Night of the Living Collection

The Harry Ransom Center has been building its phenomenal collections since, essentially, 1957 while preserving and providing access to these materials in an effort to encourage discovery, education, and understanding in its visitors. But what is the point if none of these materials can be found? The books just sit in their stacks, fading, never to be requested and looked upon. If a collection lives or dies based on whether or not you can find it, then my project's intent is to inject renewed life into the Ransom Center's book collection. The description and access team and curatorial division of the Early Books and Manuscripts Department have embarked on a kind of excavation to pull books from their stacks and re-catalog them with a focus on their unique features. This capstone project was to work with that team and, utilizing their new system of cataloging, create a clear and succinct online research guide to communicate the best search methods for finding the books in the UT Austin Libraries Catalog. By helping researchers find books in the Ransom Center's collections, this research guide hopes to never really let those collections die. This time, you'll be coming to get them!