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Constructed with state and federal funds, contributions, and proceeds from the sale of Centennial coins sponsored by the American Legion, the museum was opened to the public January 15, 1939. In 1959, by legislative enactment, it became a division of the University of Texas.
The museum is open every day, except major holidays, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM weekdays, from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Saturday, and from 1:00 to 5:00 PM Sunday. Admission is free.
Known worldwide for its collection of fossil vertebrates, the museum exhibits examples of the world-famous dinosaur footprints originally from Glen Rose, Texas. Other fossils on display are a thirty-five-foot cretaceous mosasaur, reptiles and amphibians from the Permian period of the Paleozoic era, and remains of Ice Age mammals. Geology is explored on the first floor in a display of gems, minerals, and rocks. The third floor features the contemporary native fauna of Texas, including many of the state's fascinating reptiles, birds, and mammals. The fourth floor is dedicated to Native American cultures with displays of prehistoric to more recent artifacts and tools. The museum's superb collection of antique firearms, exhibited at the entrance level, highlights the history and diversity of the gunsmith's art. Temporary exhibits from the museum's collections and from other institutions provide variety.
Operating as divisions of the Texas Memorial Museum, but located at the Pickle Research Campus, are the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory, containing more than 150,000 fossil specimens and over 6,000 recent vertebrate skeletons; the Invertebrate Paleontology and Paleobotany Collections, containing more than 3,500,000 specimens of fossil and modern invertebrates and fossil plants; and the Geological Collections (rocks, minerals, meteorites, and tektites) containing over 50,000 specimens. The Division of Vertebrates, holds approximately 350,000 specimens of fishes, over 50,000 amphibians and reptiles, over 7,000 mammals, and 2,000 birds. The Division of Invertebrates houses over 325,000 specimens of insects, arachnids, and mollusks. The Materials Conservation Laboratory provides for the stabilization, preservation, and restoration of the scientific and ethnohistoric teaching/research specimens in the museum's collections. The Radiocarbon Laboratory, administered by the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory, collaborates with research projects in archaeology, geology, oceanography, paleontology, and paleobotany, where age determinations of organic materials within the time range of the past forty thousand years are required.
The museum produces the following scholarly publications: the Bulletin; Pearce-Sellards Series; Speleological Monographs; Conservation Notes; Miscellaneous Papers, Museum Notes, and information circulars.
The museum is the academic home of the museum studies courses offered in the College of Liberal Arts. The courses are designed to provide basic training for students preparing for careers in the museum profession, or for those who have an interest in museums growing out of scholarly interests in other fields.
KUT Radio is a national center for the production and distribution of a variety of radio programs and is housed in a facility of exceptional design and flexibility. Services include meeting the audio production requirements of KUT Radio and its subsidiary, the Longhorn Radio Network, and providing a public radio service to the University and to local communities throughout Central and West Texas. The flagship station, KUT 90.5 FM, is a charter member of National Public Radio and is one of 344 public radio stations in the United States certified by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as "full-service" stations, which qualifies it to receive annual federal assistance through the radio Community Service Grant program. KUT Radio also distributes KUT and other programs statewide and nationally via the public radio satellite system and on audio cassettes through its syndication service, the Longhorn Radio Network, itself a descendant of the University's first production and distribution service, Radio House, established in 1939.
Radio facilities include: (1) three radio production studios and four associated control rooms; (2) a broadcast control room/library complex; (3) a satellite operations center for uplink and downlink activities; and (4) a master/eighteen-slave audiophile cassette duplication system.
Programs produced by KUT Radio have received numerous awards and are broadcast regularly by National Public Radio.
High Performance Computing Systems. The Computation Center provides high performance computing services at the High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) at J.J. Pickle Research Campus. Supercomputers there are connected to the main campus with high-speed data links. The HPCF also has several parallel computer systems to support large-scale science and engineering applications. The HPCF operates the Visualization Lab in support of data visualization and advanced computer graphics for research in all academic disciplines.
IBM SP2 Academic Data Server. The Academic Data Server is an 11-processor IBM SP2 system. Designed for parallel computing applications, it utilizes IBM's AIX operating system, with special software for parallel computing. Mathematical applications, relational database servers, application development, and data modeling are also available on the system.
Windows NT System. The Computation Center's DEC AlphaServer 1000 4/200 provides a Structured Query Language (SQL) server for the campus community. SQL is an industry-standard interface for accessing relational databases.
Training Programs. The Computation Center offers free noncredit short courses on introductions to various computer systems, electronic mail, using Internet resources, editors and text formatting programs, mathematical and statistical software, and database management systems. In conjunction with the Division of Continuing Education, the Computation Center operates the Microcomputer Teaching Facility (MTF) in the Thompson Conference Center. The MTF offers workshops on Windows, Macintosh, and Internet topics. Each semester, the Computation Center and the Center for Teaching Effectiveness sponsor a series of free technology seminars for faculty members that consist of presentations and demonstrations followed by hands-on sessions covering the software demonstrated.
Documentation Services. The center publishes many kinds of documents to describe its software and services. Most of the publications are available electronically. The Web address for Computation Center information is http://www.utexas.edu/cc/.
Network Services. The center maintains extensive communications networks for user access to the University's computers from terminals, microcomputers, and workstations and for data communications among computers. The campus computer network, UTnet, is a system of networks, equipment, and software that enables information to be sent between campus computers and on to computer sites worldwide. UTnet and the Internet are also accessible by telephone and modem. TELESYS, the center's high-speed modem system, can connect users at speeds up to 28,800 bits per second.
Student Microcomputer Facility. All University of Texas at Austin students may use the Student Microcomputer Facility (SMF) in the Flawn Academic Center. This 200-seat facility includes Macintosh and Dell workstations, as well as scanners, laser printers, and a color printer. Software on the workstations includes text-processing applications, graphics, spreadsheets, and mathematical and statistical packages. All workstations are connected to the campus network and provide access to electronic mail, Internet resources, and the UTCAT library catalog.
Founded in 1941, the institute is located in Port Aransas at the entrance of the main ship channel to Corpus Christi, with access to a wide variety of beach, bay, gulf shelf, and open gulf environments. These represent natural environments ranging from fresh to hypersaline waters, grass and mud flats, shell reefs, sand beaches, dune areas, and the surf zone. Facilities include a laboratory-classroom-office building, laboratory building with running seawater facilities, pier laboratory over the Aransas Pass, physical plant building, dormitories and apartments, library/auditorium building, and dining hall. Special research facilities include a one-hundred-five-foot research vessel (the Longhorn), a fifty-seven-foot trawler (the Katy), and outboard launches and skiffs; vehicles; walk-in growth chambers; concrete experimental ponds; isotope facilities; specialized laboratory equipment; shops; invertebrate, vertebrate, and algal reference collections; a 5.25-acre boat basin; and a branch of the University's General Libraries that contains about eight thousand books and thirty-seven thousand bound journal volumes in marine science and related fields.
The Marine Science Institute also operates a mariculture research center. This twenty-two-thousand-square-foot facility was deeded to the University by the United States Government National Marine Fisheries Service in 1987. The mariculture program is focused on finfish reproduction, growth, and harvesting. Other universities and state agencies participate in the mariculture research.
A visitor's center is maintained and operated by the Marine Educational Services and offers a visiting-class program for junior high, high school, and college science classes that hosts approximately 9,500 students each year. A series of teacher workshops designed to encourage the introduction of marine science topics and techniques into the curriculum for all subjects, from science to art and history, is organized to improve the proficiency of classroom teachers at all grade levels. The Visitor's Center, open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, also houses seven aquariums with typical Texas coastal habitats and numerous educational displays. The center is toured by more than thirty-five thousand visitors each year. Tours for groups of fewer than thirty are available by request in advance.
Additional information may be obtained from the director, Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas.
The foundation is guided by an advisory council that meets twice a year to review policies and to help determine future direction. In its work the foundation operates as an integral part of the University of Texas, calling on faculty members and postgraduate research assistants from the medical, biological, and social sciences, as well as education, nursing, social work, and law, to serve as consultants to communities and organizations and to campus departments and community agencies that have received Hogg Foundation grants.
Specific phases of the foundation's work are carried on cooperatively with components of the University and with other universities and statewide organizations interested in the promotion and study of mental health. The foundation's program is focused on projects that examine new ideas in which evaluative research is an integral part.
The Hogg Foundation fosters a broad program of mental health education. A mailing list is maintained for those who request materials published by the foundation. The publications are outgrowths of foundation-funded projects or studies.
Several hundred books in various areas of mental health are part of the foundation library. The Regional Foundation Collection, a comprehensive reference collection of materials related to grantsmanship, was established through the cooperation of The Foundation Center of New York City. Open to the public, it is a noncirculating reference library containing the most current and comprehensive information available on private and corporate philanthropy, grantsmanship, and nonprofit management.
The institute has formal relationships with many institutions in Central and South America. Student exchange programs have been developed with the University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica; Monterrey Institute of Technology and the University of Nuevo Leon, Monterrey, Mexico; The Ibero-American University, Mexico City, Mexico; and Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, Peru. The institute is also affiliated with the Latin American Faculty for the Social Sciences, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; University of Chile and Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile; Monteverde Institute, Monteverde, Costa Rica; Catholic University 'Mother and Teacher,' Santiago, Dominican Republic; and Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador.
Throughout the year the institute sponsors symposia and lectures by visiting and resident specialists, maintains a substantial publications program, and offers public service activities to foster greater knowledge of Latin America around the state and the nation. The institute houses on-going research projects, currently including the Conference of Latin American Geographers and Latin American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, but these represent only a small part of the research activity at the University on Latin American subjects.
The institute also houses the Mexican Center, an office dedicated to developing and coordinating the extensive academic programs and activities focused on Mexico and carried out by University faculty, students, and visiting Mexican scholars. The Mexican Center regularly organizes binational academic conferences on a variety of themes. Through its C.B. Smith fellowship program, the center offers a limited number of travel scholarships for Mexican scholars to take advantage of the institute's library resources.
Another division of the institute is the Brazilian studies office, which coordinates the work of Brazilianist faculty and students on campus and links the University to institutions of higher education in Brazil. The division also sponsors visiting lecturers, film festivals, workshops, and symposia focusing on Brazil.
Located in Sid Richardson Hall, the institute is in the same building as the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, one of the most comprehensive holdings of its kind in the world. Substantial demographic data pertaining to Latin America are found in the Population Research Center, while other supplementary information resources are located in the Perry-Castaneda Library and the Tarlton Law Library. The University's holdings of modern Latin American art are outstanding, and the Photography Collection also contains photographic documentation of relevance to Latin Americanists.
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