UTSA Libraries new employees: Juli McLoone and Sean Heyliger

Juli McLoone and Sean Heyliger

By Anne Peters
Senior Communications Specialist, UTSA Libraries/p>

(January 13, 2010)--UTSA Libraries has appointed two new professionals to the team overseeing the university's rapidly growing archives and special collections. Juli McLoone, special collections librarian, and Sean Heyliger, university archivist, assumed their roles in the fall semester.

McLoone and Heyliger will be responsible for the development, organization and preservation of the university's rare and unique primary source materials, which include rare books, manuscripts, official records, personal papers, maps and other items of historical significance. The collections specialize in the people, history, art, life and literature of San Antonio and South Texas, as well as the history of the university.

"The work that Juli and Sean are doing directly supports UTSA's ascent to Tier One research university status," says Krisellen Maloney, UTSA dean of libraries. "Most major research universities have extensive research centers with unique primary source materials. Though UTSA is a young university, our institutional strategic plan provides us with a solid framework for enhancing our scholarly resources on South Texas. We need to continue to build our collections so our faculty, students and visiting scholars have access to important historical materials about our region, whether in person or online."

McLoone joins UTSA from the University of Iowa, where she served as the Robert A. and Ruth Bywater Olson Fellow for Special Collections. A specialist in rare books and resource digitization and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, McLoone holds master's degrees in anthropology and library/information science, both from the University of Iowa.

Heyliger comes to UTSA from the San Antonio Municipal Archives where he was the assistant archivist. Before his role with the city, Heyliger served as an archival assistant for the Archives of American Mathematics, Center for American History in Austin, Texas. Heyliger has a master's degree in American studies from the University of Wyoming, and a master's degree in library information science from the University of Texas at Austin.

"Sean and Juli's roles are critical for advancing scholarly research and education at the university and beyond," says Mark Shelstad, head of UTSA archives and special collections. "They, together with manuscripts curator Nikki Thomas, will help us to build a collection of distinction, increase access to the materials and work to preserve them for generations to come."

The UTSA Archives and Special Collections include the personal papers of such San Antonio luminaries as the late community activist Fay Sinkin, authors John Phillip Santos and Naomi Shihab Nye and San Antonio's prominent David Carter family. Other materials housed in the collections range from Mexican manuscripts from the 1500s to original Fiesta San Antonio Commission photos of the 1920s to memorabilia from HemisFair '68.

A new Special Collections suite is scheduled to open Jan. 19 in the John Peace Library Building on the Main Campus. The fourth-floor suite will feature a large, handsomely furnished reading room, a collections storage room with library-quality environmental standards and office space for staff.

For more information, visit the UTSA Archives and Special Collections Web site. View a photo gallery of some of the treasures from the UTSA Special Collections.

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UTSA Libraries is at an exciting stage with new leadership, a forward-thinking vision and a major renovation project underway. UTSA Libraries includes the John Peace Library on the Main Campus, the Downtown Campus library, and the UTSA Archives at the Institute of Texas Cultures on the HemisFair Park campus.

The John Peace Library is in the midst of a four-year renovation project informed by fresh thinking on collection management and student intellectual engagement. The libraries are well integrated into the intellectual life of campus through active partnerships with the Writing Center, Teaching and Learning Center and Tomas Rivera Center for Student Success. In support of UTSA's goal of becoming a Tier One public research university, UTSA Libraries seeks to achieve Association of Research Libraries status within the next decade.