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Wednesday, July 13, 2005
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Texas Universities Join to Create a Digital Library for Scholars and the Public
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Four Texas university systems and Rice University will collaborate on a digital repository whose goal is to offer online resources, such as teaching aids, dissertations, and practical information, although not books.
The repository will be called the Texas Digital Library, but it will not resemble the California Digital Library -- not initially, at least. While the California Digital Library -- which provides books, journals, and databases to California libraries -- provides an inspiration, says Fred Heath, vice provost of the University of Texas Libraries, "this would be closer to the DSpace collaborative at MIT."
The DSpace project is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online archive of scholarly works.
Intended to benefit both educators and the public, the new digital repository will be supported by the Texas A&M University System, the Texas Tech University System, the University of Houston System, and the University of Texas System. Rice, a private institution, is also part of the consortium.
David W. Gardner, associate commissioner for academic excellence in research at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, hopes that the digital library will allow the various Texas institutions to pool resources in ways that will save money on digitization efforts and offering online information. "We're rapidly expanding in terms of the number of students," he said. "It's not clear that our resources will expand at the same rate."
Mr. Heath would like to see the Texas Digital Library go online by the end of the year, but he wants to be sure that the site has enough content to keep visitors busy. UTopia, a digital library on the University of Texas at Austin's Web site, is a model for the Texas Digital Library.
As an example of content the library might provide, he said, "We have been talking about working with our nursing school, our social-work school, and one of the medical universities to create a piece on 'your aging Texan.' What do you do when your parents age and you become a caretaker? How do you move them into assisted living? What are the laws of Medicare and Medicaid?"
He said he and librarians at the other institutions hoped the repository would help fulfill their mission to serve the public.
"It allows us to make a statement to the people of Texas and the people of the world -- Here are resources that aren't behind the ivy wall. These are here for you too," Mr. Heath said. "We are very keenly interested in restoring the concept of public higher education as a public good, not as a private good and if you want it, you pay for it."
Mr. Heath had no estimates on the project's costs. Its budget is being hammered out now.
Daniel Greenstein, director of the California Digital Library, applauds the project. He says it is interesting that the Texas institutions are approaching the project with an eye toward providing public service first. The California Digital Library started working on that part of its mission after its other services had been established.
Digitization and creating content for the site will be the most expensive part of the project, Mr. Greenstein said, but collaboration could allow the universities to save money elsewhere by pooling resources and negotiating for group deals on software and database licenses.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
- Papers Wanted (6/25/2004)
- 6 Institutions Will Help Fine-Tune a Popular New Archiving Program (2/14/2003)
- 'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output (7/5/2002)
- 2 Digital Libraries in California Form Partnership to Expand Services (6/30/2000)
- U. of California System Plans New On-Line Library (10/24/1997)