Projects

Harris and Eliza Kempner Collection

The Kempner family influenced the social and philanthropic landscape of Galveston, and its members created an expansive economic empire. We are engaged in a multiyear partnership with Galveston’s Rosenberg Library and the Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund to digitize and describe both personal papers and documentation of the family’s involvement in business and industry. The resulting Harris and Eliza Kempner Collection is available via The Portal to Texas History.

Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL)

The mission of TRAIL is to ensure preservation, discoverability, and persistent open access to government technical publications regardless of form or format. As one of more than four dozen member institutions, we serve TRAIL by digitizing and describing technical reports with difficult formats such as fold-outs, oversize pages, and microcards. Items we digitize appear locally in our TRAIL and TRAIL Microcard collections in the UNT Digital Library, and can also be accessed through the larger consortial search interface.

Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP)

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) partners with Texas communities, publishers, and institutions to promote standards-based digitization of newspapers and to make newspapers freely accessible via The Portal to Texas History. Through continual outreach visits across Texas combined with advanced technological infrastructure and multiple funding sources, TDNP has become a state and national leader in newspaper preservation. Our digitization capabilities include scanning paper copies and microfilm, ingesting PDF print masters, and producing associated metadata.

The Portal to Texas History

Emphasizing primary sources and spanning centuries of Texas history, this state-wide collaborative program provides a digital gateway to resources held by participating Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, publishers, and private collections. We support the Portal by actively seeking new content partners, digitizing materials, developing and maintaining the UNT Libraries’ metadata guidelines, creating metadata, hosting and archiving content, and working vigorously to enhance users’ experience through regular improvements to our search and retrieval systems. The Portal is sustained by the Cathy Nelson Hartman Portal to Texas History Endowment.

UNT Digital Library

Home to materials from the University’s research, creative, and scholarly activities, the UNT Digital Library also showcases content from collections in the UNT Libraries and other campus departments. We build the Digital Library by advising Libraries’ departments and other contributing partners on digitization best practices, digitizing materials, developing and maintaining the UNT Libraries’ metadata guidelines, creating metadata, hosting and archiving content, and supporting continuing system improvements through programming and research.

UNT Scholarly Works

UNT Scholarly Works serves as UNT’s open access repository, bringing together scholarly and creative output representing the expertise in our university community. The materials are readily accessible to researchers around the world via the UNT Digital Library. For this growing collection, we help contributors determine copyright, embargo dates, and other licensing and access information; upload materials into an archival system; create metadata; ensure long-term preservation and access; and work collaboratively with UNT departments to promote open access and develop the repository.

UNT Theses and Dissertations

This UNT Digital Library collection contains full text of both “born digital” UNT theses and dissertations (1999-present) and digitized versions of earlier UNT theses and dissertations previously available in print or microform (1936-1998). Problems-in-lieu-of-thesis and similar materials appear in a related collection, UNT Graduate Student Works. For this ongoing program, we load the items into an archival system, ensure long-term preservation, and create metadata that complies with national and international standards for electronic theses and dissertations.

Web Archiving

To help ensure that they remain available to future audiences, we focus on capturing Web sites of defunct U.S. federal government agencies and commissions, as well as Web sites that are expected to change when newly elected officials take office. We also collect and archive UNT Web domains and topical content related to current events. In this continuing effort, we identify, capture, and preserve Web sites; present archived Web content in the UNT Digital Library and other interfaces; work collaboratively with other libraries and institutions to develop Web crawling tools and procedures; and undertake research in collection development and preservation of Web archives.