Fondren to Help Establish Digital Library System in Texas

Proponents of the digital revolution have long envisioned a world where large repositories of knowledge are at one’s fingertips. But while the Internet has made dissemination of such information possible, the availability of high-quality storage has lagged behind. Now, the Texas Digital Library™ (TDL) will help change that.

Organizers of TDL plan to assemble and provide the combined technological advances and cultural and creative resources of Rice University, the Texas A&M University System, the University of Houston System, the Texas Tech University System, and the University of Texas System. The result will be a cost-effective venue for the assembly and delivery of information that will benefit a variety of communities, including K–12 students and their parents, university researchers, and the corporations doing business within the state and interacting with its institutions of higher education. The initiative will be headquartered at the UT–Austin libraries, and a website will be launched in association with the project.

“This is a major initiative that should contribute significantly to the public good and all areas of education in the state of Texas,” says Charles Henry, vice provost and university librarian at Rice. “The Texas Digital Library will help focus our efforts to make more widely available the wonderful resources that we have and to provide leadership and energy to the increasingly complex—and vital—digital environment.”

The TDL, notes Geneva Henry, is a logical extension of Rice’s multifaceted Digital Library Initiative, of which she is executive director. “The many projects that are part of Rice’s Digital Library Initiative have a common goal to share as widely as possible the knowledge that comes from teaching and research,” she says. “This includes papers published by Rice faculty, musical performances by Shepherd School faculty and students, knowledge published in the Connexions commons, material in the Travelers in the Middle East Archive, Ancient Rome digital assets, the Advanced Placement Digital Library, and many other resources developed at Rice and by our collaborating partners around the world. The TDL will bring further visibility to this community of scholars, furthering the dissemination of knowledge and the growth of new ideas.”

—B. J. Almond