TTU School of Law Digital Repository - Documenting a Tradition of Excellence

Texas Tech University (TTU) Law Library spent the past year installing and customizing a DSpace instance to serve as the institutional repository of the TTU School of Law. This digital repository is the Law School’s first institutional repository in history. It was designed to collect, maintain, preserve, share and promote the Law School’s digital materials, including research and scholarship of the law faculty and students, institutional history and law-related resources. In addition, the repository also serves as a dark archive to house internal records.

Digital preservation activities among law libraries have been largely limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise. Most Law School Libraries who have an IR chose proprietary platforms. The TTU School of Law Digital Repository is one of the a few Law School repositories in the nation which were built on the DSpace open source platform. The collection development of the repository is still ongoing. Thirteen collections were planned out to be included in the repository. Highlighted collections are the faculty scholarship and the personal manuscripts. The faculty scholarship collection will include all publications of the Texas Tech Law School faculty. Personal manuscript collections will gather personal manuscripts dedicated to individual Texas Tech Law professor or alumnus. The first set of collected works within this collection was donated by distinguished Texas Tech Law Professor J. Hadley Edgar’s (1926-2009) wife Helen Edgar. It includes personal correspondence, photos, newspaper clippings, etc. The repository will also include Texas Governor Executive Orders, Law School history, regional legal history, Audio/Video, etc.