The Texas Digital Library, through its home institution the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, is excited to be the recipient of a 2016 Library Cooperation Grant from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission for the project “Development of a Statewide Aggregation Service for Texas Digital Collections.”
The TDL and its grant partners, the University of North Texas (UNT) and the Houston Public Library, will use the grant funding to plan for and prototype a metadata aggregation service to showcase the digital collections of Texas and ensure their discoverability in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The DPLA is a discovery tool that brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
The project builds on the work of UNT’s Portal to Texas History, which contributes metadata from its collections (representing 329 partners and more than 800,000 items) to the DPLA. By expanding the aggregation of Texas-based content to include collections hosted in other repositories across the state, the project partners will work to make all of Texas’ digital cultural heritage materials part of the large-scale DPLA collection, making them more visible and discoverable, and offering opportunities for them to be used in novel ways.
Over the next year, the TDL and its partners will use the grant funds to develop a prototype aggregation hub and demonstrate its capacity for collections DPLA-compliant metadata from a select group of representative institutions (including Houston Public Library, Baylor University Libraries, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center). The project partners will also work to develop a sustainable business model and an inventory of Texas-based digital collections to facilitate future growth of the service.
Click here to download the original proposal/narrative. (PDF; 2016)
This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. (2017)
