Podcast 134: Increasing Access to Primary Materials through Digital Portals

The Preservation Technology Podcast Episode 134

Catherine Cooper speaks with Jake Mangum about working on the Portal to Texas History.

The Preservation Technology Podcast is a series about the people and projects that bring innovation to preservation. Read articles based on episodes, listen, or subscribe. This podcast is produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).

Digital Access to Primary Sources

Portal to Texas History home page

Image courtesy of Jake Mangum

Catherine Cooper: My name's Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Jake Mangum: Jake Mangum. I'm the project development librarian for the Portal to Texas History.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jake Mangum: Absolutely. I'm happy to be here.

Catherine Cooper: I'm wondering if you could tell us what the Portal to Texas History is and how you got involved?

Jake Mangum: Certainly. So, the Portal to Texas History is a digital repository for cultural heritage and historic materials from across the state of Texas. We've worked with about 465-ish partners to digitize and make freely available over 1.8 million items. That includes over 800,000 issues of newspapers, 450,000 photographs. We have 80,000 maps, we've got legislative documents, we've got books. We've got journals. Basically we've got 36 different media types all available on the Portal to Texas History. Again, all of our print materials are full text searchable. So if someone is looking for a specific name or a specific event, they can type that in and it'll pull up all the print instances we have of that.

I got involved with the Portal kind of by accident. I was a graduate assistant here in the library, finishing up my Master's in Library Science, and I happened to be at an event the same time that my current boss was at the event. And we were talking, she said, "You're in the library, I'm in the library, so we should sit together and talk a little bit." So we did. And she mentioned that she had a position open, and if you're wanting a position in an academic library, you take every opportunity and apply. If you're being told about it, you apply. So I applied and it turned out that it worked perfectly because the position that I'm in, I act as a liaison between the digitization lab and partnering institutions. My areas of specialties in library science school were academic libraries as well as digital imaging and archiving, so I was able to bridge those two different areas together in this position.

Crafting Teaching Materials

Portal to Texas History education page: Texas History for Teachers

Image courtesy of Jake Mangum

Jake Mangum: The Portal to Texas History, like I mentioned, has 36 different media types currently available on it. As well as we've been working on a project called Texas History for Teachers, in which we've worked with a historian here in the university, some Texas history teachers to create course curriculum based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards, that the fourth and seventh grade... Well every grade has to teach to specific standards within the state. And fourth and seventh grade specifically deal with Texas history, so we are focusing on creating course units for those grades in particular starting with seventh grade.

And one of the cool things that we're doing with that is we actually have been able to do work with a camera system called Matterport, which allows us to do virtual field trips to museums with historical significance that touch on, like the TEKS . So we're able to take students and do a field trip when typically like you're not going to be able to go to Goliad. Those aren't the field trips that schools tend to send students on. So you can at least get a better understanding of what the museum looks like and what the area looks like through these Matterport virtual field trips. The Portal to Texas History, is at Texashistory.UNT.edu. Whereas the Texas History for teachers is education.Texashistory.UNT.edu.So, we just added an education dot in front of the website address and that is still a work in progress. We initially did some materials for it several years ago, and as learning standards changed, things got quickly out of date. And so now it was a 2020 project that is turned into a really great long-term substantial project.

A Variety of Users

Portal to Texas History Matterport virtual tour

Image courtesy of Jake Mangum

Jake Mangum: It probably wouldn't come as any sort of real big surprise to know that probably a third of our users are genealogists. Since we do have such a large collection of newspapers, like I said, over 800,000 issues of newspapers. There's a lot that can be gathered there. Genealogists, teachers, students, historians of all different levels and expertise can access it. So those are the main groups. My position, I don't typically interact with them a whole lot directly unless they're having issues or concerns and sometimes they will contact me and ask for guidance and assistance through their searches.What I really want to see the Portal do and be able to accomplish is to continue to expand the understanding of what Texas history is. Right now, my goal is to tell the stories of underrepresented communities within Texas. So typically history tends to be told by the older white men and there are a lot of other voices that need to be shared as well to fully understand what the story of Texas is.

There are a couple of different ways that we are pursuing adding those materials to the Portal. One, we recognize that a lot of history has not really been preserved properly through the official institutions that are responsible for preserving everyone's history. They haven't really preserved everyone's histories, so the communities have had to find other ways of preserving their own history. So it's materials that are in churches, materials that are in families passed down from family member to family member.

And one of the ways that we've worked with this to reach those different groups that wouldn't necessarily have funding to do a digitization project is we have a project called Rescuing Texas History in which we offer up to a thousand dollars’ worth of digitization, metadata creation, and hosting of materials on the portal for board applicants. And we've specifically in the last few years, made it a point to target those groups that have been disenfranchised, basically, in the past. So we're actively seeking those out and trying to reach out to those communities.

My email is Jacob (J-A-C-O-B) dot Mangum (M-A-N-G-U-M) @UNT.edu. And if you go to Texashistory.UNT.edu and scroll down, there's also a section called Rescuing Texas History.

I think we got it covered with everything.

Catherine Cooper: Yeah, I'm sliding other questions in here. Okay.

Jake Mangum: Yeah, it was perfect.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us.

Jake Mangum: Absolutely, absolutely. I'm happy to do it. It was really good seeing you again.

Catherine Cooper: Good to see you too.

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