Digital Projects Unit Receives Heritage Preservation Award
As genealogists, we recognize the need to preserve family and historical records of the lives we are leading today for future generations. We also appreciate the effort of organizations that see the value of digitizing and preserving records from the past before they are lost or destroyed. The Portal to Texas History project began in 2002 with a goal to create “a digital gateway to historical materials” with a grant from the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund of the State of Texas. By 2004, UNT launched its first site with just 5 partners, 6500 images and about 1000 researchers per month. In 2010, The Portal has 130 collaborative partners, 900,000 digital images and 115,000 visitors each month from around the world. It continues to add partners, images and users daily. Portal Services for Educators was also launched in 2004 to provide resources to help teachers connect their students to original documents. The Portal has been recognized by the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) as one of the best online resources for education in the humanities. Recent grants from NEH and the Amon G. Carter Foundation are funding new projects for continued growth and sustainability. Grants from the “Chronicling America” program fund projects for digitizing newspapers throughout Texas. DGS is pleased to present this year’s Heritage Preservation Award to the Digital Projects Unit at the University of North Texas as the developer of The Portal to Texas History – for their vision and for their commitment to partnering with families, historical societies, universities, and other resources. Accepting for the Digital Projects Unit at the University of North Texas is Dreanna Belden, Assistant Dean for External Relations. Presenter: Sandra Crowley –from Dallas Genealogical Society, December 11, 2010 digital_projects_unit_in_the_news
Posted:
12/13/2010
UNT Digital Library Now Online
Infrastructure For the past two years the Digital Projects Unit in the UNT Libraries has conducted research with a federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to build a rapid development framework for digital libraries. The output of this project was first realized in The Portal to Texas History release in June of 2009. After several rounds of usability studies on the user interfaces and development of additional functionality for the internal management system, a second release of the Portal was launched in October. Our focus then shifted to employing the rapid development framework for the other digital collections maintained by the UNT Libraries. These collections posed several new challenges: authentication, restricted content, and audio and video content, as well as other file types and formats not currently present in the Portal. In the conversion to the new system we were able to consolidate some of the previous “silos” that existed in our digital library space and now have a unified platform for providing access to all of our Digital Library content. We designed the new infrastructure to allow for substantial growth in all areas from the amount of content we put online to the number of visitors we receive. The systems are built using standards in the digital library community including Dublin Core, ARK, METS, PREMIS, OAI-PMH, SRU and OpenSearch. Content The UNT Digital Library is home to materials from the University’s research, creative, and scholarly activities, and also showcases content from the UNT Libraries’ collections. Materials currently include theses, dissertations, artwork, performances, musical scores, journals, government documents, rare books, and historical posters. We make the majority of our content freely available to users via the Internet. However, due to licensing agreements and/or university policies, some materials in the UNT Digital Library are restricted to use by members of the UNT community. Participation We are actively seeking to support research and scholarship at UNT. If you would like to work with the UNT Libraries to host content in the UNT Digital Library or are curious about any aspects of this project please contact Mark Phillips (mark.phillips@unt.edu), Head of the Digital Projects Unit. digital_projects_unit_collection_highlight
Posted:
01/19/2010
