Projects

The Portal to Texas History^SM is a state-wide collaborative digital program that offers students and lifelong learners a digital gateway to the rich collections held in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections.  It features digital reproductions of photographs, maps, letters, documents, newspapers, books, artifacts, and more.  In addition, Portal services for educators provide resources and curricula that comply with TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) standards and highlight relevant materials for students and classroom teachers. 

Constantly growing, the Portal contains more than 250,000 digital images and receives some 1.4 million online hits per month.  To learn more about the Portal's contents, please browse by collection.

For this ongoing program, the Digital Projects Unit actively seeks new content partners, provides services for educators, digitizes materials, develops and maintains the UNT Libraries' metadata schema, creates metadata and assists partners with their own descriptive metadata, hosts and archives content, and works vigorously to enhance users' experience through regular improvements to our search and retrieval systems.

Theses and dissertations represent a wealth of scholarly and artistic content created by masters and doctoral students in the degree-seeking process.  One of the first five American universities to require ETDs for graduation, UNT began accepting theses and dissertations in electronic format in 1999. 

Originally the files were housed on UNT Academic Computing Services servers with the UNT Libraries providing bibliographic access through the Libraries' online catalog.  However, beginning with the fall 2007 semester, the Libraries took on a  broader stewardship role--moving some 1700 existing ETDs and consolidating them onto the Libraries' servers.  The Libraries are also absorbing new ETDs as they are released. 

Now available full-text via the UNT Libraries Digital Collections, the Electronic Theses and Dissertations can be located through full-text and metadata searches.  The ETDs continue to be linked through the Libraries' online catalog as well.

For this ongoing program, the Digital Projects Unit loads the ETDs into an archival system, ensures long-term preservation, and creates metadata that complies with national and international standards for ETDs. 

Important Note:  Some UNT ETDs are restricted to use by the UNT community.  To learn more, see Electronic Theses and Dissertations at the UNT Libraries: Setting the Scene, August 2007.

The UNT Libraries Digital Collections provide online access to materials drawn from the Libraries' general collections, Government Documents Department, Music Library, and Rare Book and Texana Collections, as well as UNT's electronic theses and dissertations.  The collections feature books, pamphlets, maps, musical scores and recordings, war posters, laws, regulations, reports, the CyberCemetery of defunct government agency Web sites, and much, much more.  For more content information, view the highlights of the Digital Collections.

Rapidly expanding, the Digital collections contain more than 580,000 digital files and receive some 123,000 online hits per month.

For this ongoing initiative, the Digital Projects Unit advises Libraries' departments on digitization best practices, digitizes materials, develops and maintains the UNT Libraries' metadata schema, creates metadata and assists departments with their own descriptive metadata, prepares online catalog links to materials in the Digital Collections, hosts and archives content, and supports continuing system improvements through programming and research.