Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative
Local maps, letters, artifacts from across Texas, lesson plans, current field trips to exotic and educationally appropriate places, video, audio, pictures–all are just some of the things that are being digitized, organized, and displayed for public use by universities, museums, Libraries, etc… all over Texas.
New resources since my previous post include:
Portal to Texas History (http://texashistory.unt.edu/) Hosted by the University of North Texas Libraries (although it was listed last time, they have added hundreds of thousands of new materials)
Texas Tides (http://tides.sfasu.edu/home.html) Hosted by Stephen F. Austin State University (also listed last time, but they have developed many lesson plans based on TEKS)
Baylor University Library Digital Collections (http://contentdm.baylor.edu/) especially look at the Guthrie Civil War Letters collection.
INSTITUTE OF NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY (http://ina.tamu.edu/) Hosted by Texas A&M University
Center for American History (http://www.cah.utexas.edu/) Hosted by The University of Texas
Photographic Preservation Society (http://www.ppsglobal.org/) wonderful photographs!
Again, all these wonderful sites (and more) may be explored with a Federated Search at the Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative web site (http://www.thdi.org/).
Dr. Jesus F. de la Teja, the Texas State Historian shared some interesting perspectives on digital information. Bottom-line, he said we need to be sure and design our user interface with the user in mind (duh!). Many of the resources listed here are going through user evaluations to make their sites are more user friendly.
Not a digitization project but more of a Web 2.0 project = Timeline = (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/) by MIT.
Enjoy! Let me know if I should be adding other similar resources to this list!
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Will have to wait until Spring Break but I am planning a wonderful virtual tour through all of these wonderful resources that I would probably never get to see/review without benefit of digitalization…although actually getting to touch and pick up the 1849 daguerreotype of the Alamo from the Center for American History a few years back still gives my goosebumps thinking about it! I am so glad things like that photo are being preserved for benefit of all to see and use virtually!