Texas Digital Library Mission

What Is the Texas Digital Library? | Goals | What Services Does the TDL Provide? | More Information

What Is the Texas Digital Library?

The Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a multi-university consortium dedicated to providing the digital infrastructure to support a fully online scholarly community for institutions of higher education in Texas. Through the establishment of shared policies and standards, forums for professional interaction, expertise in digital collections and preservation, and robust technical services, the TDL aims to increase the availability of the enormous intellectual capital produced throughout Texas universities.

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Goals

Access to digital materials - Digital resources are created at a constantly accelerating rate in higher education, and the TDL provides a centralized digital repository structure to store and share this information. This system will include the following, in order to enhance the ability to find and share scholarly assets from all TDL member institutions:

• Support for a full range of digital formats, from documents to images to streaming audio to datasets
• Multiple search interfaces, with inclusion in widely used services such as Google Scholar
• Ease of use
• A set of policies guiding collection submission and management, including information regarding digital rights management

Long-term preservation of digital collections - For many university scholars, the digital revolution has improved their ability to preserve a lifetime of work. However, at the same time digital collections provide new challenges, such as the migration of file formats over time and rapid changes in storage solutions. The Texas Digital Library will provide a long-term preservation option that addresses these and other concerns, so that faculty members may be assured that their data and publications will be maintained for posterity.

Support for the scholarly community - Scholarly interaction is naturally based on more than journal articles and lecture notes; community is engendered when individuals come together for discussion and debate, and when their ideas can be easily shared. The TDL facilitates discussion and cooperation through its communication services: scholarly blogs, research project wikis, and faculty web pages. These tools add a level of informal interaction which raises the TDL beyond the threshold of digital repositories, into the realm of a scholarly community.

Aggregation of resources - One of the founding aims of the TDL was to share the resources of multiple universities across a common structure in order to broaden the overall impact of any work undertaken. The TDL’s centralized technical solution offers considerable efficiency in terms of cost, personnel, leverage with outside groups, and licensing. In addition, the TDL serves as a focus for technical and domain expertise in the areas of digital repositories, digital preservation, and scholarly communication, and its distributed structure allows multiple institutions to benefit from research interests and practical experience at any single school, relieving the need for broad support at every institution. Finally, the collective TDL expertise helps set broad policies, guidelines, and long-term directions for higher education across Texas and beyond.

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What Services Does the TDL Provide?

The Texas Digital Library (TDL) provides services to TDL member institutions, faculty at those institutions, and the general public, including:

• Digital Repository - A centralized storage, management, and publication system which accepts any digital asset and makes it available in an online environment.
• Peer-Reviewed Journals - Equal parts online publisher and distributed workflow mechanism, the TDL’s journal application allows members to create and manage a new journal through an efficient web interface.
• Scholarly Blogs - Faculty members at TDL institutions can set up blogs quickly and easily for use in information sharing, commentary, and dialogue.
• Research Project Wikis - Information-sharing among project members and with the world is made fast and easy through a wiki interface.

For a full list of services, visit the TDL Services page.

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More Information

For additional information about the Texas Digital Library, please visit the Projects page for current efforts, the Members page for a list of member institutions and information about joining the TDL, and the Organization and Staffing page for details about the TDL's structure. For a longer-term perspective, please see the TDL's five year plan. Finally, a brief overview of the TDL may be downloaded (PowerPoint).

If you have questions or would like other information, please contact us.

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