Our Crowdfunding Groups
From the students, faculty, staff, and
Great news! Because of donors like you, we reached our goal to raise $5,000 in the first 20 hours of the 30-day campaign!
Due to the resounding success created by the generosity of our donors, these gifts will purchase a digital camera set-up for archival use—the first of two machines necessary to expand the number and variety of digital collection images available online for teaching and research. Thank you!
All gifts to the campaign between now and December 31, will help us get one step closer to our goal of raising an additional $200,000 to purchase a Phase One DT Versa, a high-resolution and high-output digitization system in use by a number of leading repositories including the Library of Congress and The Smithsonian as well as other major archives held by research universities.
Without records, there is no history—only myth and legend. On behalf of all of the students, faculty and other researchers who use the center’s collections, THANK YOU for helping us make the evidence of history widely available.
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The Briscoe Center for American History, one of the cultural gems at The University of Texas at Austin, is one of the nation’s leading research centers for historical inquiry.
The Briscoe Center’s archives, museums, and historic buildings document the people, places, events, and ideas that have helped shape the United States. Researchers working with original, primary source materials preserved at the center unlock valuable clues to the secrets of the past. The center’s vast collection includes the most significant assemblage of Texas-related materials, one of the top three archives on the American South, unmatched holdings on news media history and the American energy industry, and the official archive of The University of Texas among others.
An active place of learning, the center facilitates the use of its collections in teaching and research to help ensure that discussions Americans have concerning their identities, origins, and values remain rooted in historical evidence. The Briscoe Center is committed to making it possible for students of all ages to examine primary sources, form questions, seek evidence, and deepen their understanding of the American story.
Even in a pandemic, people continue to do research requiring access to primary sources.
There are virtual class modules, theses, dissertations, articles, books, documentary films, and other research projects with deadlines that must be met. Researchers have questions, and the Briscoe Center wants to help them find answers.
Since March, reference and digital image requests for virtual teaching and remote research have increased five-fold over the same time as last year. This surge in digital image requests is expected to continue even after the pandemic is over. Our current digitization equipment cannot support this tremendous growth. The center must expand its digitization capacity by upgrading our equipment now in order to efficiently and effectively meet the increased demand for digital collection images today, and in the future.
By purchasing upgraded digitization equipment, including a digital camera set-up for archival projects and a Phase One DT Versa digitization system for public service, the center’s archivists will be able to produce images of three-dimensional artifacts and two-dimensional items—including those that are either too large or too fragile to digitize with a document scanner. The new system will help the center provide students, faculty, and other researchers with even more digital images of collection materials from the convenience of their home or office allowing them to:
Our archivists need the special features of these improved technological tools to increase the number and variety of high-quality digital images from the Briscoe Center’s collections available online for researchers to complete class projects and research endeavors.
You can help
The center seeks to raise $5,000 through the “Expanding Digital Access” HornRaiser campaign to help purchase upgraded digitization equipment. Your gift, in any amount, can help us reach this goal by December 31.
Your impact
Without records, there is no history—only myth and legend. Your gift will help make the evidence of history widely available.
Offering expanded online access to digitized collection materials is critically important for the Briscoe Center to meet the continuing educational and research needs of students, faculty, staff, and independent researchers in the twenty-first century. Your gift for the Briscoe Center’s Expanding Digital Access HornRaiser campaign will help faculty teach; students produce research papers and graduate on time; and writers and filmmakers publish articles and books and produce documentary films to enlighten and entertain.
Gifts received over the $5,000 HornRaiser campaign goal, the amount needed to purchase the digital camera set-up for archival use, will go toward the next phase of the Expanding Digital Access campaign-- the purchase of a Phase One DT Versa, a high-resolution and high-output digitization system in use by a number of leading repositories including the Library of Congress and The Smithsonian.
The addition of this upgraded digitization system to the Briscoe Center’s toolkit, comprised of both the camera set-up for archival use and a Phase One DT Versa, will expand the center’s capacity to digitize a greater number and variety of high-quality digital images of collection materials and make them available to researchers online as soon as possible.
The Briscoe Center's reading room has assisted researchers from 18 countries.
Students and faculty from 55 different universities and colleges around the world use the Briscoe Center's collections in their research projects.
The center's namesake, Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, would have celebrated his 97th birthday this year.
The center's archivists taught information literacy and research skills to 241 students in 13 visiting classes during the 19-20 academic year.
The center’s archivists have fielded more than 500 remote reference requests for digital images of collection material since March, 2020.
Each year, the Briscoe Center’s archivists help more than 700 UT students conduct research in the collections for class projects, theses, and dissertations.
In 1897, the first gift of historical archives arrived at UT, launching efforts to collect and preserve historical evidence for teaching and research. These archives became the foundational collections of today’s Briscoe Center for American History.
