The Woodson Research Center located within Fondren Library maintains the university archives, special collections, and rare books for Rice University. While much of Woodson Research Center's digital content is not publicly available due to copyright concerns, the Woodson Research Center's Digital Collections provides free access to over 14,000 items including photographs, newspapers, correspondence, oral histories, and maps. 

Our digitized and digital materials come from our more than 1,000 special collections in the Woodson Research Center that focus on the history of Texas and the Greater Houston area, politics, entrepreneurship, oil and gas, architecture, women’s history, and fine and performing arts. Formats in these primary source collections include photographs, letters, diaries, reports, financial records, memorabilia, land deeds, maps, and many others. 

The digital and digitized content from the William Ward Watkin and Annie Ray Watkin University Archives documents the university's beginnings to the recent past. The university archival digital collections include: campus plans, drawings, blueprints, photographs, publications, video, audio, and memorabilia.

After selecting "Advanced Search," either on the home page or elsewhere, you'll be brought to a form. You can do a keyword search and if desired use AND, OR, and NOT to expand or limit your results. If you want to search an exact phrase, place the keywords within parentheses, e.g. "beer bike". You can also limit your results by date, collection, people and organizations, format, location, subject, and/or time span.

Each digitized item has information about its source. You can take the title of the collection from the source and search our finding aids/inventories. After determining the collection name and the box number where the item lives, you can contact us at woodson@rice.edu. We can order the boxes for you and book you an appointment in our reading room. If the item is a rare book, please provide us with the call number.

For collections of digital images, higher quality versions may be available. Please contact woodson@rice.edu for additional information.

If you find that we have labeled a photograph incorrectly or find something else that needs an edit, please contact us at woodson@rice.edu and include the URL. If you can help us improve our descriptions by identifying people in a photograph, providing us more context, or anything else along these lines, reach out to us via email.

If you find that we have posted your materials without your permission, please contact us woodson@rice.edu to find out how we can rectify the situation.

Each digitized item cites the title of the collection in the "Source." You can take the title of the collection and search our finding aids/inventories. If you find related materials that you would like to see in our reading room, you can contact us at woodson@rice.edu. Please provide us with the collection title and/or number and the box numbers.

Click on the button below, to learn more about citing and publishing Woodson Research Center materials.

For any questions, concerns, or comments, please email us at woodson@rice.edu.