Texas State Library and Archives Commission

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission, together with 11 partner institutions in the Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative, will identify, describe, digitize, preserve, and make broadly accessible special collections materials of history and culture held by libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies throughout the state. The project will ensure seamless, integrated statewide access to these resources by using open source software in support of international standards such as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol. A key aspect of the project will be the "uplift" of partner institutions that are not yet compliant with standards to allow searching across the collections; this will be achieved through the provision of metadata upgrades, data translation, controlled vocabularies, and other improvements.