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.

• Texas Tech Libraries goes digital – and green – with KIC scanners
• Baylor Electronic Library’s Gospel Music Collection
• Border Studies Resource Center
• Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
• Journal of Texas Women Writers
• Treasures @ UT Dallas

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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Treasures @ UT Dallas

The 2.5 million documents, photographs, tapes, and other items that comprise The History of Aviation Collection at the University of Texas at Dallas tell the intriguing tale of commercial and military flight in the US. Thanks to an institutional repository from the Texas Digital Library, those treasures are readily available to researchers anywhere in the world.

Their digital home is Treasures @ UT Dallas, a digital repository created through a partnership between UT Dallas’ McDermott Library and the Texas Digital Library. The Treasures @ UT Dallas repository includes digitized images from the library’s collection of Civil Air Transport and Air America materials, which document the history of the airline famous for its CIA-sponsored operations in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Other materials in Treasures @ UT Dallas include images related to the distinguished World War II aviator and general James H. Doolittle.

The McDermott Library staff plans to continue adding digital material to Treasures @ UT Dallas. The repository already includes archived library communications, as well as some faculty materials.

Special Collections Coordinator Paul Oelkrug, who oversaw the digitization of the History of Aviation assets, said that other materials from the university’s rich collection may be incorporated in the future, including some items related to Braniff International, a Dallas-based airline that contributed a set of documents and photographs to the library after it ceased operations in the 1980s. “I’d also like to add items from our Lighter than Air materials, of the Hindenburg and the Graf zeppelin, just to name a few things,” Oelkrug said.

For more about the History of Aviation Collection and Treasures @ UT Dallas, visit the McDermott Library Web site. For information about setting up a TDL Institutional Repositories, please contact the TDL at info@tdl.org.

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