For years, the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office has been experimenting with digital technologies to transform this “unreadable” Spanish colonial archive into accessible humanities data for scholars. However, we tried something new this past year and reversed the equation: We convened colonial Latin Americanists online to transform handwritten words on pages into digital text that they could then use to make the digital humanities (DH) more accessible.

Two members of the LLILAS Benson Digital Initiatives team recently visited Buenaventura, Colombia, to work with archivists and community leaders at Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), a grassroots collective of organizations founded in 1993 that is working to transform the political, social, economic, and territorial reality of Colombia’s Black, Afro-descendant, Raizal, and Palenquera communities through the defense and revindication of their individual, collective, and ancestral rights.

Art historian Dr. Virginia E. Miller, a UT Austin alumna, has generously included support for LLILAS Benson in her estate. The bequest designates the creation of two program endowments: Virginia E. Miller Endowed Excellence Fund in Latin American Art Studies, to support the study of Latin American Art via LLILAS, and Virginia E. Miller Endowed Excellence Fund for the Benson Library, to support any function of the Benson Latin American Collection. 

It was a doozy of a summer for the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office. Thanks to a Department of Education National Resource Center grant, we had the distinct opportunity to share some of the Benson Latin American Collection’s Spanish colonial treasures with a few communities outside of UT Austin. In a traveling exhibit titled A New Spain, 1521–1821, the reproduced materials demonstrated the cultural, social, and political evolution of colonial Mexico.

AUSTIN, Texas—Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA) is pleased to announce that it has concluded negotiations with Elsevier, and all TLCUA members have signed or are finalizing new agreements for subscription journal access.

The University of Texas Libraries announced the student recipient of the 2022 Map & Geospatial Collections Explorer Fellowship at a GIS Day event on Wednesday, November 16.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin will soon have a new space for scholarly collaboration and innovation on the Forty Acres.

Construction is underway in the creation of a new Scholars Lab on the entry level of the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) that aligns with a growing focus on digital scholarship at the university. It will provide a technology-forward community hub for interdisciplinary scholarship for students, faculty and researchers.

The Black Diaspora Archive (BDA) at The University of Texas at Austin documents the Black experience in the Americas and the Caribbean through the voices and stories of those who have championed the Black spaces that we use and benefit from today.

The vast digitized collections of the University of Texas Libraries are becoming increasingly available through a new web portal.

A new access point on the Libraries’ website – the Collections portal – allows users to undertake remote research and study utilizing rich resources that have previously only been available in person or through more time-intensive digitization on demand processes.