Texas Tech University Libraries Launch Digital Library Initiative
Texas Tech University Libraries, who have already become a leader within a consortium of major Texas university research libraries in the push to build the Texas Digital Library, have just unveiled their own digital library initiative. This new initiative will help greatly enhance the visibility of Texas Tech faculty and researchers' intellectual material by making it available online.
"In the Information Age, digital libraries hold unlimited potential regarding the propagation of virtually all forms of media content—including books, journals, articles, music, video and an array of visual content,” said Donald Dyal, Texas Tech dean of libraries. “The work that our library faculty and staff are doing will put the university on the proverbial map as we help the academic community build digital collections and share them with the world."
Through the university's online digital collections and institutional repository, the forecast for exposure of faculty works could not be more promising, says Dyal.
"The universe of scholarly contribution is about to be strikingly more accessible to more people, dramatically advancing the academic enterprise and increasing the visibility and viability of the university, its colleges, and the faculty, researchers and students who contribute to and draw from the body of works," he says.
Library administrators describe Texas Tech's Digital Library as a portal to online resources, providing access to a rich set of intellectual assets and tools for scholarship. Designed specifically to aide the research enterprise, the initiative will make accessible an enormous amount of intellectual capital that is not readily available to faculty, staff and students throughout Texas and beyond.
"Texas Tech's Digital Library is basically an online library of educational materials that offers patrons access to the university's digital collections and institutional repository," says Greg Barnes, digital projects coordinator. "It's easy to get confused about these emerging technologies, but what we are talking about is a library composed of digital collections. A digital collection is simply a grouping of related digital objects that support research and education."
The "backshop" for the digital collections is the libraries' Digital Laboratory. This new University Library service offers access to state-of-the-art scanners, computers and software needed to build a virtual collection of digital images, texts, soundtracks and videos.
Another component of the digital library is the university's eScholarship Repository-a central online space that preserves and promotes the intellectual output of the Texas Tech University community, which might include electronic theses and dissertations, faculty datasets, departmental databases, digital archives, instructional scanning, digital media, and other special collections.
University and library faculty and administrators look forward to rapid growth of the eScholarship Repository with the addition of increasing faculty contributions over time. When substantially complete, the virtual body of academic materials will serve as an "on ramp" for faculty, researchers and students to the world-wide computer and information grid.
"The sky is the limit for our digital collections," says Barnes. It's an accessible, online storehouse of digitized works that may include everything from documents such as articles, books and musical scores, to architectural renderings, three-dimensional models, artwork and recorded sound, for example."
As a founding member of the TDL, Texas Tech is a vital affiliate of this significant fraternity of university libraries and as such serves as a center of excellence for the creation, curation and preservation of digital scholarly information for the State of Texas.
