About

Special Collections & Archives at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Libraries was founded in 1974 as the Special Collections Division and was the direct result of a gift from Jenkins and Virginia Garrett of Fort Worth, Texas. The Garretts donated more than 10,000 books, documents, graphics, maps, periodicals, manuscripts, newspapers, and pieces of sheet music. As a result of this extraordinary gift, the university established the Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library in 1978 on the sixth floor of the Central Library to house these materials, which relate to the history of Texas, Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) and the cartographic history of the Gulf of Mexico region and the greater American Southwest.

Our collecting efforts have built on the subject areas found in the initial donation from the Garretts and have evolved over time. The current collecting areas include:

• Cartography Collection
• Texas History Collection
  • Pre-Texas History
  • Early Texas History
  • Contemporary Regional Texas History
  • Texas Disability History Collection
  • Texas Political History Collection
  • Texas Photographic History Collection
  • Texas Labor Archives
• University Archives
• U.S.-Mexico War Collection
• Yucatan and Honduras Collection

To learn more about our collections search our finding aids online, and to learn more about Special Collections, visit our website.