After five years of collaboration across campus, the University of Texas Libraries along with partners at the Harry Ransom Center and Blanton Museum of Art unveiled a new way to explore the university’s world-renowned cultural and research collections in one place. The Campus Collections search interface – accessible through the Libraries catalog – connects users with digitized materials from the Libraries, Harry Ransom Center and the Blanton Museum of Art.

The new service is part of a Mellon Foundation–funded project (2020–2025) to create a unified discovery platform for the university’s arts and cultural heritage holdings. While each partner institution continues to manage its own digital collections, the new interface allows researchers, students and the public to search across all three collections simultaneously – a first for the university.

The grant project team consisted of several Libraries staff across the organization, including Aaron Choate, Wendy Martin, Mirko Hanke, Devon Murphy, Melanie Cofield, Alisha Quagliana, Mandy Ryan, and Dustin Slater. As members of the Access Systems unit – which manages the Alma/Primo library services platform powering the Libraries’ catalog and discovery environment – Cofield and Quagliana collaborated closely with Metadata Analyst Devon Murphy and colleagues at the Blanton Museum and Ransom Center. Together, they worked to align descriptive standards and ensure system compatibility across institutions.

The service relies on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to synchronize records across systems, setting a baseline for shared metadata that includes titles, rights statements, identifiers and thumbnail links. The project’s success now positions the project partners to share their records more broadly through other aggregation platforms like TxHUB, operated by the Texas Digital Library.

Very few institutions have used the library catalog’s capacity to harvest metadata through OAI-PMH,” said Metadata Analyst Devon Murphy. “We really forged a new path to broaden the scope of discovery and access for our users.”

The Campus Collections search builds on the Libraries’ ongoing work to integrate more of the university’s digital assets into its discovery environment. Since launching Alma/Primo in 2020, the Libraries have harvested metadata from the Texas ScholarWorks institutional repository and the Libraries Collections Portal. These integrations allow users to find open-access research, digitized archives, maps, audio and video alongside traditional catalog materials.

The Access Systems team also oversees Alma Digital, a companion service used to manage licensed and restricted digital content such as streaming media and digital scores. Together, these tools create a more cohesive and accessible digital ecosystem for the university community.

The Campus Collections interface is now available for public use at search.lib.utexas.edu.