Name Authority Control at Fondren
Name authority control allows users to find all works by a specific author, even if they have used pseudonyms or different name variations, while also disambiguating individuals with the same name. Name authority control is integral to libraries and other information institutions because it improves searchability and ensures data quality in catalogs by standardizing author names and other identifiers.
In the United States, the principal source of name authority control is the Library of Congress's Name Authority File (NAF), a database that contains over 12 million unique records for persons, organizations, places, and conferences that is used by libraries all over the world. The records are contributed to the NAF by libraries across the country, and Fondren Library does our part to ensure that the people of Rice University and our community are represented in this database.
In FY2025, we added new records to the NAF for people and departments that are integral to Rice University, including:
- Bernard "Bernie" Banks, the Director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders
- Katharine Shilcutt, the Director of Communications for the Office of Research
- Raymond D. Brochstein, Brochstein Pavilion namesake and trustee emeritus
- Robert M. Eury, former Vice President and Director of Research Development for Rice Center and Kinder Institute trustee
- Rice University Office of Public Affairs
- Rice University Center for Career Development
- Rice University Department of Art
- Exhibitions at Rice, a curatorial program of the Rice School of Architecture
We also added new records for people and organizations beyond the hedges, which include:
- H-E-B Grocery Company
- Evin Thayer, well-known Houston photographer
- The Straus and Stuart collections at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston
- Margaret Downing, Editor in Chief of the Houston Press
- Houston Shakespeare Festival
These are just a few examples of the 75 new and 12 updated name authority records that Fondren Library created or edited to ensure that Rice University, the Houston community, and our collections are part of the national literary record.
DMC's Proactive Approach Almost Triples In-Class Instruction Sessions
In aligning DMC efforts with goals set out at the Digital Scholarship Services retreat to improve support for teaching, the DMC engaged in a successful direct outreach campaign encouraging faculty to utilize DMC support for digital media instruction embedded into their courses. DMC staff browsed the course catalog for courses that either mentioned media components or appeared to be good candidates for incorporating digital media and emailed instructors directly.
The feedback received was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive. While the DMC has long supported in-class instruction, we saw a substantial increase from 19 in-class sessions in FY24 to 49 in FY25. The courses supported spanned 17 different departments, increasing the DMC’s visibility and establishing connections with faculty all across campus.
The departments supported included English and History in the School of Humanities, Anthropology and Psychology in the School of Social Sciences, Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering in the School of Engineering, and Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Science in the School of Natural Sciences. Areas of support included website design and creation, citation management with Zotero, digital storytelling, document and layout design, data visualization with Tableau, and ethical generative AI use. Going forward, the DMC team hopes to build upon this successful year, growing long-lasting collaborative relationships with faculty and enriching students’ educational experiences.
Reginald Moore Social Justice Research Travel Grant
Michael Yesibu, PhD candidate at the University of Oklahoma, was awarded the travel grant this year. His dissertation is entitled “Survival, Memory, Revitalization, Adaptation, Relocation, and Preservation: Small Chinatowns Across the West since the 1950s,” and it will explore Chinatowns, non-white identity in the post-war period, and the experiences and contentions
of being “Asian” in America. It will focus on five Chinatowns located in the following cities:
Stockton, California; Fresno, California; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Tucson, Arizona; and
Houston, Texas.
This grant is supported by the Woodson Research Center.
New Archival Collections at the WRC
Some new additions include Rice University Voices of Math oral histories, Smalley Curl Institute records, Rice University Campus Photographer Files, Albert T. Patrick letters from prison (related to the murder of William Marsh Rice), Houston Folk Music Archives, Houston Hip Hop archives including Mia X, original comic art in the Comic Arts Teaching and Study Collection, Houston Asian American archives oral histories, plus family collections such as the Tang family archives.
By the numbers:
- 550 GB of born-digital content
- 280 linear feet of physical archives
- 50 books within archives to be cataloged separately
Overleaf Use at Rice Continues Strong Growth Across Disciplines
Overleaf has proven to be a valuable resource provided by Fondren Library and is most popular with the Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, and Chemistry departments here at Rice although there is a good deal of usage across other departments as well. Our users collaborate on Overleaf projects with a growing number of other educational institutions across the United States and the world. Overleaf usage at Rice has shown substantial and steady growth across all metrics since our first full year of usage in 2019. The average number of monthly active users in 2019 was 460 and has grown to 1,926 in 2025.The average number of active projects in 2019 was 2,065 versus 9,412 in 2025. Our users created an average of 857 new projects each month in 2019 with that number growing to 3,230 in 2025.
Fondren Invests in Transformative Agreements
Under traditional publishing agreements, access to content is limited to subscribers. Under open access agreements, any readers in the world are able to access content at no cost by Rice authors.
Scott Vieira, Head of Collections & Content Strategy, says, "This unrestricted access leads to the dismantling of economic, geographical, and technology-related barriers to research and scholarship. For research and researchers, this means wider reader engagement, larger citation counts, and various ways to disseminate research to a larger, more diverse audience via tools like social media. For scholarship and scholars, this means better accessibility, straightforward access to research regardless of their affiliation to any organizations, and all this at a minimal cost, essentially whatever it takes to get internet access."
Sara Lowman, Vice Provost and University Librarian, added, "Fondren Library continues to explore how we can support open access and new models that support the scholarly communications ecosystem. We are committed to supporting research and helping researchers make their publications accessible to all. Open access aligns with the university’s new strategic plan by making scholarship more visible."
These new agreements represent one aspect of Fondren’s overall investment in open access scholarship, which also includes membership discounts and subvention grants for publishing open access journal articles, chapters, and monographs, as well as sponsorship of entire publications such as Fondren’s recent investment in the journal Foucault Studies.
For more information on open access publishing at Rice University, please visit our OA publishing libguide.