Texas Documents: What are They Good For?

Although some people might have thought to use these documents as fuel to keep warm this past winter… UT Arlington Libraries has decided to digitize a core collection of legacy documents produced by Texas state agencies. What seemed like a straightforward project: select documents, scan and upload to our institutional repository – quickly became a complex project. Problems included creating a comprehensive list of our state document holdings, mapping titles and agencies to degree programs, and deciding which titles were candidates for scan to destroy vs. scan to retain, and how to use existing metadata from our catalog to populate the institutional repository metadata. Early successes include developing a better understanding of how to find holdings for state documents and building a closer working relationships with our Special Collections, systems and cataloging units.

A possible outcome of this project could be the creation of a statewide collaborative where individual institutions would choose to become a “center of excellence” for a particular state agency. Based on ASERL’s Collaborative Federal Depository Program, institutions would take responsibility for collecting, digitizing and making available the works of their “adopted” agencies.