Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas
Helen Agüera
Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities
Brenda Gunn
Associate Director for Research and Collections, Briscoe Center for American History
University of Texas at Austin
Mark Phillips
Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas
More than 200 libraries, museums, archives, and scholarly research centers collaborated to create the statewide Portal to Texas History over a 10 year period. This rich resource now contains millions of files comprising more than 220,000 titles, many of which are extensive back-runs of historic state newspapers. The Portal is now used millions of times per year by both academic and public researchers. This panel will discuss the Portal to Texas History as a case study in large-scale collaboration to develop networked information content. Issues that will be discussed by panel participants include the national context of digitization efforts, scholarly guidance in content selection, community engagement, standards-based technology for content aggregation at scale, assessment of usage and impacts, and strategies for long-term sustainability.