Share information. Make it easy for others to find. Build knowledge and insight faster. That’s the idea behind the collaborative work of the Texas Digital Library.
Last month, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) embarked on a new collaborative project in partnership with several prominent water researchers in the state. With these partners, the TDL is developing a resource for sharing Texas water data called the Texas Water Digital Library (TWDL). The TWDL will federate water research currently stored in dispersed databases and websites at various Texas universities. It will electronically harvest these resources from cooperating institutions (using OAI-ORE technology) and deposit them in a TDL-hosted DSpace repository, creating a single place for researchers to search for water data from every part of the state.
The Texas Water Digital Library serves as a model for the kind of cooperative efforts that the Texas Digital Library facilitates. The mission of the TDL is to provide services to faculty members at member institutions that will facilitate collaboration with their peers as they conduct and disseminate their research. The TWDL uses two of the services – a digital repository and the OJS peer-reviewed journaling system – provided by TDL and represents the kind of collaboration that TDL intends to foster and support.
The creation of the TWDL involves cooperation among key researchers at several Texas universities, including Dr. David Maidment, the director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at UT Austin; Dr. B. L. Harris, Director of the Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M; and Dr. Ken Rainwater, Director of the Texas Tech University Water Resources Center.
Participants in the project met on February 17 to begin discussions about how best to provide resources. Future meetings to advance the project are in the works, and the TWDL planners will provide an update on the project at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, to be held at UT Austin in May.