Mail us your
Questions, Comments
Registrar's Web Team
19 August 1997
Libraries and Other Academic Resources
The University Libraries
The University libraries are a resource center for Texas and the Southwest, as well as a national resource center for library materials on Latin America, Texas, the history of the American South and West, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, French, and American literature. The library system includes the General Libraries, the Center for American History, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the Tarlton Law Library. The General Libraries are the Perry-Castaneda Library, the Undergraduate Library, the Collections Deposit Library, nine branch libraries, and two special collections.
The online catalog, UTCAT, available on public terminals in the library and from terminals and personal computers on and off campus, includes most items in the General Libraries and has partial listings for the Humanities Research Center and the Law Library.
Detailed information about University libraries is given in General Information.
Perry-Castaneda Library
The Perry-Castaneda Library is the University's main library, containing over two million volumes, over five thousand current journals and newspapers, and a large collection of microforms. It embraces most subject fields but emphasizes the humanities, the social sciences, business, and education. Special materials housed in the Perry-Castaneda Library include a collection of United States and United Nations documents, University theses and dissertations, the Map Collection, and the Textbook and Curriculum Collection. Traditional reference and computer-based information services are offered and photoduplication services are available during most hours the library is open. Graduate students may consult subject bibliographers to identify useful resources and gain access to them.
Center for American History
The Center for American History is a special collections library, archive, and museum that facilitates research and sponsors programs on the historical development of the United States. The center supports research and education by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible research collections and by sponsoring exhibitions, conferences, fellowships, and grant-funded initiatives. Research collection strengths are the history of the South, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain West, congressional history, and specific national topics.
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, housed in the Harry Ransom Center and the Flawn Academic Center, is a complex of rare book libraries and special collections, primarily in the humanities but including also social science and history of science research materials. Its particular strength is in twentieth-century British, French, and American literature. Among the important collections in photography, theatre arts, and film are the Gernsheim History of Photography Collection. The center houses about a million books, thirty million manuscripts, five million photographs, and more than one hundred thousand works of art.
Tarlton Law Library
The Tarlton Law Library is one of the largest academic law libraries in the country, with over eight hundred thousand volumes of codes, statutes, court decisions, administrative regulations, periodicals, textbooks, and treatises on law and related fields. It offers a strong collection of foreign and international legal materials.
Special Collections and Branch Libraries
The University has a variety of special collections that serve the research needs of scholars in many fields. The Edie and Lew Wasserman Public Affairs Library, serving faculty members, students, and agencies of government, is a 118,000-volume collection that includes government financial statements and annual reports. The 633,000-volume Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection contains books, pamphlets, and magazines in addition to manuscripts, maps, audio recordings, and other nonprinted materials on subjects related to Latin America.
The nine branch libraries are the Architecture and Planning Library, the Mallet Chemistry Library, the Classics Library, the McKinney Engineering Library, the Fine Arts Library, the Walter Geology Library, the Life Science Library, the Kuehne Physics-Mathematics-Astronomy Library, and the Marine Science Library in Port Aransas. The Balcones Library Service Center is administered through the McKinney Engineering Library. Reference services are available at all branch libraries, and most branch libraries provide computer-based information services.
Other Libraries in Austin
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, located on campus, is operated by the National Archives and Records Administration. This library is a valuable resource for the study of the twentieth century. Faculty members and students also have access to other public and private libraries in the Austin area, including several special-interest libraries.
Research Facilities
The University offers some of the most extensive university research facilities in the United States. There are about eighty-five organized research units on campus and many other informally organized laboratories; they give graduate students the opportunity to conduct laboratory and field research in almost all fields of study. Internships are also offered in many fields.
Facilities associated with specific degree programs are described in chapter 4.
Academic Computing and Instructional Technology Services
Central academic computing facilities are available to all academic departments and research centers and to students, faculty members, and staff members. Academic Computing and Instructional Technology Services (ACITS) operates two supercomputers and several parallel computer systems; many smaller, specialized information and computing servers; and a two-hundred-seat Student Microcomputer Facility in the Flawn Academic Center.
ACITS' computing and information servers provide general computing capabilities and information resources. Students use the Macintosh and Dell workstations in the Student Microcomputer Facility for text processing, graphics, spreadsheet, mathematical, and statistical applications; for electronic mail; and for access to the Internet, to the University's library catalog, and to a variety of University services. The Academic Computing Workstation Laboratory, also in the Flawn Academic Center, offers access to X-window workstations.
ACITS maintains extensive communications networks for access to the University's computers from workstations, microcomputers, and interactive terminals both on and off campus. By means of these communications networks, including the high-speed campus backbone network, UTnet, a user can connect to a computer, communicate electronically with others, direct printing and plotting to output sites, or connect to state, national, and worldwide computer networks.
ACITS' computing servers include a suite of machines running the UNIX, NT, and Open VMS operating systems. These machines are used for Internet access, programming instruction, research, Web publishing, and other academic purposes.
The High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) serves research and instructional computing needs with two supercomputers and several parallel computer systems that support large-scale science and engineering applications. Located at the J. J. Pickle Research Campus, the HPCF is accessible to the University community via high-speed data links.
Many of ACITS' services are available on-line at http://www.utexas.edu/cc/.
A cooperative arrangement between The University of Texas System and the Texas A&M University System allows a graduate student at one institution to use unique facilities or courses at the other institution with a minimum of paperwork. The graduate student registers and pays fees at the home institution and may retain any fellowship or financial assistance awarded by it. Space must be readily available, and the instructor or laboratory director of the proposed work must consent to the arrangement. Approval must be given by the graduate dean of each institution.
A similar arrangement among component institutions of The University of Texas System has been authorized by the chancellor and the Board of Regents. The University has active arrangements with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Science Park in Bastrop County.
A cooperative arrangement between the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso allows doctoral students who focus their work on the United States-Mexico border to receive their degree from UT Austin after conducting a portion of their coursework and research at UT El Paso. Social science faculty members from both campuses serve as instructors and committee members.
Cooperative Degree Programs
With appropriate approval, the University of Texas at Austin and another component of The University of Texas System may enter into a cooperative agreement in which one component serves as the degree-granting institution while some or all of the courses in the degree program are taught at the other component. The component that grants the degree is the sponsoring institution. A student who enters such a cooperative program is admitted on the understanding that institutional sponsorship of the program may change during the student's enrollment. The student's continuation in the program will not be affected by such a transfer of sponsorship, but the student will become subject to the policies and procedures of the new sponsoring institution, which may differ from those of the original sponsor. The student will receive his or her degree from the component that sponsors the program at the time of the student's graduation.
Graduate Degrees
Libraries and Other Academic Resources
Equal Educational Opportunity
Nature and Purpose of Graduate Work
Fields of Study
Joint Degree Programs
Doctoral Portfolio Programs
Cooperative Arrangements
Graduate Catalog
Contents
Chapter 1: Graduate Study
Chapter 2: Admission and Registration
Chapter 3: Degree Requirements
Chapter 4: Fields of Study
Chapter 5: Members of Graduate Studies Committiees
Appendix: Course Abbreviations
Other UT Pages
Catalogs
Course Schedules
Academic Calendars