“Normally most things that we do as teachers and researchers are aimed inward toward students and researchers,” UTA Library Director Fred Heath said in the July 13 Austin American-Statesman. “One of the obligations of public higher education is to do what we can to disseminate our resources to the citizenry. This is an outreach vehicle.”
Heath would like to see the service go online by the end of the year, but he wants to ensure that the site has enough content to keep visitors busy, the July 13 Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The digital library could eventually offer each institution’s online catalog, as well as special exhibits from UTA’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center or the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.
“It’s sort of like combining what all the research universities are doing in putting their digital scholarship online and making it look more like a Texas initiative rather than having each school have its own set of projects,” Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice University’s Digital Library Initiative, told the American-Statesman. “Certainly it’s an asset to the citizens of Texas, but it’s also wonderful visibility to all these projects and faculty to get more recognition for the research they are doing.”
Posted July 15, 2005.