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Digital Projects: Projects

Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP)

Due to the vast size and long, colorful history of our state, a staggering number of newspaper titles have been published in Texas.  The Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) actively seeks partnerships to digitize Texas newspapers covering a broad geographic area and to make the newspapers freely available on the Internet.

So far, the program has produced a rapidly expanding collection of some 290,000 newspaper issues accessible through the TDNP Collection on The Portal to Texas History.  This collection receives more than 2.6 million uses per year.

For this ongoing initiative, the Digital Projects Unit works with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative, and other institutions, community groups, and publishers to identify, locate, microfilm, and digitize Texas newspapers.

The Portal to Texas History

The Portal to Texas History 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, the Portal's Resources4 Educators pages 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 6.3 million digital files and receives some 6.4 million uses per year.  To learn more about the Portal's contents, please explore by collections.

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 guidelines, 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.

UNT Digital Library

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 include theses, dissertations, artwork, performances, musical scores, journals, government documents, rare books, historical posters, the CyberCemetery of defunct government agency Web sites, and much, much more.

Rapidly expanding, the UNT Digital Library contains 8.5 million digital files and receives more than 4.3 million uses per year.  To learn more about the Digital Library's contents, please explore by collections.

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

UNT Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

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

Now available full-text via the UNT Digital Library, the Electronic Theses and Dissertations can be located through full-text and metadata searches.  You can also find the ETDs by searching the Libraries' online catalog.  Important Note:  Some UNT ETDs are restricted to use by the UNT community.

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.  With the Libraries' Technical Services staff, we are also working to digitize earlier theses and dissertations that were originally published in print and microformat.

To learn more, see Electronic Theses and Dissertations at the UNT Libraries: Setting the Scene, August 2007. See also ETD Progress Report.

UNT Scholarly Works

UNT Scholarly Works is home to materials from the UNT community's research, creative, and scholarly activities. It serves as UNT's open access repository, bringing together articles, papers, artwork, music, research data, reports, presentations, and other scholarly and creative products representing the expertise in our university community.

UNT Scholarly Works makes materials readily accessible to researchers on campus and around the world via the UNT Digital Library. We invite members of the UNT community to submit their work to the repository.

For this growing collection, the Digital Projects Unit helps contributors determine copyright, embargo dates, and other licensing and access information; uploads materials into an archival system; creates metadata; ensures long-term preservation and access; and works collaboratively with UNT departments to promote open access and develop the repository.

Web Archiving

B​​ecause the impermanence of Web content poses a challenge for future audiences, the Digital Projects Unit ensures that Web sites remain available by taking an active role in Web archiving.  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.

So far, our web harvesting activities have allowed us to preserve over 24 terabytes of content.

In this continuing effort, the Digital Projects Unit identifies, captures, and preserves Web sites; presents archived Web content in the UNT Digital Library and other interfaces; works collaboratively with other libraries and institutions to develop Web crawling tools and procedures; and undertakes research in collection development and preservation of Web archives.  We are active members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and currently serve on its steering committee. For complete details about our Web archiving activities, please see our About Web Archiving page.