The Texas Digital Library (TDL) provides services to TDL member institutions and the faculty, staff, and students at these institutions. Each of the services supports TDL’s goal of broadening access to the scholarly output and unique cultural heritage collections of colleges and universities.
| DIGITAL REPOSITORY HOSTING | EXPAND ACCESS Preserve and disseminate a wide variety of content beyond traditional scholarly articles. IRs can include datasets, learning objects, electronic theses and dissertations, audio-visual content, and presentations. |
| PROMOTE SCHOLARSHIP Showcase the world-class scholarship of students and faculty. TDL members’ scholarly contributions are accessible with other Texas institutions of higher education. | |
| BRAND CONTENT We are a partner of higher education institutions and not a vendor; that means the name of your IR will not change, and you will always retain branding power and ownership of your valuable digital content. | |
| TEXAS DATA REPOSITORY | FLEXIBILITY The TDR allows researchers to share their data with a select group of colleagues, version the data, and publish it when they’re ready. |
| SECURITY Only users with university credentials have permission to deposit data in the repository, unless special access is granted. | |
| TRANSPARENCY By providing technical infrastructure to enable data sharing and robust description of methodology, the Texas Data Repository will help facilitate a culture of reproducibility within the sciences. | |
| DIGITAL PRESERVATION SERVICES | CONSULTATION TDL expert staff work with your library to discover the right combination of technologies and workflows to meet your unique content needs. |
| TRAINING Digital preservation users are highly-trained and informed through webinars, conferences, and facilitated working groups. Members have access to webinars and workshops specifically for digital preservation services. | |
| STORAGE Store your valuable content in multiple geographically-dispersed locations with fixity audits. We offer non-commercial, community-based storage options as well as two commercial options with AWS. | |
| OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS | FREE FOR FACULTY USERS Faculty members willing to do the work could start up a peer-reviewed journal without prohibitive hosting costs. Our helpdesk will support journal users, from library staff to journal managers and editors to peer reviewers and authors. |
| PEER-REVIEWED PUBLISHING TDL’s open journal software helps with every stage of peer-reviewed publishing, handling online submissions from authors, managing the peer-review process, publishing issues online, and indexing content. | |
| YOUR POLICY Members control most policy for new journal creation and can provide value-added publishing support. | |
| THESES & DISSERTATIONS | SUPPORT EMERGING SCHOLARS TDL provides a simple ETD interface through which students can submit their theses and dissertations online using an easy five-step process.
TAME YOUR WORKFLOW Track and manage the manuscript review process, create flexible workflows using customizable filters, and export documents and metadata for all ETDs. Managing communications with all participants, including students, faculty advisers, and staff, happens through a single interface. |
| CONNECT WITH THE ETD COMMUNITY Publish ETDs in your IR and the TDL Statewide ETD Repository, where they are readily discoverable by other researchers. TDL members have access to training and are encouraged to join our users group to guide the future development of Vireo, our ETD submission and management system. | |
| DPLA Aggregation (TxHub) | AMPLIFY Sharing information about your unique digital collections with DPLA helps you reach new users around the world who might never have discovered them otherwise. |
| BROADEN In DPLA, your materials are discoverable alongside items from other institutions around the country. Combining your materials with this national collection creates new connections between items and contextualizes your community’s story within the national narrative. | |
| ENHANCE Participating in the DPLA network helps increase local knowledge at your institution and across TDL about digital collections issues. Additionally, sharing your materials with DPLA can make your digital collections program more appealing to funders and grant agencies. |
Authentication
In keeping with its commitment to the use of open-source technologies, the Texas Digital Library employs Shibboleth federated authentication software for authentication and identity management. The Shibboleth System is a standards based, open-source platform that allows TDL to authenticate users by leveraging its member institutions’ authentication and identity management systems.
With Shibboleth, faculty and staff at participating TDL member institutions can log on to most TDL services using the ID and password they use at their home institutions. The home institutions (or identity providers) give TDL enough information about each faculty member to enable authorization. In this way, faculty members at TDL institutions do not have to create unique IDs and passwords for TDL services, and TDL can leverage the existing authentication infrastructures of its member institutions.