About Special Collections

Special Collections at UTA Libraries was founded in 1974 as the Special Collections Division, the direct result of a gift by Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins Garrett of Fort Worth, Texas.

The Garretts donated more than 10,000 books, documents, graphics, maps, periodicals, manuscripts, newspapers, and pieces of sheet music. The university built rooms on the 6th floor of the Central Library to house these materials, which related to the history of Texas, Mexico, the U.S. - Mexico War (1846-1848) and depicted the cartographic history of the Gulf of Mexico region and the greater Southwest.

Our collecting efforts have built upon the subject areas found in the initial donation from the Garretts, as demonstrated by significant acquisitions in several collecting areas, including:  

• Texas History – In 1979, a room on the 6th floor of Central Library was designed for the processing of the Robertson Colony Collection.

• Cartography – The Cartographic History Library was established in 1978 and supplemented by the donations of hundreds of maps, geography textbooks and atlases from Mrs. Garrett in 1990 and 1997. On October 1, 1977, the Cartographic History Library was renamed the Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library. 

• Spanish Language Archives – Since the early 1970s, the archivist responsible for this collecting area has conducted many microfilming projects in the Mexican state of Yucatán and the Central American country of Honduras. 

• Photograph Collections – Notable image collections are the photo archives of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and of commercial photographers W.D. Smith, Jack White, Squire Haskins, and Basil Clemons. The collections of J.W. Dunlop and the Arlington Citizen-Journal focus on Arlington history.     

Other collecting areas:

• Texas Labor Archives – Established in 1967, these archives collect the records of Texas labor unions and their officials, as well as conduct oral history interviews with union leaders and rank-and-file union members.
• University Archives
• Texas Political History Collection

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