Collecting Area

Middle Eastern Collections

The Middle Eastern collection of the University of Texas at Austin comprises over 128,000 items in a wide range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, and linguistics. The collection prioritizes Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, but it also has holdings in Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and other languages of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. The collection’s geographic focus prioritizes Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. Materials are also collected from and about North Africa, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

Western European Collections

French and Italian Collections

The French and Italian collections at the University of Texas at Austin include primarily print and electronic material, microfilm/microfiche, and audiovisual material (DVDs, videocassettes, and streaming video). Strengths of the collection include Francophone literature in Latin America/Caribbean and Africa, literary history, film, linguistics, and the Medieval/Renaissance period across the Liberal and Fine Arts.

Hebraica and Judaica Collections

Established in the late 1930s, the Hebraica and Judaica collections at the University of Texas at Austin comprise over 85,000 holdings in a wide variety of disciplines, including history, art, music, cinema, linguistics, literature, sociology, government and politics. These resources are located in almost every branch of the University of Texas Libraries.

The current goal of the Hebraica and Judaica collections at UT Libraries is to enhance the area of Israel studies and Hebrew literature, and to expand the current holdings of Israeli cinema and human rights issues.

Taiwan Resource Center for Chinese Studies 臺灣漢學資源中心

The University of Texas Libraries have partnered with the National Central Library of Taiwan to establish the first-ever Taiwan Chinese Studies Resource Center (TCSRC, renamed Taiwan Resource Center for Chinese Studies, TRCCS) as part of its permanent collections.

The National Central Library exchanged a memorandum of understanding with the University Library on November 5, 2012, at a launch event at the Fine Arts Library at The University of Texas at Austin.

South Asia Collections

The South Asian collection of the University of TexasLibraries compromises material covering the countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. The majority of the material in our collections was acquired through the P.L. 480 Program, and the South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program, both of which administrated by the Library of Congress, but there has also been significant additions through direct purchasing and gifts. We actively collect material in all formats.

Science Fiction

The UT Libraries Science Fiction collection has been built intentionally since the 1970s, when Harold W. Billings, the director of the Libraries from 1972-2003, personally curated and donated science fiction novels for the Perry-Castañeda Library. We continue to build the collection with: