DENTON (UNT). It’s history in the making as two dynamic proponents of Texas history join forces in a landmark alliance. The Texas State Historical Association will become the 100th partner of the Portal to Texas History. “We launched the Portal about 5 years ago with a mission to provide free, online access to Texas history resources from around the state. Adding our 100th partner is a major milestone after such a short period, and how exciting it is for us that the 100th partner is TSHA,” says Cathy Nelson Hartman, assistant dean of libraries for digital and information technologies.
The Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), long regarded as the nation’s premier regional history organization, settled into its new home at UNT in 2008 and early on the two groups began to discuss the possibilities for future collaboration. The conclusion? The groups will join forces to digitize and provide online access to the Texas Almanac, the acclaimed “source for all things Texan.” Kent Calder, the executive director of TSHA, notes that, “The Texas State Historical Association could not have found a better partner than the Portal to Texas History to help us realize our goal of being a leader in the digital dissemination of Texas scholarship to students and researchers across Texas and around the world. The digitization of the Texas Almanac is just the beginning, and we are proud to be the Portal’s 100th partner.”
In 1857, The Galveston News issued the first edition of the Texas Almanac, beginning a successful enterprise that would move forward to release annual, and then biennial editions of the publication that defines Texas through fascinating facts, stories, and statistics. In the Almanac you can learn about anything from the population of Brazoria County to tales of the Buffalo Soldiers and the roots of Texas’s music traditions. The project will provide online access to the Almanac from 1857 to 1999 and will include over 28,000 pages. The Texas Almanac will be online by the winter of 2010 in the Portal to Texas History. The Portal, administered by the UNT Libraries’ Digital Projects Unit, provides a digital gateway to collections in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies and private collections. The Portal contains maps, books, manuscripts, diaries, photographs and letters.
