TCDL 2025

Ten years of the Texas Digital Archive: lessons learned and future steps
By: Mark Myers

In 2015 the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) received seven terabytes (TB) of electronic records from the outgoing administration of Texas Governor Rick Perry. This marked the first official transfer of electronic records to TSLAC and was coupled with financial support from the governor’s office to create a digital archive. As of January 1, 2025, the TDA has over 250 TB of data and over 36 million digital objects. This presentation will look back at the lessons learned in the development and implementation of the Texas Digital Archive over the last ten years centering on:

• the issues and challenges of arrangement and description and how we standardized several metadata schemas into a workable solution.
• working to overcome years of not having the resources to accept electronic records and getting agencies to transfer records into the TDA.
• development of internal policies governing metadata, naming and date conventions, transfer methods, and handling electronic media.
• our efforts to make the TDA more visible and more important to our agency, the state, and the people of Texas. Access equals preservation.
• This presentation is being offered as a case study in building and maintaining a sustainable and growing digital archiving solution.

Collaborative Digital Archiving at HBCUs - the HBCU History & Culture Access Consortium
By: Ben Schachter & Rita Reyes

The University Museum at Texas Southern, along with four partner HBCUs, is part of a first of its kind collaboration between HBCUs to digitize the collections of each institution’s respective museum or archive. The HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium, in association with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) and George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, works to highlight the contributions and importance of HBCUs to American history. A website featuring thousands of digitized items from the universities will go live this August, paired with a large-scale exhibition which will open at NMAAHC in September and then travel across the nation. This presentation, which will feature the University Museum’s project manager and graduate fellow, will showcase the rich collections from Texas Southern University which will be featured in the project, highlight the digitization, metadata, and oral history methodologies utilized, and discuss student participation and growth opportunities. Challenges and opportunities that have arisen during this collaborative, open-source, and public-facing archival project will also be analyzed.