Cooperative initiatives and outreach

The General Libraries continued to increase its participation in many UT System, State of Texas, regional, and national cooperative ventures and consortial arrangements.

Participation in national, state, and regional programs continued
The "community" the General Libraries serves has clearly expanded from the "40 Acres" to the whole State of Texas and in many cases the world. Among the more prominent cooperative programs in which the General Libraries is a partner are: the national Library of Congress Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), CONSER, the NACO Music Project, OCLC, the Research Libraries Group, the Research Library Cooperative Program (mentioned at bottom of p. 5), the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project, TexShare, UT System libraries, and several statewide resource sharing agreements.

The Welch Chemical Information Project funded—to benefit entire State
The Welch Foundation grant of $300,000 is funding the General Libraries Mallet Chemistry Library's project to expand and enhance its collection of chemistry reference materials and provide statewide access to this information via document delivery and reference assistance. As the only stand-alone academic library in Texas specifically devoted to the chemical sciences, the Mallet Chemistry Library offers reference assistance to off-campus researchers, students, and librarians via telephone, e-mail, and onsite visits.

All materials acquired will be cataloged in UTNetCAT, the UT Austin online catalog, which is freely accessible to all via the Internet. The state-funded TexShare: A Texas Library Resource Sharing Program (http://www.texshare.edu/) will provide the basic infrastructure to make chemical information accessible to all institutions of higher education, public and private, throughout the state.

Texas Department of Transportation maps offered online
The General Libraries Texas County Highway Maps Web site originated as a joint effort with the UT Austin Department of Geography. The maps are published by and reproduced with the permission of the Texas Department of Transportation. Users can search by the name of the county, city, lake, university, or other large geographical entity. Once the map has been located the user can then zoom in to specific details of the map.

Texas Archival Resources Online Project funded
This Texas Digital Library Alliance (TDLA) initiative, overseen by the General Libraries and the Ransom Center, applied for and received funding from the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund to support the first phase of a prototype repository of finding aids for archival materials located at institutions around the state. The archive will enhance K-12 education by making available over the Internet a wealth of significant documents, images, and sounds.

General Libraries assists UT Arlington library
When the library at UT Arlington became so crowded that its regional accrediting agency ordered the campus to provide more library space, the General Libraries came to the rescue by opening its Library Storage Facility to UT Arlington and creating procedures for electronic inventory control of Arlington's materials.

The Handbook of Texas featured in The New York Times
"On-Line Encyclopedia Opens Doors in Texas," appearing in The New York Times (August 26, 1999), related the experiences of a blind researcher's efforts to put together information for a history of disabled people in Texas. Her research was aided by the ability to search key words efficiently throughout the entire online text of The Handbook of Texas, a joint project of the General Libraries and the Texas State Historical Association. The online version is accessible to visually impaired users through screen-reader software. The six-volume printed version is not available in Braille.