At the turn of the 21st century, access was a problem for people in
East Texas who wanted to learn the history of the area – and for teachers who
wanted to teach about it. Museums and cultural societies had limited visiting
hours, and none of their collections were online.
To make historical resources available on the Web, the Ralph W.
Steen Library at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches launched the
Texas TIDES Digital Learning Consortium project in 2002, funded by a state grant.
The Library worked with five local museums, libraries, and archives to start a
digital collection of resources – documents, photos, and oral histories – focused
on East Texas history. The resulting Web site contained lesson plans for fourth-
and seventh-grade history teachers, more than 10,000 digitized primary resources,
and a fully searchable database.
In 2005, the Library received a three-year, $570,000 National
Leadership Grant for Libraries to expand the Texas TIDES digital collections and
develop interdisciplinary learning communities.
Serving the K-12 Community
The TIDES (Teaching, Images and Digital Experiences) project
focused on two audiences: K-12 educators and students, as well as colleges
and universities.
During the grant period, most of the Library’s efforts revolved
around the K-12 audience. The TIDES team worked with 20 schools in East Texas,
hiring teachers to create lesson plans, training teachers to use the digital resources
in the classroom, and providing cultural resources in the form of virtual expeditions
and bilingual material.
Partway into the grant, the Library discovered that what teachers
really needed was Hispanic cultural content, to connect with the growing population
of Hispanic students and have them participate more in class. To get that content,
the Library created partnerships with four Mexican schools, sent some East Texas
teachers to Mexico, and had Mexican teachers come to East Texas.
“We worked with K-12 teachers in East Texas and in Mexico
and really brought them in and got them involved,” explained Rachel Galan,
Associate Director for Library Information Services at the Steen Library. “So
they were involved in virtual field trip creation and they created lesson plans for
the classroom.”
Seven Texas teachers participated in nine Teacher Expeditions
over the course of the project. These included trips to Mexico as well as to
local institutions, such as the Tyler Museum of Art and the Caldwell Zoo.
The Library also formed two Curriculum Development Teams of teachers
who used material in the TIDES collection to create lesson plans. One was an art
teacher, which turned out to be a plus, because the local school district had slashed
or totally eliminated art programs in elementary schools.
“Having an art teacher on board who could add that component
into lesson plans that the subject area teachers were creating got everybody very
excited,” said Galan.
The Library gradually expanded the TIDES Web site, adding science
and world history resources and creating portals for each type of user – teachers;
elementary, middle, and high school students; and university folks.
“We did a lot of that work ourselves,” explained Galan.
“We went out, we photographed, we did the metadata. We didn’t ask institutions
to do that work.”
The Library worked with small, local institutions, such as the
Piney Woods Native Plant Center and the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center, because
the larger collections were being handled by the University of North Texas and the
University of Houston.
“When we brought in teachers from Mexico, that really opened
the door to all of that Mexico content and cultural content that is available now.
And as the graduate students got involved, they started adding content and their
fellow graduate students and their faculty were more willing to get involved at that
point and add their own research collections. So it just kind of snowballed person by
person,” said Galan.
In addition, the team experimented with social media, including
Facebook and Twitter. The Digital Projects director writes a blog and the team is
building a Flickr site for photographs.
Educators Surf the TIDES
The results were incredible. The Web sites received 31 million hits
during the grant period and the TIDES database now hosts more than 22,000 primary
source images and documents, 222 videos, and more than 200 lesson plans.
Beyond the numbers, the Library’s ability to keep TIDES going may
be the most important result. Galan noted, “I think the sustainability of the
program is most significant, because now we can really continue to look at the needs
of the community, the university community and the local community, and build on what
we started. And we have a really great staff.”
The Digital Projects team includes a librarian, a library metadata
specialist, an educator, and a database manager.
Another key result was that teachers reported a new connection with
their Mexican-American students and increased openness from them.
“I think the biggest impact on the community was really in
bridging that kind of cultural divide that is in the classrooms now. We took teachers
to Mexico and they came back and shared with their schools, and parents were excited
and the Hispanic kids started opening up and talking,” said Galan. “And it
really bridged, for the teachers and the students, that divide.”
Challenges and Lessons Learned
During the grant period, the Library had three directors and Galan
was moved to a new position, heading up a new department – Digital Projects. The
changing leadership and job shuffling presented a bit of a challenge.
“There was lots of administration and staff movement, but
once we got the Digital Projects department established, we had money – and a
place – to bring students in. So students started contributing work and getting
really excited about the community piece and working with the schools,” said Galan.
One big lesson was that the Web site needed to have separate
interfaces, or entry points, for each type of user.
“What we realized is the availability of the material is
just a minor thing. I mean it really has to be user focused. The whole Web interface
to get in, the metadata that’s used with the collections, how you guide them to what
they want to find. So each individual user group needs its own individual
access,” she said.
The team also learned that teachers will participate in an online
community only if they are required to. Initially, the Tides Learning Community
that the Library set up for teachers barely got any use.
“The teachers aren’t comfortable at all in that realm.
So I wrote it in their contracts that they needed to get involved. And then we
started posting weekly discussion questions to get them talking, and that
helped,” said Galan.
Another lesson was that the greatest community needs may
be apparent only once the project is underway.
“We thought we knew what the needs were in the
community, I mean we did focus groups and needs assessments and we thought
we had a good grasp on it, but the greater needs we didn’t really discover until we
were in the project,” said Galan.
Working with the University
After the IMLS grant ended in 2008, the Library made sure
Digital Projects was fully staffed and also migrated TIDES to a new database
system. The project’s next steps include integrating TIDES at the university level
and creating a community-access portal.
“We are creating the framework to create an institutional
repository here at the university, which will be really that research portal that
was underdeveloped in the IMLS grant,” said Galan.
She continued, “We’ve gotten involved in a couple other big grant
initiatives on campus, and one of them is a National Park Service grant, a Preserve
America grant. And that’s allowing funding to create that community Web interface
into the collections.”
New partnerships within the university continue to blossom
and many people are getting excited about adding their research collections.
| 
