By Robert Weaver

Greetings, TARO colleagues!

The TARO Steering Committee has some excellent news. TARO has a new logo!

For the last several months, Rebecca Romanchuk (TARO’s Immediate Past Chair) led a group of archivists from the TARO Steering Committee, various TARO subcommittees, and members of UT Libraries through a maze of almost a dozen concepts and color palettes. Ideas varied wildly, ranging from off-beat, mid-century-modern circles and diamonds framing the TARO acronym to a magnifying glass replacing the ‘O’ in TARO. But at last, the group’s hard work paid off. Without further ado, here it is!

Much thanks goes to graphic designer Neil Barrett. He poured hours of work into crafting and refining many, many potential images, all the while guiding us toward the best decision with his keen aesthetic eye. This was no easy task with a group of archivists passionate about making TARO look its best. He deserves as much credit as we can give him.

We hope you love the logo as much as we do! It was a crucial element of the requested support generously afforded to TARO through the NEH Implementation Grant, and for good reason. This logo will be the centerpiece of TARO 2.0’s new aesthetic, tying together redesigned and vastly more patron-friendly searching and browsing, reorganized finding aid web pages, and other bells and whistles. The logo was a big step toward making the site what we dreamed it could be nearly three years ago.

The new website, dubbed TARO 2.0, is scheduled to debut on September 28, 2021. If you’re curious about the work going into it thus far, how repositories can help to make their finding aids work their absolute best with the site, and a host of other information, please view this YouTube video of our recent TARO 2.0 Kickoff.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact Carla Alvarez (c.alvarez@austin.utexas.edu), the TARO Product Owner, or myself (robert.g.weaver@ttu.edu) with questions or comments. Also, keep an eye out for messages from the TARO listserv for updates or opportunities to interact with the site should they become available.

Robert Weaver
2021 TARO Steering Committee Chair

The TARO 2.0 implementation project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.