by Ann Hodges

Another busy semester has brought a lot of activity to Special Collections. Class instruction sessions and research visits by UT Arlington students seem more numerous than usual, keeping everyone hopping. Adding to the whirlwind is ongoing work on the Tejano Voices project, partially funded by our grant from the TexTreasures initiative of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Leslie Wagner joined us in early February to take over analysis and description of the oral history interviews selected for this phase of the project. Her work is being supervised by Carolyn Kadri, Special Collections Cataloger.

A number of presentations by Special Collections staff are on tap or have already occurred this spring. Lea Worcester and Evelyn Barker (Information Literacy staff member and valued volunteer in Special Collections) gave presentations at the Texas Library Association and the Louisiana Library Association annual meetings. They hope also to present at the Arkansas Library Association and the Texas Council for Social Studies conference. (They say they're aiming for all 50 states!)

Brenda McClurkin organized the Society of Southwest Archivists joint session at the Texas Historical Association annual meeting, "Voices from the Frontier: Letters from Texas Manuscript Collections," and was one of the three presenters. She spoke about our John Jay Good Letters and I, as current SSA President, chaired the session. As 2008-2009 Vice-President of SSA, Brenda was responsible for arranging SSA's May annual conference program. At the SSA conference, she chaired the session Serving Genealogists: Issues of Outreach, Education, Digitization, Privacy, and Confidentiality, at which Lea Worcester spoke; Claire Galloway presented in a session on labor archives. Carolyn Kadri continues as Chair of ALA's Maps and Geography Roundtable, and experienced a whirlwind of her own preparing for MAGERT business at the January MidWinter meeting. She'll stay busy with her responsibilities until her term of office ends at the June annual meeting.

We are happy to have finished a couple of major efforts. Lea Worcester, Cathy Spitzenberger, Brenda McClurkin and I received Applause Awards for our intensive review and revision of Special Collections' reprographics policies and forms. The ability to reproduce images digitally has led to unpredictable and increasing requests for, and previously unforeseen uses of, our materials, which turned our policies and processes on their heads and often raise intellectual property issues. We undertook a complete re-examination and comparison to practices in similar institutions. We hope these improvements and the creation of a flow-chart for staff to consult when filling orders will result in better service to our patrons and less perplexity for staff.

The other project we finished was the complete rewrite of our Archives and Manuscripts Processing Manual, which Brenda McClurkin and I produced in its 5th edition just in time for its use by the spring archives graduate class taught by Gerald Saxon. Developments affecting the description of archives over the last years have had a major impact on our practices and made the rewrite of the manual essential. One of our next projects will be to make it available online, but that will require expertise we will have to find outside Special Collections. The challenges certainly never stop coming!

A compass rose is a circle graduated to degrees in quarter points and printed on a chart or map for reference.