The Texas Digital Library (TDL) was established to assemble and provide for the benefit of society the combined technological advances and cultural and creative resources of six major research university systems in Texas—Texas A & M University System, the University of Houston System, the Texas Tech University System, the University of Texas System, the Texas State University System, and the University of North Texas System, as well as other Texas colleges and universities. While headquartered at the University of Texas Libraries at The University of Texas at Austin, the Texas Digital Library will operate in cooperation with the campuses of all the university systems in Texas.
TDL stakeholders met in July to review goals achieved over the past year and to develop strategies for continued rollout of the project over the next four years. Having completed in year one the initial phase of development—which included establishing a presence, core technologies, and base services—participants agreed to a set of goals for the next four years that can be summarized as planning, demonstration, deployment and assessment. Stakeholders established five working groups to oversee various components of the project and outlined expectations for each.
Year two of the TDL project will concentrate on planning infrastructure for the overall project and developing policies for content submission and management. Demonstrating the implementation and viability of the planning phase will be the goal of year three, with deployment of practicable assets occurring in year four. By year five, an assessment of TDL’s impact on higher education in the state of Texas can be undertaken to determine the project’s effectiveness.
Five working groups—Computing Infrastructure, Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD), Repositories, Metadata/Cataloging and Web Oversight—have been established to address particular facets of the overall project. Each working group has been charged with specific goals that contribute in a vital way to the overall success of TDL.
The Computing Infrastructure group will organize TDL’s approach to computing infrastructure, networking, and software. Workflow guidelines and policies for the ETD collections that will reside on TDL will be developed by the ETD group. The Repositories group is charged with establishing policies, guidelines and acceptable content types that will provide direction in TDL’s approach to archiving scholarly materials. Workflow guidelines and policies for cataloging TDL collections and establishing standards-based metadata schemas for content on TDL will be developed by the Metadata/Cataloguing group. The Web Oversight group will edit and maintain TDL’s web presence by insuring current, organized information.
Members of the working groups are drawn from the consortium of participating institutions currently involved in the TDL project, with expectations that the groups will grow and evolve as the project does. With the expansion of the project from existing charter members to additional partner institutions, there will be a need to add to the working groups through the inclusion of qualified staff from participating institutions through a nomination process.
For more information on becoming a participating institution in the TDL project, or further information on TDL, please contact us.