What’s New

Collaboration at its best! The Austin History Center, the Texas General Land Office, and the Texas State Preservation Board received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize their O. Henry materials.The O. Henry Collection includes letters, documents, and his many short stories.

UNT Libraries’ received a Texas Cultures Online grant, funded by the Amon Carter Foundation, to digitize ethnically diverse collections and a few are already online. The Gillespie Historical Society collection features photographs of German settlers, family portraits, local businesses, such as the Klaerner Opera House, the Ludwig Shoe Shop, and the original Probst Brewery.

The Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary showcases its archives of the Texas-Mexican Presbytery.The Presbytery established Mexican-Presbyterian churches, placed ministers, disbursed support funds, and established two Mexican-Presbyterian educational institutions

The Portal’s Digital Newspaper Program is growing by leaps and bounds and so far has more than 82,000 historical newspaper issues online. The most recent newspaper collections that were added are the Southern Mercury (1888-1907), El Regidor (1890-1903), and the Texas Jewish Post (2005-2011).

UNT Libraries received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize some of its civil war papers. The Civil War and its Aftermath: Diverse Perspectivescomprises eight archival collections reflecting the experiences of women, military men, Texas cattlemen, businesses, farmers, and government officials with vastly different political views and experiences.

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The e-newsletter of UNT’s Portal to Texas History | October 2010

http://texashistory.unt.edu/
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Content
New Collections 
What’s in the lab now?
Grant Opportunity
Focus on . . . Picnics!
Students making a Difference . . .
TDNP: Fort Worth Daily Gazette and Houston Daily Post now online
UNT Digital Collections 

Lower Valley School is not forgotten

With support from the Summerlee Foundation, the Northeast Lakeview Community College digitized hundreds of photographs and documents of the Lower Valley School (1877-1966), a rural two-room German schoolhouse which served the Cibolo and Schertz communities for 89 years.The public school opened in 1877 when German immigrants settled in the Central Texas area to start farms, ranches, and trading centers along the railroad line. The school had one teacher who taught all grades until the early 1900’s. When the Lower Valley schoolhouse closed in 1966, Lutrell and Maxine Watts, who taught at the school for 25 years, purchased and eventually donated the schoohouse and its archives to Northeast Lakeview Community College.

Picturing the Mexican Revolution

El Paso Public Library digitized over 500 photographs from its Otis Aultman collection. Working in El Paso as a commercial photographer for International News Service and Pathe News, Otis Aultman documented the Mexican Revolution as it crossed the border into El Paso and surrounding areas. His gruesome photographs of the dead or fleeing refugees portray a chaotic and dangerous borderland.The images signify the historic impact that the Revolution had on the United States with over 890,000 persons immigrating to the U.S. during the war. As one of the few American photographers that General Pancho Villa would pose for, Aultman spent much of his time following Villa and his soldiers. El Paso Library will use images from this collection for its upcoming exhibit commemorating the centennial anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.

Early Republic of Texas Sesson Laws

To the delight of many researchers, the following volumes of the Laws of the Republic of Texas are now available on the Portal thanks to funding from the Texas Historical Foundation. Finding that elusive amendment or resolution will be much simpler using the Portal’s full-text searching capability.

• Laws of the Republic of Texas, in two volumes. Volume 1. 1838
• Laws of the Republic of Texas, in two volumes. Volume 2. 1838
• Laws of the Republic of Texas. Volume third. 1838
• Ordinances and Decrees of the Consultation, Provisional Government of Texas and the Convention, Which Assembled at Washington March 1, 1836. 1838
• Translation: Laws, Orders and Contracts on Colonization, January 1821, up to 1829; In Virtue of Which, Col. Stephen F. Austin Introduced and Settled Foreign Emigrants in Texas, 1837
• Laws of the Republic of Texas: Passed at the First Session of the Third Congress, 1839
• Laws Passed By the Sixth Congress of the Republic of Texas. 1842
• Laws Passed by the Eighth Congress of the Republic of Texas. 1844

Bee County Historical Commission 
Historic homes, buildings, schools, churches and leaders of the community are featured in Bee County Historical Commission’s collection. Images of the “Confectionary” in Skidmore, the first plane to fly in Beeville, and the Skidmore Float in the 1916 Beeville parade along with hundreds of other photographs provide a glimpse into historic Bee County. When applying for the “Rescuing Texas History” grant, the Commission stated that in addition to preserving the photographs, it wanted to make them available on the Portal so students and the community could learn more about their local history.

Port Arthur Public Library 
Port Arthur was founded in 1898 by Arthur Stilwell who dreamed of turning the barren marshland into a thriving seaport. He built the first railroad from Kansas City southward to the Gulf Coast. Decades later Port Arthur would become a major site for petrochemical industries and global trade. Aerial photographs of the city show the Gulf Oil Company and Texaco plants, detailed images of refineries and technology, and an overview of Port Arthur’s business district, while images of recreational scenes such as fishing on Sabine Lake (right), the Seascout (boyscout) troop, and herding “Gulfaloes” add local color.

River Valley Pioneer Museum

Photographer Julius Born took thousands of photographs of the people, land and community in Hemphill county located in the Texas panhandle. The Portal team is in the process of digitizing 2,700 photographs for the River Valley Pioneer Museum, to add to the 1,100 already available on the Portal. 
The Museum states, “In thousands of portrait photographs taken during the first half of the twentieth century, Born forever documented our past, our heritage, our humanity.  In his images of cowboys and businessmen, well-composed ladies, and fidgety children, Born shows us the pioneers and early residents who made Canadian what it is today. For decades, Born operated his photography studio from the back of his variety store.  It was here where all types of people stepped into his curious world of cameras and backdrops, costumes and mood lighting.  Over the years, thousands sought out this self-taught photographer and curiosity shop owner to record their most important moments.” The portraits are so compelling that it’s hard to stop looking! Preview the collection.

The Portal to Texas History recently received grant funding from the Amon Carter Foundation for its proposed project Texas Cultures Online. In response to educators’ need for more multi-media materials that support the teaching of the many cultures of Texas, the Portal proposed a project to digitize cultural heritage collections that represent various racial, ethnic and religious groups. This summer the Portal will make an official announcement inviting partners and institutions to apply for a Texas Cultures Online grant. Depending on the project the award allocations will range from $500 -$20,000. The criteria for the mini-projects will include several factors: 1) historical significance of the collections; 2) ability of the materials to help close the thematic gap: Texas Cultures; 3) potential of the partner to raise additional funding or contribute staff time towards the work; and 4) and condition and age of the materials. Please spread the word if you know of a collection that would be a good candidate for this project.

Focus on … Picnics!

In the Buffalo Clover Fields of Texas, Postcard, 1908, Joe E. Haynes Collection Family picnic, Abilene Photograph Collection Group of People at a Picnic, Heritage House Museum The 1980 summer reading program at Marshall Public Library finishes with a picnic.

Meet Sashenka Lopez, Graduate Library Assistant (GLA) in the Digital Projects Lab. She has been a part of our team since spring 2009. Sashenka was born and raised in dynamic Denton, Texas but also spent quite a lot of time in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico with her relatives. Her mother is a UNT alum, with three degrees from the school.Sashenka plans to graduate with her MS in Library and Information Sciences in August 2010. She states, “The library sciences are noble. Librarians take up the battle for accessibility and the freedom to use information. Information professionals also work to preserve cultural history and foster future greatness in communities worldwide. Library science will…increase in value as the age of information defines itself.”

Sashenka is working on our Resources4 Educators and Resources4 Students initiatives through the Portal to Texas History. Resources4 Educators offers educational resources to enrich students’ knowledge of Texas History by providing exciting materials that correspond to multiple aspects of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for teaching Texas History. She feels that these resources will have a positive impact on teachers and students throughout the state of Texas. Her goal is to to foster a fun, engaging experience in order to encourage the use of primary sources within the Portal

Her passions lie with reaching out to under-served populations, working with cultural preservation and food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the “right” of peoples to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems, in contrast to having food largely subject to international market forces. She is also in a band, Orange Coax, and will be going on tour with them after graduating.

Sashenka has been a creative, self-motivated GLA and we enjoy her contributions to the Digital Projects Lab and appreciate all her hard work on the Portal to Texas History.

The Portal recently added the Fort Worth Daily Gazette, 1880-1889, Fort Worth Weekly Gazette, 1890-1899, and the Houston Daily Post, 1890-1909, which comes to a total of 3,321 issues. The newspapers are an indispensable research tool for students and scholars and are just a lot of fun to browse. An editorial in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette sums up the state of affairs in Fort Worth on May 4th in 1885:

“On the theory that variety is the spice of life, Fort Worth is certainly blessed with a good deal of “spice” just now. Seduction cases on trial, a red-hot revival meeting in full blast, horse racing sports, a prohibition convention, its incomparable White Elephant Saloon, etc, altogether constitute a programme sufficiently diversified, it would seem, to satisfy the tastes of even the most fastidious. Such is Fort Worth, where more people get off and on the cars than in all other leading towns in Texas combined.”

The UNT Libraries is one of 22 state partners, and the only partner from Texas, to receive National Endowment for the Humanities funding to digitize newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s for the National Digital Newspaper Program, “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.”

The National Digital Newspaper Program, or NDNP, is a long-term effort from NEH and the Library of Congress to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic papers. NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 in all 50 states and U.S. territories.

Miniature Book Collection
UNT Libraries’ Rare Book and Texana Collections presents a small selection of tiny treasures from the holdings of the UNT Libraries Rare Book Room. These miniature books, 4” (10 cm) tall or smaller, include both contemporary and historical works. In some cases, only the covers have been digitized.

The book in the center titled De 7 werewonderen is 3 and 3/8 inches tall and was created 1965-1973 by Franco-Suisse. It is an overview of the “seven wonders of the ancient world, and various other structures and monuments that could be considered as equally important.”

Content
New Collections 
What’s in the lab now?
Focus on . . . Thanksgiving!
Students making a Difference . . .
TDNP: Hemphill County News, Bartlett Tribune now online
UNT Digital Collections 

Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, Library and Hall of Fame

The Permian Basin Museum, located in Midland, Texas, contributed a rich sampling of photographs of West Texas boom towns, oil field camps, and ranching life from the late 1890’s through the 1950’s. Images of workers constructing oil rigs and pipelines in harsh winter weather and loading stacks of dynamite reveal the hard and dangerous work that went into building and maintaining oil wells. But along with the hard work came time for recreation as the photograph of the Cecil Bowers Cowboy Band above demonstrates. This collection provides a great snapshot of how the oil boom brought commerce and development to the West Texas Permian Basin.

Dallas Police Department photos of the Kennedy assassination now available on the Portal

Direct from the UNT News Release, November 2009 by Nancy Kolsti.

DENTON (UNT), Texas — A paperback copy of the novel “1984” was probably not an uncommon item in households in 1963, including the white, two-story home at 214 Neely St. in Dallas.

But because that home was the boarding house of Lee Harvey Oswald, George Orwell’s 1949 cautionary tale against totalitarianism was seized by Dallas Police Department officers as evidence on Nov. 22, 1963 — along with other items belonging to Oswald.

Photographs of these items and many other Dallas Police Department photos related to the investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination are now available for public viewing on the Internet, thanks to the University of North Texas Libraries’ Portal to Texas History and the Dallas Municipal Archives.

The UNT Libraries’ Digital Projects Unit, which manages the portal, recently received a Rescuing Texas History grant from the Summerlee Foundation to digitize 404 images taken by the department during the week following Kennedy’s assassination. The Dallas Municipal Archives, a division of the City Secretary’s Office, possesses all of the original investigation files except for those that have been transferred permanently to the federal investigation collection held at the National Archives.

“We are delighted to be working with the Portal to Texas History to make the collections of the Dallas Municipal Archives more accessible, and look forward to a long relationship,” said City Secretary Deborah Watkins.

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert noted that the images “document a tragic but historic moment in Dallas and American history. It’s critical that these important photographs not only be preserved, but be available to all for study and scholarship,” he said.

The black-and-white photographs are now located at http://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/JFKDP/browse and are easily searchable. They include the “sniper’s nest” in downtown Dallas’ Texas School Book Depository Building, where Oswald allegedly fired on Kennedy’s motorcade; the back and front yards of the boarding house at 214 Neely; Dealey Plaza; the intersection at Tenth Street and Patton Avenue where Oswald allegedly fatally shot Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit; interiors of the Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested by Dallas police; and the basement of Dallas City Hall, where Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963.

Dreanna Belden, coordinator of grants and development for the UNT Libraries, said that beginning in 2010, the documents that accompany the photos and the Dallas Police Department’s investigation will also be placed on the Portal to Texas History. These documents include homicide reports, newspaper clippings and correspondence, affidavits and witness statements.

“We hope to raise money to cover the completion of this project,” said Belden, who said that placing the photos and documents on the Portal to Texas History will provide the general public with the widest possible access to them.

Dr. Martin Halbert, dean of UNT Libraries called the Kennedy assassination “a critical moment in our collective cultural memory.”

“This tragic event still deeply resounds across our nation, and we at UNT are delighted to be providing public access to these historical materials,” he said.

The photos were previously digitized in 1992 by Wang Laboratories in Lowell, Mass., after the Dallas City Council passed a resolution ordering the release of all files, documents, papers, films, audio or any other evidence held by the Dallas Police Department or any city department or agency regarding the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to the public and the media. The resolution, which also ordered that these materials be preserved, was largely in response to public interest following the December 1991 premiere of the film “JKF.”

Belden said that although the photos were placed online by the Dallas Municipal Archives after they were digitized by Wang Laboratories, “there was no way to search through them using a search engine, and the image quality was very poor, due to the equipment available at the time.”

“Major changes in technology have occurred in the past 17 years, and the difference in quality is astounding,” she said.

The Telegraph and Texas Register, 1835-1843

It was news that was fit to print for the weekly newspaper. On March 12, 1836, the Telegraph and Texas Register of San Felipe de Austin published the Declaration of Independence made by the Delegates of the People of Texas in General Convention at Washington more than a week earlier. The newspaper published the entire declaration noting “We present our readers, this week, with the unanimous declaration of independence, by the assembled delegatesof Texas…the important document was presented and adopted.” The same issue included a letter from Lieut. Col. Comm. W. Barrett Travis pleading to the President of the Convention to “hasten on reinforcements, ammunition and provisions to our aid, as soon as possible.” Facing the wrath of Santa Ana with a demand that he surrender, Travis writes “Their threats have had no influence on me, or my men, but to make all fight with desperation, and that high souled courage which characterizes the patriot, who is willing to die in defence of his country’s liberty and his own honor.” The newspaper provides a firsthand account of history in the making and provides a fascinating view of life during the nineteenth-century in Texas. Many thanks to our partners at the Center for American History at UT for working with us to provide access to this important newspaper.

LBJ Museum of San Marcos

“I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.” – Lyndon Johnson

A collection of over a thousand photographs documenting Lyndon Johnson and family at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, Texas (his home from 1951-1973, Lady Bird’s until 2007) will be available in February. The photos cover major events, including historic diplomatic visits, the 1960 campaign of Kennedy and Johnson, birthday celebrations, President Johnson press conferences, national/state park dedications, and LBJ’s funeral ceremony. Noteworthy persons included in photos are Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Sam Rayburn, John F. Kennedy, Henry B. Gonzales, Hubert Humphrey, Pierre Salinger, Bill Moyers, and Johnson family members. This collection was donated to the museum by the family of Nortam Dietel, the late editor and publisher of the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio-Post.

Matthews Land & Cattle, Lambshead Ranch

Lambshead, one of Texas’ most historic cattle ranches,  is still owned and operated by the direct descendants of Judge J. A. and Sallie Reynolds Matthews. The Reynolds and Matthews families were pioneer ranchers and trail drivers who arrived in East Texas in the 1850’s and at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, in 1866. The photographs, spanning over 100 years, document ranching history, ranching practices and community gatherings such as the famous Fort Griffin Fandangle. Images of historic ranch buildings, like the one above, are also featured, the oldest one being the Old Stone Ranch, built in 1855 which was the last pioneer outpost between forts.

University of Texas at San Antonio – HemisFair ’68

Working with the UTSA Archives and Special Collections, we’re digitizing 1,000 photographs of the 1968 HemisFair, “The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas.” The images, photographs and slides document the fair – the only international exposition ever held in Texas – from the construction of buildings, to visits by important people such as Lyndon B. Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, John Connally, and Henry B. Gonzalez. From April  to October of 1968, over 6 million people visited the fair, which brought international attention to San Antonio and Texas.  The photos will be online starting this winter.

Focus on… Thanksgiving! As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. — John F. Kennedy 1943 Thanksgiving issue of the Tulia Herald George Dealey speaking at the Thanksgiving Service at the Hall of State, 1941 from Legacies Group at Aubrey Christian Church who started the Annual Thanksgiving Dinner, Private Collection of Bouncer Goin Thanksgiving postcard from 1908, Private Collection of Joe E. Haynes

Meet Josh Kasten, student assistant in the Digital Projects Unit since October 2009. Josh was born in Wisconsin, but grew up on a farm in Northeast Indiana. Josh is a military veteran, who served in the Army from 2000 – 2005.  After his training at various bases in the U.S. specializing in electronics, he served in Baghdad, Iraq from March 2004 – January 2005, mostly, “driving trucks on convoys and doing guard duty.”  He was hit by a mortar in October 2004, and his leg was injured. He came back to the US in January 2005 and was discharged in June 2005.

He is now a student at UNT working on a degree in history, and expects to graduate in May of 2010.  After graduation, he intends to do what he has always wanted to do — teach history at a high school and coach football.  He hopes to move, “out west, to the mountains.”

Josh says he has learned a lot about Texas while working in the Digital Projects Lab. One of his favorite projects has been the history reports done by students at Marfa High School.  Rather than being a collection of things on one topic, this project has a lot of variation with some interesting essays.

Josh finds it fascinating to see how sparsely populated pasture lands have turned into the metro areas of Texas in a matter of decades. He likes working with the primary historical documents. He hopes it will make history more interesting for users; he feels that rather than being told what happened by someone else, these collections give people the opportunity to,  “… see items firsthand and put the puzzle together themselves – the fun part of history.”

The Hemphill County News ran for almost 30 years, from March 1939 through July 1968. The sole owners of the newspaper were husband and wife, Othello and Elna Miller. He was the publisher and editor and she was in charge of the reporting and advertising. The Portal now has the newspaper online from 1939-1953.

The paper was published in the town of Canadian, Texas, the county seat of Hemphill County, located in the northeast section of the Texas panhandle. Canadian, Texas was, and still is, a ranching and farming community. It is also known as “Rodeo Town” since it was the first place in Texas to stage a commercial rodeo, back in 1888.

The Hemphill County News began in March 1939. The Millers were soon joined by Earl “Scoop” Clark as their reporter. For a couple of months in 1939 they became a semi-weekly paper with publications on Tuesday and Friday. 1940 saw the inclusion of syndicated news from Bell Syndicate and Western Newspaper Union. The Hemphill County News became part of the Panhandle Press Association in July 1939. By the mid-1940s and 1950s the newspaper was a combination of local-only advertising, syndicated columns, and local stories. Syndicated columns included: Star Dust – Stage, Screen and Radio News, The Hometown Reporter in Washington, Household Memos, The Washington Merry-Go-Round, The Fiction Corner, Around the House, Grassroots, The Bible Speaks, Sportscope, and comic strips. Locally written columns included: Happy Birthday, Local News, 10 Years Ago in the News, and the Classified Ads. It had something for everyone, claiming to be “The Only Paper With Complete Coverage in Both City and Country.”

The town of Bartlett straddles the border of both Williamson and Bell Counties, and settlers began to populate the area in the 1850s. When the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad made plans to lay tracks through the area in 1881, the citizenry decided to form a town. John T. Bartlett and J.E. Pietzsch donated land for the township, and by 1884, Bartlett could boast a population of 300, a post office, a gin, a hotel, a grocer, a meat market, four churches, and a school.

The Bartlett Tribune began publication in 1886, and served a vital role in the community by reporting on national, state, and local news, publishing obituaries, and creating a record of legal notices for the area. As in any community, the newspaper provided the most in-depth means of preserving the stories that formed the town and its citizens.

With partners at the Bartlett Activities Center and Historical Society of Bartlett, UNT created a plan to microfilm, digitize, and provide free online access to the Bartlett Tribune between 1902 – 1972. This project was made possible by a grant from U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. Editor and owner of the Tribune-Progress, Gayle Bielss, graciously granted copyright permission for UNT to host this newspaper online.

Libraries Digital Projects Unit receives $631,720 grant 
The UNT Libraries have received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to investigate collection development needs related to online government information.

Working with the Internet Archive, project investigators will research several methods of classifying materials from the 2008-09 End-of-Term Web Archive of the .gov and .mil domains. In addition, UNT will develop metrics for measuring units of selected materials in Web archives — allowing archived materials to be quantified in a way that is more familiar to libraries and university adminstrators. For more details on this project, please see the UNT News Service Story.

The CyberCemetery: where Federal Agencies go to die . . .
What happens when a federal agency ceases operations and closes its door? Since 1997, the UNT Libraries have been harvesting the websites of defunct goverment agencies, and making them permanently accessible to the public. Much of this information would have disappeared forever if UNT had not captured it. Due to our role in creating the CyberCemetery, and other vital government-related digital materials, the UNT Libraries exist as one of only ten Affiliated Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and is the only university in the U.S. to hold that distinction with the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point.

Examples of some of the archived websites include the Commission to Strengthen Social Security, the National Drought Policy Commission Home, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and the United States Information Agency.

Columbia Accident Investigation Board	Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction	Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States

Content
New Portal! 
What’s in the lab now?
Focus on . . . Summer!
Making a Difference
TDNP: a new grant
UNT Digital Collections 

Designed with you in mind

After months of conducting user studies, planning, testing and retesting, we are happy to present the new Portal to Texas History. The new Portal contains the same interesting materials you’ve come to expect, but in a redesigned web site with easier to use navigation and searching. In the new Portal, you can:

• target Basic Searches by material type or item record type
• view brief or full records for each item
• see any image in six different sizes
• use enhanced zooming for maps and other large format items
• get a suggested citation for an item
• use the Share feature to send content to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other social networking sites
• find Help in our extensive suite of help guides
• and much more…

Behind the scenes, the Portal content now resides in a more robust system that ensures that we will be able to support ever-increasing numbers of users, add many more collections, and periodically provide new enhancements. For example, later this year we plan to roll out faceted searching that will allow you to filter your search results by category and find related collections or subjects.

Calling all Genealogists!

Over the past year the IOGENE Project at the University of North Texas Libraries has been working with genealogical societies and individual family history researchers in northeast Texas to understand how they use the Portal to Texas History. Their input led to several major enhancements in the new Portal. The redesigned Portal will help genealogists: 

• Discover anything from an ancestor’s picture to
  a rare historical map.
• Explore resources for a specific Texas county.
• Optimize searches using a Help guide for Genealogical Materials.

We are particularly interested in feedback from people researching their Texas ancestors.
A brief survey is accessible from the footer of most pages in the Portal. Please take a few minutes to complete the brief survey about your experience!

Abilene Photograph Collection

The Lab is now in the process of digitizing the Abilene Photograph Collection consisting of 10,000 4 inch x 5 inch black and white negatives dating from the early twentieth century to the present. The collection has a delightful assortment of images of community members, homes, businesses, churches and ranches. The collection details Abilene’s rich history, capturing a multitude of public events in Abilene and surrounding areas as do these two portraits from Abilene’s early years.

The collection is owned by Hardin-Simmons University and housed in the Richardson Research Center of the Southwest in HSU’s Richardson Library. Developing the collection was a community project with McMurry University and Hardin-Simmons taking the lead role. 

Focus on… Summer! Enjoying the pool. University of North Texas Libraries collection, 2006. Getting Ready for Old Settlers Barbeque, Childress County Heritage Museum Camp Wildurr on Village Creek in Hardin, First Christian Church, Port Arthur Glen Lake Camp, Archives of the Central Texas Conference United Methodist Church

Meet Jeremy Moore, Manager of the Digital Projects Lab, who organizes and oversees all the projects in the lab. He assigns projects to student assistants and maintains the equipment used for digitizing historic and contemporary content that is put into the Portal to Texas History and into the UNT Digital Collections. Jeremy began working in the lab as a student assistant in March 2005 and became the lab manager in February 2007.

Jeremy hails from Springfield, IL; Charlottesville, VA; and Lake Dallas, TX. He is currently working on an MFA in Photography and an MA in Art History. He expects to graduate in 2011. He likes the facilities and scope of a university with 35+K students, but with a small college feel.

Due to his knowledge of photography and photographic processes, Jeremy is quite helpful when others need help dating photographs. He gives an educated assessment of dates based on stamps, brands, or logos on the prints. He has provided expert guidance regarding handling and scanning of glass plate negatives. Jeremy said this job has taught him a lot about managing people. He began with only four student assistants and now has over sixteen. He said that the “students never cease to amaze me with goofs and …great insights that have improved our output in the lab.”

Outside the lab, Jeremy is serious about his photography. Most of his work is landscape-based using a Chamonix 4×5 camera. His artist statement describes his work as, “find[ing] beauty in the chaos of everyday life. He distills the world around him into images that existed for a single moment. [His subjects have] an acute sense of aesthetic form and geometric order.” To view his work take a look at Jeremy’s website. By the way, he has a show (Road Trip: Denton, TX to Las Vegas, NV) up at the Union Gallery at the University of North Texas Union through July 29, 2009.

Direct from the UNT News Release, July 2009 written by Nancy Kolsti

UNT receives additional funds to digitize historical Texas newspapersDENTON (UNT), Texas — The front page of the Sept. 10, 1900, issue of the Houston Daily Post contained an eyewitness account from a Houston businessman of “the great disaster that had befallen the nearby city.” In the account, the newspaper reported that “at least 1,000 people” had been drowned, killed or missing.

Texans can now log onto the Internet to read this historic source of information about the hurricane that destroyed Galveston on Sept. 8-9, 1900 — and ultimately killed more than 6,000 people, thanks to the University of North Texas Libraries’ Digital Projects Unit.

The UNT Libraries is one of 22 state partners, and the only partner from Texas, to receive National Endowment for the Humanities funding to digitize newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s for the National Digital Newspaper Program, “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.”The National Digital Newspaper Program, or NDNP, is a long-term effort from NEH and the Library of Congress to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic papers. NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 in all 50 states and U.S. territories.

The UNT Libraries first received a two-year $397,552 grant from NEH in 2007, which allowed the Digital Projects Unit to digitize 108,000 pages of newspapers published in Texas. In addition to pages of the Houston Daily Post, which was established in 1885 and ceased publishing in 1995, the unit digitized pages of:

• the Brownsville Daily Herald
• the Jefferson Jimplecute
• the Palestine Daily Herald
• the Jewish Herald, now published in Houston as the Jewish Herald-Voice;
• and the defunct Fort Worth Gazette, which was also published as the Fort Worth Weekly Gazette and the Fort Worth Daily Gazette.

The earliest pages of these newspapers date to 1883, and the latest to 1910.

All of the pages are now available on the Chronicling America web site and will be placed by the end of the summer on the UNT Libraries’ Portal to Texas History, which provides students and others with a digital gateway to collections in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies and private collections.

The UNT Libraries recently received an additional two-year grant of $399,790 to expand its digitization of historic Texas newspapers, with pages from as early as 1860 and as late as 1922 digitized, said Cathy Hartman, the UNT Libraries’ assistant dean for digital and information technologies.

In addition to providing those interested in Texas history with local perspectives of national news stories, such as the 1900 Galveston hurricane and World War I, Hartman said the 19th- and early 20th-century newspapers included human interest stories.

“They covered things that newspapers don’t cover any more, such as whose relatives came by for tea,” Hartman said. “That gives us a glimpse into what life was like in that community. The advertising is interesting as well.”

Dreanna Belden, coordinator of grants and development for the UNT Libraries, said the style of reporting in these newspapers is also interesting.

“You read stories about murders and crimes, and they were so graphically written,” she said.

Belden said a committee of scholars will decide the next round of Texas newspapers that will be digitized. These papers are on microfilm at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas Tech University and other locations throughout Texas.

The UNT Libraries are also are a partner with the Oklahoma Historical Society, which received a $307,000 grant from NEH to make 100,000 pages of historical Oklahoma newspapers available to the National Digital Newspaper Project. The Digital Projects Unit will provide the technical expertise for the OHS, which has 85 percent of Oklahoma newspapers ever published on microfilm, Belden said.

“In 1844, the Cherokees published the Cherokee Advocate, which was the first newspaper in what is now Oklahoma,” she said. “Three newspapers existed in Indian Territory prior to the Civil War, related either to missions or tribal government, and 28 newspapers appeared between the war and 1889, the opening of the Unassigned Lands in the state to settlers. For the first time, these newspapers will be made available to the general public.”

A-Z Digitization Project

The A-to-Z Digitization Project encompasses all pre-1960 government documents selected by the UNT Libraries Government Documents Department for retro-cataloging purposes.  We are digitizing them alphabetically, starting with the call letter A, which includes agricultural documents, such as the Farmers’ Bulletin published by the USDA since 1889. These bulletins provide a snapshot of farming and the American household before 1960. For instance, some may chuckle at the bulletin titled “Chinchilla Raising” but Chinchilla fur was a popular fashion item in 1950. Topics range from “Rammed Earth Walls for building” to “Chrysanthemums for the home.” The bulletin “Potatoes in popular ways” published in 1944 describes the nutritional benefits of potatoes and provides various recipes, possibly to help American households add variety to their rations during World War II.

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