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.

The University of Texas Libraries are leveraging technological advances in geographic information systems (GIS) to enhance the value of map collections at The University of Texas at Austin with the recent launch of a new portal designed to facilitate discovery of geospatial datasets that are ready to use in GIS software for mapmaking and analysis.

Late last fall, the Lebermann Foundation contributed $250,000 for the creation of the “Lowell H. Lebermann Jr. Endowment” to enable the UT Libraries to keep apace of ever-evolving technology, provide funding for modifying spaces and services to the changing natures of learning and pedagogy and help to support, preserve and disseminate unique research and scholarship on the Forty Acres.

The University of Texas Libraries received a generous gift from the Austin-area Tocker Foundation that will support the development of digital teaching and learning resources through a partnership with Austin Community College and the Austin Public Library.

The University of Texas Libraries, the Blanton Museum of Art and the Harry Ransom Center have been awarded a $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a collective digital infrastructure at The University of Texas at Austin that will provide expanded digital access to the rich cultural resources of the university.

A grant of over $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities is going to help the University of Texas Libraries contribute to the customization of a Wikipedia-like platform for the collaborative transcription, translation and indexing of archival texts in non-English languages.

Students in Astrid Runggaldier’s Art and Archaeology of Ancient Peru class were tasked with an intriguing project this spring: take a collection of pre-colonial objects that is, for all intents and purposes, invisible, and make it visible using digital tools. Their efforts have come to fruition with a first-of-its-kind online exhibition titled Ancient Coastal Cultures of Peru: People and Animals at the Edge of the Pacific Ocean.

More than 60 thousand scanned images from seven archival collections throughout Latin America are now available online in the updated Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI) repository (ladi.lib.utexas.edu). The site was developed over the course of two years by the LLILAS Benson Digital Initiatives team and University of Texas Libraries software developers, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A previous version of the site, featuring four archival collections, launched in 2015.