As a leading history research center, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History collects, preserves, and makes available documentary and material culture evidence encompassing key themes in Texas and U.S. history. Our particular collection strengths include the history of civil rights movement, congressional and political history, and news media history. Our digital collections shed light on the history of Texas and the U.S. through historic newspapers, digitized maps, photographs and moving images.
Researchers, students, and the public mine our collections for a wide range of academic, professional, and personal uses. So far this year we have served over 3000 patrons from 12 countries, of whom one quarter were 1st time researchers at the Briscoe center. Of those user from within the UT community, 35% were students, 24% were faculty or staff, and a full 41% were alumni or retirees from UT.
Our collections also inspire our own projects, including books, exhibits, programs, films, and educational materials. The Briscoe Center partners with the University of Texas Press for the Focus on American History Series, featuring books that draw extensively from the center's historical research collections. We also work with other presses and researchers to open our collections for use in their own projects. Whether photography monographs, political histories, memoirs, documentaries or musical recordings, the Briscoe Center's holdings have inspired a range of publications and productions that shed light on the history of Texas and the U.S.
Briscoe Collection and how we present them online
Access through TARO
- Archives and manuscripts collections
Rich media (glifos)
- Access to Briscoe moving images and sound recordings enriched with access tools such as cartographic data, transcripts, and indexes synchronized to audio/visual content (http://av.cah.utexas.edu/index.php/Category:Media_Type)
Digital Media Repository
- Access to the Briscoe Digital Collections, but only includes images and digitization of 3d objects (http://www.cah.utexas.edu/research/digital_collections.php)
UTDR (dspace)
- Born digital collection material - Briscoe community (http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/7020)
Portal of texas history
- Briscoe materials digitized and hosted by the Portal to Texas History, UNT Libraries (http://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/partners/CAH/browse/)
Reference materials, indices and research guides
- Newspapers (Texas, US, international)
- Genealogy subject guides
- Census records
- Photographs
- New York News Media Morgue
- Ship passenger lists
- Texas directories collection
- Vertical files index
Project base web developments
- Example: Video Game archives (http://www.cah.utexas.edu/projects/videogamearchive/index.php) --> The UT Videogame Archive seeks to preserve and protect the work of videogame developers, publishers and artists for use by a wide array of researchers. We are eager to meet or correspond with anyone interested in donating game software and hardware, documents, art, digital records, promotional materials, and business records related to all things videogame. The archive seeks not only materials from game designers and producers, but also documentation on gamers, gameplay, and advocacy organizations related to the videogame industry
- ideas for drawing more attention to special collections on campus