want to learn more about zines? Check out these resources:
Now that Dell Medical has adequately settled in, related programs really need some extra support. Enter Lynn Bostwick, our new Liaison Librarian for Health Sciences.
What’s your background in libraries, and how did you decide on librarianship as a career?
I decided on librarianship as a career because I was inspired in part by my grandmother who worked at the law library at SMU in Dallas when I was growing up. I learned from her to never take the access to information for granted. I also worked for a time for a non-profit providing medical information and community resources to the public, and realized then that I enjoyed the work of helping people access the information they need, so librarianship was a good fit for me. My background is in academic libraries and is varied! It includes all different types of work from cataloging and metadata creation for digitized items to reference and circulation to collection development, instruction and providing research help.
What’s your title, and what do you do for the Libraries?
My title is Liaison Librarian for Health Sciences. I work with students and faculty in Nutrition, Nursing, Pharmacy and Public Health providing them with classes and research help.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
Knowing I’ll have the opportunity to help someone or learn something each day.
What are you most proud of in your job?
Providing a class to Nutrition students and seeing the results in their posters on display in the Union Ballroom.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
All the people I’ve met so far – super students, faculty and colleagues! What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I LOVE football!
Dogs or cats?
I like dogs but have always had cats. We currently have a seal-point Siamese that rules our house.
Favorite book, movie or album?
Tough question! Favorite album is Alkohol – Goran Bregovic. Years ago I got to see Bregovic perform with his band at Bass Concert Hall.
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
Both, but lately we’ve been going out to eat at Nori, a plant-based restaurant on Guadalupe that is so good!
What’s the future hold?
Catching up on travel post-pandemic and seeing more of the world!
