PERRY-CASTAÑEDA LIBRARY. The Perry-Castañeda Library is part of the University of Texas at Austin General Libraries system. The building was designed by Bartlett Cocke and Associates and Phelps and Simmons Associates and was completed in 1974 during the chancellorship of Charles LaMaistre. It was built by the Stokes Construction Company and named in honor of UT faculty members Ervin S. Perry and Carlos E. Castañeda. The PCL, an open-stack facility, is the cornerstone of the General Libraries. It houses over two million volumes covering a wide variety of subjects including the humanities, social sciences, business, and education. Foreign-language holdings include works in Chinese, Urdu, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, and Japanese. The library also has an extensive collection on the Middle East that contains volumes in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. While the Center for American History is the primary archival deposit at the university, the PCL does have access to valuable archival and manuscript collections, particularly in African-American and women's history. Of particular importance to both fields is the Littlefield Collection, consisting of 40,000 volumes and thousands of microforms relating to the Old South. Other microform sets include the papers of the Congress of Racial Equality (1941-67) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909-). Students of women's history can access the Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880 and Women, Industry, and Trade Unionism: The Gertrude Tuckwell Collection, 1890-1920 through the library's microform resources.
