This summer marks a historic milestone as the United States celebrates 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In honor of this momentous anniversary, the Dick Smith Library invites the community to experience a new temporary exhibit, Texas America250, on loan from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC).

Featuring historically significant “Texas Treasures” from the state’s collections, Texas America250 encourages visitors to explore the rich and complex story of the Lone Star State over the past 250 years. From the era of Spanish missions to the innovations of the space race, Texas has played a vital role in shaping the nation’s landscape, culture, economy, and identity.

This engaging exhibit offers a unique opportunity to reflect on Texas’s contributions to American history while celebrating the people and events that have defined the state.

For more information, visit:

• America’s National Parks – America’s 250th
• America250.org
• Texas America250 Commission
• TSLAC Texas America250

This past semester, we have had the opportunity to have an intern working in our archives, digitizing one of our most used collections, the University Photo Collection. Join her as she explains the mission of the archives and the process she followed in digitizing some of the collection. All of the images in this blog are ones that she digitized during this process.

The Dick Smith Library at Tarleton State University houses a multitude of items. The most notable items are the books, periodicals, and digital resources available, but it also houses the Tarleton Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. The goal of the archives is to curate and preserve materials relating to the history of Tarleton, Erath County, and the Cross Timbers region. These materials are photographs, manuscripts, rare books, serials, and the permanent historic records of Tarleton. While curating a collection is one topic to discuss and conservation another, the one that most people are curious about is the preservation of a collection.

Preservation comes in many forms. There is the preservation of physical items in climate-controlled environments, which necessitates the use of archival materials such as acid-free boxes, papers, and folders to separate items from one another. This keeps harmful acids and chemicals that leach over time from items and stops them from touching other items. These acids and chemicals damage and age items, and protecting them from this added harm keeps items intact for many more years than letting them sit stacked beside each other without acid-free barriers would. However, the most modern method of preservation is digital preservation.

Digital preservation will vary depending on the type of item being preserved. While digital-born items are the most common things created today, think photographs and emails, many older physical items can also be preserved digitally. This process is largely completed by scanning the item. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) shares guidelines for best practices for the digitization of items. These standards allow for best practices and best care for the items and their digital records. TSLAC’s recommendation is for images to be at 600 or better dots per inch (DPI) and for documents to be at 400 or better DPI. This is only one portion of the standards necessary for digital preservation. The other is metadata, or the information about the item. While a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture still has a title, a description, a creator, a date created, and so on and so forth. The DACS or Describing Archives: A Content Standard sets a set of rules for describing collections and allows for standardization across multiple materials.

The only thing left after establishing what is necessary to collect is to begin. Starting with the earliest images that exist about Tarleton in the University Archives Box 1 Folder 1, we took down the information about the item, identifier – the name of the item in the system, title -the name of the item, creator, date, folder, and so on, and then scanned each item from there. For the majority of the items in the collection, a flatbed scanner was adequate to digitize the majority of the images. For the items that are too large to fit on a standard scanner, a high-resolution camera and a well-lit room will suffice. This process, while simple, is labor-intensive and time-consuming, and when it is complete, there is a digital copy of these items that will potentially outlast the physical, so long as the preservation of the digital copy succeeds; however, digital preservation for digital items is a different topic to discuss.