Newsletter Number 44, Summer 2000 The University of Texas at Austin www.lib.utexas.edu
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The 1998-1999 fiscal year was a time of building upon past initiatives and forging new ones—with the UT Austin community, with a select and special number of state and national entities, but with a constant eye on serving also the extended body of students and citizens of Texas. During the past five years the General Libraries has been at the forefront in embracing opportunities afforded by recent technological and telecommunications advances, while recognizing our obligations to legacies still held in trust. In a sense, we have enriched an ageless paradigm of information access and by that enrichment made it one that will prosper to the benefit of all knowledge seekers. 
Harold Billings Director of General Libraries |
- 1998-1999
Annual Report
and beyond...
Services to users
- Initiated a major renovation to the entrance level of the Perry-Castañeda Library, including creation of the 21st-Century Study
- Began offering online hold and recall services which resulted in a 21% increase in use
- Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) completed; received national recognition
- $1.5 million from the Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund Board funded high-speed network upgrades to UT Library Online
- From 44 to 68 million "hits"—an increase of 54% in use in just one year of UT Library Online
- Collections and resources
- Added dozens of new databases to UT Library Online, including many full-text materials
- One of the world's largest collections of census materials transferred to the General Libraries
- Successfully managed the second-year allocation of $1 million from the UT System Academic Library Enhancement Program
- New digital bibliographies created by General Libraries subject specialists assist researchers
- Cooperative initiatives and outreach
- Welch Foundation Chemical Information Project to benefit State of Texas initiated
- Research Library Cooperative Program with Stanford and UC Berkeley began operation
- Texas Department of Transportation County Map Project completed
- Texas Archival Resources Online Project to provide archival resources online funded by Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund
- Support and funding
- Received $300,000 from the Welch Foundation to support a project to provide statewide access to chemical information resources
- Geology Library support benefited from additional $230,000 donation to Barrow endowment; Boggs and Witt endowments established
- 3,634 donors gave $369,596 worth of materials