The following stories highlight the exciting work that TDL member institutions are doing — both in collaboration with the Texas Digital Library and on their own — in the area of digital libraries and digital scholarly communication. For more information about how members use TDL services, visit the Usage Scenarios page and the Texas Digital Library Blog.

• UT Southwestern Library to digitize History of Medicine photographs
• Baylor preparations for Open Access Week
• University of Houston Digital Library
• Texas A&M Qatar developing Arabic repository interface
• Texas Tech Libraries goes digital – and green – with KIC scanners
• Baylor Electronic Library’s Gospel Music Collection
• Border Studies Resource Center at UTB/TSC
• Journal of Virtual Worlds Research at UT Austin
• Journal of Texas Women Writers at Angelo State

Member Story: UT Southwestern Library to digitize History of Medicine photographs

– A photograph of tent facilities for sick soldiers during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

– A portrait of the first five African American doctors admitted to practice at St. Paul Hospital (or to any Dallas hospital staff) in 1943.

– An image of the first open-heart surgery performed in Dallas, at Parkland Hospital in 1956.

These images, and hundreds of others housed in the collections at UT Southwestern Medical Center Library, document the history of medicine in Dallas. Up to now, the images have only been available to researchers and patrons who visit the library’s physical facilities, but thanks to a grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), the photographs will soon be available online.

TDL DSpace as Preservation Tool

The Library received a $25,000 Historic Preservation and Digitization Award from the NN/LM South Central Region to create a digital photo repository entitled Dallas Medical Images, 1890-1975. While the images will be made publicly available through CONTENTdm, UT Southwestern Medical Center is using its Texas Digital Library DSpace repository as a preservation tool for the collection, fulfilling a key component of the grant application and the goals of the project.

According to Matt Zimmerman, principal investigator for the Dallas Medical History 1890-1975  project, the Library has several goals: (1) to make the images more widely accessible by getting them online, (2) to promote the wider holdings of the UT Southwestern Medical Center Library, and (3) to preserve the images digitally.

“CONTENTdm is the public face,” says Zimmerman, “but the other important goal is long-term storage and preservation. Without having the DSpace repository and the upcoming Preservation Network behind it, we wouldn’t be able to do the preservation part of the project.”

The DSpace repository, hosted by the Texas Digital Library, will serve as an archive for uncompressed master images that are digitized during the course of the project. Those images in turn will be preserved in the TDL Preservation Network, which will send all TDL-hosted digital contents to the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin. TACC, in turn, will replicate the files at its geographically dispersed partner institutions.

A Rich Medical History in Photographs

The image repository will be available to the public via a CONTENTdm instance hosted by OCLC. It will contain some 500 photos that illustrate the history of medicine in Dallas between 1890 and 1975. UT Southwestern and its partner institutions have been key players in the development of medicine in the Metroplex: its St. Paul Hospital and affiliate Parkland Memorial are the two longest-operating hospitals in Dallas, and Parkland famously treated not only John F. Kennedy, but also Lee Harvey Oswald before they died. The UT Southwestern Library holds approximately 7,000 photos in its Historical Archives and its History of Medicine Collection, from which the digital repository collection will be drawn.

The grant project represented an opportunity for UT Southwestern to begin digitizing its collections, according to Zimmerman. Previously the library had digitized a small collection of apothecary jar photos but lacked the infrastructure to do large-scale digitization. The grant will cover the purchase of a scanner and other materials to undertake the project.

Additionally, UT Southwestern’s membership in the Texas Digital Library provided the institution with the ability to preserve their digital assets and to demonstrate as much in its grant application.

“It was great to be able to say that long-term preservation was being facilitated by being part of the TDL,” Zimmerman says.

Along with the digital repository, the grant-funded project will create a special Web exhibit of approximately 50 “high-interest” photos that will appear on the library’s website.

The project began in July 2010 and concludes within nine months. For more about UT Southwestern Library, please visit the library’s website at http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/libraryinternal/.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. N01-LM-6-3505 with the Houston Academy of Medicine – Texas Medical Center Library.

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Member Story: Baylor Libraries and Open Access Week

Open Access Week (OA Week) is a worldwide event designed to promote the concept of free and immediate online access to research, and it allows academic research institutions the opportunity to educate faculty, students, and others about the benefits of Open Access. OA Week 2010 s scheduled to take place October 18-24, 2010.

Baylor Libraries participated in OA Week in 2009 with a number of events designed to engage faculty about Open Access and promote services offered by the TDL. Among other things, Baylor Libraries – led by Billie Peterson-Lugo (Director of Resources and Collection Management Services for the Baylor Electronic Library) and Beth Tice (Associate Director for Central Libraries) – held faculty coffees at locations across the campus and sponsored a lecture on open access journals.

The Baylor team presented a poster at TCDL 2010 on its activities, which generated interest among some faculty about Open Access scholarly communications, particularly the online journal management services Baylor offers through its membership in the TDL.

For the faculty coffees, Baylor Libraries set up information stations at several spots on campus: in the business building, the education building, and the science building. They offered coffee and donut holes and staffed the tables with two or three library staff members who engaged faculty members about Open Access, scholarly services that Baylor offers via the Texas Digital Library, and other issues.

Additionally, the library staff invited Linda Kornasky, English professor at TDL member institution Angelo State University, to speak to faculty about setting up an online scholarly journal. Kornasky manages and edits the Journal of Texas Women Writers, hosted by the TDL Electronic Press

Following OA Week last year, the Baylor Libraries team received several requests for follow-up meetings and talks about OA and had interest from several faculty members about setting up online scholarly journals through TDL.

The team is already gearing up for the 2010 OA Week, which takes place October 18-24, and plans to reprise the faculty coffees.

The services offered by the Texas Digital Library can provide libraries and faculty at TDL member institutions with tools that increase the availability of institutional research and library collections. In this way, the TDL supports universities in their efforts to increase access to the scholarly output of their institutions, and gives faculty members opportunities to employ new methods for scholarly research, collaboration, and dissemination.

The TDL encourages members to use Open Access Week as an opportunity to educate faculty on the availability of new models for publishing research, including via Open Access peer-reviewed journals and institutional repositories hosted by the Texas Digital Library.

The TDL will be providing materials intended for use by its members in observing Open Access Week; those materials will be located on the OA section of the TDL website at TDL.org/open-access.

Following are some helpful tips provided by the Baylor Open Access Week team on what worked and what didn’t during their OA Week activities.

Open Access Week: Lessons Learned

• Get out of the library. Reaching out to faculty in their own environments through the faculty coffees was the most successful activity. The single most rewarding outing for the Baylor librarians was at the education building, where they set up shop near faculty mailboxes. (And donut holes were a big draw!)
• Don’t just talk: Listen.  One of the goals of Baylor’s OA Week planning was to hear faculty concerns about OA and scholarly communications as much as to communicate their own message about open access.
• Handouts aren’t necessary, but freebies are great. The Baylor staff handed out post-it notes and pens, but in response to some OA Week website tips, didn’t use handouts, which can just end up in trash cans.
• Target specific groups. The activities that worked best were those that addressed targeted groups of people. For 2010, Baylor plans to target more specific audiences, rather than issue a general invitation for a lecture or roundtable.
• Be prepared to follow up.  The OA Week activities generated several follow-up meetings with deans and departments, as well as interest from several faculty members in setting up OA e-journals. This interest also led to policy discussions at the provost level.

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Member Story: University of Houston Digital Library

The Suffrage Movement through the eyes of a Texas socialite. Yearbook photos of 1950s-era bobby soxers. Letters from a Revolutionary War officer. Historic hand-tinted photographs and tourist postcards collected over many decades. What do they have in common? They are all part of the rich collection of photos and other primary materials to be found in the University of Houston Digital Library.

Over the past year, the UH Libraries has developed an exciting set of digital collections focused mainly, though not exclusively, on Houston and Texas history. The continually growing set of items includes about a dozen collections, including a set of historic Houston photos and one that contains images of the devastation caused by the 1915 Galveston Hurricane.

Leading the development of the UH Digital Repository is Michele Reilly, Head of Digital Services, who came to the University of Houston in 2009. Reilly and her staff have built on limited digitization efforts that preceded her to launch the collection of photographs, postcards, scanned scrapbook items and letters that together comprise the UH Digital Library.

From Suffragettes to Cougar Spirit

“Our ultimate mission,” says Reilly, “is to provide our faculty and students with a really great resource for primary objects, so that they can further their own research.”

To that end, Reilly and her team have added – and continue to add – collections of primary materials that have the potential to enrich scholarly understanding of life in Texas and in Houston, as well as historically important materials owned by the libraries that are outside those geographic parameters.

A particular favorite of Reilly’s is the Ewing Family Papers, a collection of scrapbook materials from Mrs. Kittredge Ewing, a Houston socialite and suffragette of the early 1900s. The materials include newspaper clippings and other materials that detail Ewing’s connections with the national Suffrage Movement and other activism on health care and women’s issues.

“To read through [the clippings], you get a real sense of what it was like in Houston at that time and what they were fighting for – better schools, no child labor,” Reilly says. “It’s a very, very interesting collection and one that, for instance, the women’s studies college on campus uses in the classroom, because it has so much importance for their work.”

Other Texas-related collections include a set of Houstonian yearbooks from the 1940s and 50s (“the drawings crack me up,” says Reilly) and sets of photos of historic Houston, the university campus, the Galveston Hurricane of 1915, and the Texas City industrial explosion of 1947.

Additionally, the Digital Library includes collections that are not Texas-centric. A collection of beautiful hand-tinted photos by Mexican photographer Luis Marquez, for instance, only has a tangential connection to Texas. Marquez gave the photos to Mrs. Joe Betsy Allred, wife of Governor James Allred, after she visited Mexico in 1937.

Other collections, like a set of correspondence written by Revolutionary War soldier Israel Shreve, have no direct connection to Texas but are important enough historically to include in the online repository. Other Israel Shreve letters exist in collections at other universities, including Rutgers and LSU, but the University of Houston is the first to display theirs online.

Collection Development and Workflow

The UH Digital Library officially went live in September 2009, though a pilot collection was up and running a few months earlier. “We started with about 2,500 items that were already scanned before I arrived,” says Reilly. “Then we wrote a collection development policy and a checklist for people to go through.”

The development of that collection policy – and a detailed standardized workflow for the Digital Projects team– have been crucial to the Digital Library’s success.

Collection development begins with a project proposal that comes either from a collection’s owner — either a private collector or an institutional holder of a collection. The proposal process allows the Digital Projects team to determine whether there are enough items to constitute a collection and to prioritize groups of items for digitization.

Once the team has set priorities for entering the proposed collections, students (under the supervision of digital photo technician Nicci Cobb) begin the scanning of collection items using the UH’s Bookeye overhead scanner and flatbed scanner. Students also begin compiling available metadata for the items and upload them to ContentDM, the collection management software used by UH Libraries.

From there, metadata librarian Mingyu Chen and staffer Shawn Anderson determine the first 10 items of Dublin Core metadata and work with the collection’s owner to determine what other fields are necessary to produce a usefully curated collection.

Along the way, the team uses a blog, Excel spreadsheets, and a carefully maintained email policy for logging progress on each project and keeping all team members informed about the various stages of digitization and curation.

“Doing the backend stuff like policy development is truly one of the most important things,” Reilly claims. “My staff and student workers know what’s happening at any moment and they know where they can go to find it out.”

Reilly credits her staff with making the creation of the UH Digital Library possible. “I’m so proud of my staff and the work they’ve done,” Reilly said. “They have picked up this ball and run with it – they are creative and come up with terrific ideas. I really couldn’t have a better group to work with.”

For more information about the University of Houston Digital Library, visit  http://digital.lib.uh.edu/.

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Member Story: Texas A&M Qatar developing Arabic repository interface

More than 200 million people worldwide speak Arabic as their native tongue and millions more speak it as a second language. Arabic speakers are also one of the fastest-growing groups of Internet users. And within the last year, the organization that oversees Internet domain names has begun issuing web addresses in Arabic characters – Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the first to apply for non-Latin character domains.

In this context of increased internationalization of the Internet, Texas A&M University at Qatar is at work to make its digital assets more accessible to Arabic speakers by translating its TDL Institutional Repository into Arabic.

A member of the Texas Digital Library, Texas A&M Qatar operates a DSpace repository that contains a diverse range of institutional, faculty, and student materials, including news releases, honors theses, and faculty research. Texas A&M Qatar is a branch campus of Texas A&M University that was established in 2003.

News stories in particular, which are released by the university in both Arabic and English, presented an interesting case to Texas A&M Qatar library director Carole Thompson. She and a bilingual staff member tested the repository software to see if metadata entered in Arabic characters for these documents could be searched for in Arabic, and discovered it was possible. As a result, Thompson and her staff are entering metadata for such dual-language items.

Thompson then decided to take the next step, exploring the possibility of translating the entire repository interface into Arabic. By doing so, users will have the choice to navigate the repository in either English or Arabic.

To accomplish this, Thompson enlisted James Creel, a software developer at Texas A&M University, as well as one of her own staff Wael Al-Rihawi, an engineering student at Texas A&M Qatar. Al-Rihawi served as chief translator on the project, converting the English text to modern standard Arabic. Among the technical and translation challenges faced by the team are ensuring that the Arabic text is right-justified onscreen, as Arabic is read from right to left, and finding suitable Arabic words for some technical terms like “e-mail” that don’t have direct translations.

Thompson sees the project as essential to the school’s mission. “It’s very common in this part of the world to have Web sites in two languages,” she says. “I’m hoping this project will let us do more outreach and also that it will be a tool for preserving our school’s history.”

“I’m happy to think that in addition to being able to display the TAMU Qatar repository in Arabic, we’ll be making a contribution to the larger world.”

For more information, visit the Texas A&M Qatar repository or read about TDL Institutional Repositories.

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Member Story: Texas Tech Libraries goes digital – and green – with KIC scanners

What happens when you combine a foundation that has pioneered the way for educational philanthropy and a library that is a cutting edge leader in technology? Pioneerology.

The combination of the two words – pioneer and technology – symbolizes the loyal support of the technological advancement at Texas Tech University Libraries by the Helen Jones Foundation.

In 2007, through a generous grant from the foundation, the Libraries purchased the first of several Knowledge Imaging Center (KIC) Scanners. Since that time, Tech has hosted representatives from other universities, while also fielding numerous inquiries via e-mail, regarding guidance on the implementation of the technology. And because of ever-growing usage, today the Texas Tech Libraries system offers six KIC Scanners for patrons.

While most students seem to intuitively know how to operate the KIC Scanner, seasoned library patrons may think of it as a fancy copier, only with more bells and whistles. The scanner’s customer-friendly technology and touch-screen monitor with large buttons provide ease for patrons in converting materials from hard copy to electronic or digital format. In following the simple on-screen instructions, patrons scan an item and have the convenience of either e-mailing it to any e-mail account or downloading it directly to a USB drive, all right from the scanner.

With the KIC Scanners, the library is not just providing an outlet for patrons wishing to “go green” through the use of its paperless research option (at no charge).It’s also supporting  the Libraries’ effort to save a little green. In today’s economic crunch, the KIC Scanner allows the Texas Tech Libraries to practice good stewardship of available resources, as the scanner eliminates the expense of paper and ink.

Pioneerology.

The above story contributed by Kayley Daniel, Director of Texas Tech University Libraries’ Office of Communications & Marketing.

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Member Story: Baylor Electronic Library’s Gospel Music Collection

Through their digital collections, Texas Digital Library member Baylor University and its Baylor Electronic Library are preserving rare and fragile cultural materials, while at the same time making them more widely available to scholars, researchers, and the public.

The Electronic Library, headed by director Tim Logan, features a wide range of digitized collections, available for the viewing, reading, studying, and listening pleasure of people all over the world. Among its holdings are digitized collections of Civil War Letters, vintage American sheet music, artifacts of Christian persecution in Soviet Russia, and local oral histories.

The Electronic Library is perhaps most famous, however, for its unique and large collection of black gospel music, known as the Royce-Darden Gospel Music Collection. The collection aims to protect a vanishing cultural resource – music that was produced from 1940 through 1970 that never had the mainstream studio backing to ensure its preservation.

The Royce-Darden collection began with the passionate advocacy of Baylor professor Robert Darden, who in 2005 wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times calling attention to the impending loss of large amounts of classic gospel music. The music, largely produced by small and independent labels and church groups, was of little interest to mainstream music companies and didn’t generate much interest in reissues. The consequence, according to Darden’s op-ed, is that “irreplaceable master tapes deteriorate, get lost, or are simply tossed out.”

As a result of the article, Darden found help from Connecticut businessman Charles Royce, who funded a project to collect and digitize the rare and at-risk music. The staff of the Baylor Electronic Library have been busy ever since – collecting, digitizing, and cataloging recordings, as well as album covers and sleeves.

The Royce-Darden Gospel Music Collection, gathered from more than 20 private collectors, includes recordings off of LPs, 45s, 78s, and cassettes, and, in one case, fragile radio transcription discs. A prototype collection of about 200 items went live in the summer of 2009, and currently 900 are available online. Another several hundred recordings have been digitized and will receive descriptive metadata before being made available.

The aim is to preserve these cultural artifacts before they are lost: “Every time you play a record, you damage it,” said director Tim Logan. “You need to take a snapshot at the earliest possible moment to preserve them. The point is to capture the material the best way we can with current technology.”

The Texas Digital Library has assisted Baylor Electronic Library with these preservation efforts by providing off-site backup storage in the form of a dark archive. “Large volume storage is a real issue at Baylor and elsewhere,” said Logan, and the TDL is storing about six terabytes of data, which includes archival copies of gospel music files, as well as items from other Baylor collections.

For more information about the Royce-Darden Gospel Music Collection, visit the Baylor website at http://www.baylor.edu/lib/gospel.
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Member Story: Border Studies Resource Center

The US-Mexico border region spans 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, traversing deserts, mountains, forests, rivers, and wetlands, and serving as home to some 18 million people. Many of those people live in pairs of sister cities that straddle the border and that have evolved uniquely bi-national, interdependent cultural and economic identities.

Brownsville, the southernmost city in Texas, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, form one of these bi-national communities at the eastern edge of the border region. And the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College, a member of the University of Texas System and the Texas Digital Library consortium, is uniquely positioned to provide insight into the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the border region.

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), UTB/TSC is currently planning the development of a Border Studies Resource Center that will collect and disseminate Border Studies research, an area of study that comprises many disciplines and has real-world implications for policymakers on both sides of the border.

One important component of the Resource Center is a digital repository hosted by the Texas Digital Library. With the repository, UTB/TSC will create a centralized collection of border-related research produced in both the US and Mexico.

John Hawthorne, Assistant Director of the Oliveira Library at UTB/TSC, hopes the repository will elevate the usefulness of border studies by making it easily accessible to researchers around the world.

“This region of the U.S. and Mexico is misunderstood in both nations,” he said. “Our hope is that the Border Studies Resource Center will help scholars and policymakers throughout the U.S. as a resource for accurate information.”

In 2009 UTB/TSC received a $99,276 planning grant from the IMLS, which it is using to gather resources, hold meetings, recruit partners, and identify content for the repository. It has been holding a series of forums in the U.S. and Mexico to solicit feedback on how the resource center can be most useful to scholars and public policymakers and to identify potential partners in the project.

A key player in the formation of the Resource Center will be the Texas Center for Border and Transnational Studies, a teaching and research center at the university that is headed by Dr. Antonio Zavaleta.

UTB/TSC has also found an external partner in El Colegio de La Frontera Norte, the preeminent Mexican university that studies the border region. But the team’s goal is to create a larger consortium of institutions in the two countries that will partner in the creation of the Border Studies Resource Center.

As part of the planning process, members of the UTB/TSC team will attend DSpace training classes offered by the Texas Digital Library. The team will also work with the TDL to create a prototype repository with roughly 100 items, as well as a planning document for how to move forward with the project. The team hopes to apply for a second IMLS grant to continue work on the Resource Center once the planning phase is complete.

The ultimate result will be a collection of interdisciplinary resources with a practical purpose: “We would like the rest of the country to better understand the region,“ Hawthorne said. “Our region is the future of the U.S.”

Anyone wishing to contribute to or learn more about the Border Studies Resource Center can contact John Hawthorne, Assistant Director of the Oliveira Library, at John.Hawthorn@utb.edu.

Go here to find out more about DSpace repositories hosted by the Texas Digital Library.

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Member Story: Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

If you’ve used online chat or played a multi-player game like World of Warcraft, you already know about virtual worlds – those computer simulations where avatars (either textual or graphical) stand in for actual people. Virtual worlds aren’t just for gamers or for keeping in touch with far-flung friends, however. They have broad application across a number of academic and non-academic fields, including healthcare, government, and economics.

The Journal of Virtual World Research (JVWR), a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the TDL Electronic Press, aims to provide a space for both scholars and creative communities to explore the practical and theoretical concerns that the term “virtual worlds” encompasses.

The journal is published online using Open Journal Systems, the open source online journal management software used by all TDL journals.

Jeremiah Spence, the founding editor of JVWR, started the journal in May 2008, with the aim of creating a “world-class academic journal that provided quality and useful content” to both academic and general audiences. Spence is a doctoral student at UT Austin, pursuing his degree in the area of Communications and Sociology of Technology.

JVWR operates on an Open Access model, promoting the widest possible availability to its authors’ research by charging readers nothing and requiring no payment from authors. It does receive limited financial sponsorship from the Singapore Internet Research Centre and the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at UT Austin.

Since its inception in 2008, JVWR has produced five issues, including thematic issues on areas where virtual worlds and other disciplines, such as consumer behavior and pedagogy, collide. JVWR’s most recent issue, published in May, explores the intersection of 3D virtual worlds in the realm of health and healthcare.

You can access the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research via the TDL Electronic Press or the JVWR Web site. For more information about JVWR or TDL Electronic Journals, visit the TDL Web site or contact the TDL at info@tdl.org.

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Member Story: Journal of Texas Women Writers

When Dr. Linda Kornasky set out to fill a gap in the scholarly record on the women authors of Texas, TDL Electronic Journals helped her do it.

A professor of English at Angelo State University, Kornasky recognized the need for a scholarly journal focused on Texas women writers, a distinctive group often neglected by traditional research outlets. Kornasky decided to address this disparity by creating and managing a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal of her own, called the Journal of Texas Women Writers (JoTWW).

Not knowing where to start, she consulted with a librarian at her institution, who recommended the TDL’s Open Journal Systems electronic journal service. The librarian told her that Angelo State was a member of the Texas Digital Library consortium, giving her access to all the faculty communications tools – including Open Journals Systems (OJS)– that the TDL offers.

A TDL electronic journal using OJS was a perfect fit for JoTWW in other ways: “I didn’t want to be slowed down by financing,” Kornasky said, “and I wanted something that people could access without buying subscriptions.”

With the help of Texas Digital Library staff, Kornasky set up the OJS software and got to work. “At first I was a little nervous about the technical aspects of it, but then I decided to jump right in,” she said. “And like any other computer program, it became easy to use once I got the hang of it.”

The JoTWW, with Kornasky serving as managing editor, published its inaugural issue in February 2009. The journal features scholarly articles, as well as original fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry by contemporary Texas women writers.

“I’m excited about the journal,” she concluded, “and amazed at how much support I’ve gotten from potential readers and submitters.”

For more information about electronic, peer-reviewed journals from the Texas Digital Library, please visit the TDL Electronic Journals section of this Web site. To view a list of all TDL Electronic Journals, visit the TDL Electronic Press.

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