The Portal to Texas History

The Portal to Texas History is a collaborative digital library hosted by the University of North Texas. The photo to the left shows a crowd standing in line in front of an Austin Kentucky Fried Chicken stand in the 1960's. The photo is part of the Austin History Center's collections.

Collection Principles

The mission of the initiative is to offer "students and lifelong learners a digital gateway to the rich collections held in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections. The Portal team at the University of North Texas provides strong leadership by supporting collaborative efforts with its partners, while pursuing the goals of accessibility, best practices, and preservation of historical material." This web site provides a great deal of transparency into their processes for selecting materials, which are submitted by cultural heritage centers "out in the field". The project has received funding from several grants, the most notable appears to be from the Summerlee Foundation, which allows this inititative to give "mini grants" to these participating cultural agencies in order to digitize objects that are in jeopardy of being lost. The Best Practices , Equipment, and Tutorials pages links to relevant pages on those subjects and offers standards regarding the digitization of the items. This is a valuable resource for other digitization programs. This project also regularly publishes a newsletter to inform interested parties about new objects and new partners, as well as information about using the resource.

Object Characteristics/Metadata

Users are able to search by full text, metadata, title, subject, or creator or browse by subject, collection, contributor, or era. Subjects are often further subdivided into more specific categories. This interface allows users to customize the display into either a grid or a list. Brief metadata is provided with the thumbnail image. Once the information is clicked, more detailed metadata is provided, many with hyperlinks to additional information or to narrowed results on the topic. Users are able to interact with the photo and can contribute information. The site uses Dublin Core and provides a metadata tutorial for the partner institutions.

Audience

Texans, researchers, life-long learners