The finding aid for the Jan de Hartog Papers is now online at the TARO web site. The collection documents the life and work of author and playwright Jan de Hartog, a citizen of the world and an important Houston figure.
Jan de Hartog Papers, 1943-2005
Photo: Charles ?, Marion Orgain, and Jan DeHartog survey the author’s works in the University of Houston Libraries’ Special Collections Department, 197?
I was fortunate enough to meet the wise and funny John Overholt last week, who shared his stories of the Hyde Collection Catablog. The Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson at Harvard’s Houghton Library is the largest collection of Samuel Johnson materials in existence, as well as one of the "world’s great archives of eighteenth-century English literature, with more than 4,000 books and 5,500 letters and manuscripts". (Check out this article on the Houghton’s acquisition of the collection.) Overholt, the collection’s cataloger, is using the blog to reveal some of the collection’s treasures as he works. Even if you use your unabridged Boswell as a doorstop, or think the process of rare book cataloging is best left to the imagination, the Catablog is worth reading for the informal history of the collection, and the entertaining images (such as the one above) passed along.
Special Collections is happy to announce the launch of our weblog.
Contributions will be primarily from Special Collections librarians and staff, but all are welcome to comment. Our goal is to share news from our department as well as resources that may be of interest to our researchers and colleagues.
The new exhibit Penguins, Pulps, and Pretty Ladies: A History of Paperbacks will open on May 1, 2006 and run through the end of the fall semester on the 1st floor of the M.D. Anderson Library.
Several electronic resources for research in Texas and Houston history have emerged as of late. Here’s a brief overview:
Texas Reference Center:
Texas Reference Center includes more than 80 full text journals and books about Texas history, ethnic & cultural diversity, gender studies, literature, public health, business as well as home & garden and sports & leisure. The database contains biographies portraying famous historical and contemporary Texans such as George Herbert Walker Bush, Lady Bird Johnson, Dan Moody, Susanna Dickinson and Sam Houston. Also available in the Texas Reference Center is the Spanish-language newspaper El Sol de Texas with Texas and national news coverage. This EBSCOhost database is updated weekly.
To access this database, select Academic Search Premier from the library Database menu, then select Texas Reference Center from the drop-down menu below the search fields. This resource is an excellent supplement to the Handbook of Texas Online and Gale’s online Texas Almanac.
The Daily Cougar (along with a smattering of college and university newspapers) is available full text in Lexis Nexis from 1998 on. To access, search "Daily Cougar" in the library catalog, and click on the record for the electronic resource.
UH Theses and Dissertations Online via Dissertation Abstracts
While we welcome you to visit us for Theses and Dissertations, most of the submitted theses from UH (from around 1995 on) are available for free full-text PDF download. Simply select "Dissertation Abstracts" from the library database menu.