 I'm Robby Citell of the Government Information Librarian at the University of North Texas. She's dedicated to preservation and access to government information, specifically digital-borne information. And she's involved in a number of initiatives that raise awareness on this issue, including one that I'm involved with her on called Peggy, our Preserving Electronic Government Information. Thank you very much, Robby, for presenting today. Thanks so much for having me. So, as Linda said, I'm the Gov. Info Librarian at UNT, and we host a number of collections which I'll talk about. And to get started, I'm going to title this deep in the heart of Texas, Government Information Stars from the Portal to Texas History. So, as everyone knows, I'm a huge fan of Pee Wee Herman. I recently saw the movie, and so had to include that because it's kind of fun to watch. So, just a quick overview of what we do offer at UNT as far as digital collections. We have the UNT Digital Library, which many of you may already be familiar with. The UNT Digital Library actually grew out of partnership in 1997 between the GPO and UNT's Government Information Connection. This partnership harvested the ACIR, but this initial harvest eventually grew into what is now known as the Cyber Cemetery, which is a cornerstone collection for UNT's digital library. Today, the Government Information Connection at UNT is a fit net partner to the GPO, and we are also the only non-military university to be appointed as an affiliated archive of the National Archives and Records Administration. And with those partnerships, we participate in a number of projects, the Cyber Cemetery being the most prominent. As of September 19th, I just wanted to give some stats on what we have included in the digital library. We currently, in the UNT Digital Library, it hosts 31 partners of which the Government Information Connection is one, and provides access to over 430,000 items made up of over 16 million files. And since its beginning in 1997, the digital library has had over 23 million uses. And so a sister collection to this is the Portal to Texas History. The portal began in 2002 as a digital gateway to historical materials from private collectors and collaborative partners across the state of Texas, including library museums, archives, and other historical groups. Among those, we get the Government Information Connection at UNT as one of those partners. So today, the portal hosts over 965,000 items from 367 partner organizations, and since 2002 has seen over 40 million uses. For the purpose of today's presentation, I really am just focusing on some of the Government Information Collections that we host through the portal, but I would encourage anyone that is interested in general history or especially Texas history to make a point to go and peruse what we have. We have incredible newspaper collections, county and city archives from across the state, lots of stuff that would be of interest to genealogists or local historians. So if you have time to kill and like to go down rabbit holes, I encourage you all to do more exploring on your phones. So I'm going to start with the Texas Centric, Federal Government Information within the portal. There's a whole lot of Texas out there, and we want everyone to fund it. Okay, so the first collection I thought I'd talk about is the War of the Rebellion, which is a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate armies. Some of you may already be familiar with this collection. Although this is included in the portal to Texas history, it is a fully digitized run of the OR, as some people call it. So if you're not familiar with this, it is known as the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. Some people call it the War of the Rebellion. Other people call it the OR. It contains four series of volumes that cover military operations in the field, prisoners of war, and materials with Union and Confederate authorities. It's a 128 volume collection that was published between 1864 and 1901. And toward the end of the publishing run, they did do some comprehensive indexes. Those are also included in this digital collection. And then in the 1960s, I think Mero went back and did another set of indexes to make these materials easier to use. So these are among the most important sets of primary resources for any Civil War historians or those looking for personal accounts or military involvement within the Civil War. It does include firsthand accounts, orders, reports, maps, diagrams, and correspondence from both the war and Navy departments from both sides of the Confederate Union. And I included just a few snapshots of items within the collection. I showed just one entry for Texas. It includes a pictorial history, although that asserts indicates that the item is not included at the War Department Library, which is where most of the materials were housed that were indexed as part of the collection. And then it also notes, I don't know if you guys can see that in the final paragraph of the text excerpt, it asks people to submit materials, anything that might be relevant to the Civil War, and they would get postage paid on anything that they sent. And so I thought this was really fabulous because it might be one of the first notes of crowdsourced materials, so I thought it was just kind of cool. Okay, so we also have a Texas patents collection. The patents that we host through the portal of Texas History reflect patents that were filed by Texas Inventors prior to 1900, and a majority of these patents are for agricultural-industrial applications. The addition of this collection predated my joining UNT, so I went back and answered the 15 official libraries, why they decided to include the patents as one of the collections. And he noted that they had the ability to do it, and we have the collection, and so they might as well do it. But now it actually serves as a teaching tool, several of our faculty librarians are adjuncts within our library school, and they use this collection to teach students how to work with metadata, so that's just a little side note. And I think that patents, personally, I think patents are a treasure trove of primary source information that illustrates technological, economic, and social goings-on during a specific period in American history. I pulled three examples of abdominal support systems. These were all invented by and intended for use by women, and they all, if you read the patent letters that accompany the drawings, they all have very specific end-usics, so it's just a little fascinating collection that's kind of an unsung hero. Okay, so we also have quite a few maps within the digital libraries, especially the portal. I'm showing two examples today, the USGS photographic maps and the census maps. And I wanted to point out these collections simply because this might be one of the first collections that we harvested from existing digital content. I don't know if anybody out there knows, Mark Phillips, who's the associate dean for digital libraries, but he comes from a family of Skuptox librarians, his mom and dad both worked with the Skuptox collections at Oklahoma State University. And so I think that Mark sometimes just thinks of Skuptox collections that he would like to include in the digital libraries, just like wakes up in the middle of the night with a whim and says, hey, I'm going to go out and harvest that collection. And so that is in part why we have these collections here, but for those of you that were active in documents when we had the government shut down in 2012, I think that was a lot of these collections went dark, especially the census collection. So having a backup of these materials is vitally important. So even though it is duplicated content, lots of copies keep subtext. And then just a note about the one on the right is a USGS TOPA map for Rockport, Texas, which was recently devastated by a hurricane. And then the one on the left is a census block map of my neighborhood. And then we do have, okay, so we do host several collections that are Texas government information, among which are the general and special laws of the state of Texas and the Texas laws and resolutions. I'm not sure who's familiar with state government in Texas, but it's crazy. We meet every two years, our legislature meets every two years for only 140 days, but it seems that whenever they meet it has national repercussions. And we, every two years also in Texas, host a constitutional amendment election. So this year actually in November we're voting on a number of constitutional amendments because in Texas it's not enough just to pass a law, you also have to amend the constitution constantly. So we have one of the most amended constitutions across the US and it's mayhem, it's very hard to kind of get your grasp on it. So in hopes to maybe assist our state constituencies or outside observers in better understanding what we do in the state of Texas, we do host these collections of legislative materials. So the general and special laws of Texas are also known as session laws, and this is the complete set of those passed into law during each session of the Texas legislature. This collection begins with the 1931 volumes. We do also host the laws that predate the materials from 31. Those are actually known as gamels, laws of Texas, and those aren't technically a government vote connection collection, so I can include them, but you can find them. And this collection was eventually supplemented and supplanted by the Texas laws and resolutions collection. So I have on the screen the front matter for the general laws and then the two to the left are items that now reside in our Texas laws and resolutions. So that collection at the end of each legislative season, we go out and harvest the bills, joint resolutions, concurrent resolutions, anything that was passed by the state legislature during that session. We also include materials that were vetoed by the governor. So these materials begin with the 78th legislative session. I think we're in the 84th this year, but I could be wrong. So these are all keyword searchable and patrons can come in and find all matter of Texas laws. And next up are the House and Senate journals. These are the proceedings of the respective houses of the state legislature and include legislation, reports, discussions, votes, and other points of order. We had a patron come in in person recently that was looking for information about a family member that she thought had either been noted on the floor of one of the bodies of the state legislature and we went through a bunch of indexes and couldn't find anything and then did keyword search for the ancestor's name in these questions and was able to immediately find where he was mentioned and why and so that was kind of cool because it definitely makes short work of things that used to take a lot more time to research. I've included here just mentions of UNT as they occurred in the state and House journals. Page from the House journal is actually a note about a bill that was referred to committee that funded the library in which I worked. So that was kind of cool. So you can find all kinds of great little nuggets and points of interest. And then the final two questions I'm going to mention are the Texas Register and the Texas State Publications. And I wanted to mention these specifically and kind of end with these because these are questions in which we have ongoing memorandums of understanding with the Texas State Library and the Secretary of State. So we are the official institution of record for the Texas Register. They are still printed and distributed to any that are interested, but UNT does digitize and make available through the portal, the Texas Register. And when you go to the Texas Secretary of State's website and look for the electronic version of the Texas Register, you are redirected to UNT. So that's kind of a cool point to think for us. And then in 2008, the State Library discontinued our State Pository Program due to budget cuts. And at that time UNT and Texas Tech entered memorandums of understanding with the State Library in which we agreed to be the sort of digital library of record for Texas State Publications. And Texas Tech would continue to house and maintain and catalog these tangible materials. So we every year receive what would normally have been routed to State Positories and digitize those and make them available to all of Texas plus anybody that might be interested. So I've included just a few things here that might be of interest, a part guide, the Demographic Survey of Texas Library players, and then even a collection of comments by a public murida. This one is the University of Texas Press book, which I'm kind of surprised that you've included that. But if we get it through to Pository, we put it up for everybody to see. And so we're proud of both of these collections and the ongoing relationships that we have with the state to maintain and allow access to these materials. And we do, I just wanted to add a few notes. We don't do, we being me, I'm the Department Head for the Government Information Connection, which is a public service department that handles government information for the library. This is the library in the area. And Digital Libraries is a different unit of the UNT Library. And so they manage all of the digitization and harvest industry if we choose to harvest materials. But we do have an ongoing partnership, the Government Book Connection and Digital Libraries. So the Digital Libraries does all of the collecting, and then we in the Government Information Connection do the metadata side of things. So we assist with the discovery and public access to these materials. So we have students that create most of our metadata for us and we work closely with the Digital Libraries unit to train and maintain standards of metadata that they would like for us to adhere to. And so that's sort of how our relationship works. Most of these collections are collections that predate my joining UNT, but we are committed to continuing both the Government Book Connection and the UNT Digital Libraries committed to continuing making these materials available and growing these collections. So we also have in the past identified new collections to be added and hope to continue to do so and work for funding sources to make that happen. When you come to the portal to Texas History, this is what you see. It's very clean interface, easy to keyword search, and they've given you some examples of how to search. So using quotations will give you phrase searching abilities. There is at the bottom of this page, I want to scroll down so I want to make everybody nauseous, there is at the bottom of this page some help tips on how to do more advanced type searching. And then the way I usually start to search rather than just doing keyword is I actually want to come down slightly. I like to explore the collections. So if you come down, you can get to more advanced or guided search options. But I also like to explore by collection or by partner. So I'm going to start by partner just so you guys can see. And I'm going to come in and look just for the UNT Government Information Connection collection. For anybody that's on the webinar from Texas, we also the digital libraries offer what they call text treasures grant. And so that's where you at your home institution can identify a collection that you would like to have included in the portal to Texas History and you can apply for funding. And they will, they, the digital library will digitize those materials and then host it through the portal. That's a great way to get more content and to start getting your content. If you're not an institution that can support digital projects, then it's a great way to get your content out there. So I'm going to, if you click about, it will tell you a little bit about our department, how to find us. You can look at some of our information, some of our latest editions. You can also explore all of our holdings. So I'm going to explore all of our holdings. UNT Libraries, Digital Libraries does a great job of providing statistics on our collections. So if you're ever interested in knowing more about how things are accessed or how often they're accessed, the stats are out there for you. But if you explore holdings, it'll let you search by collection or by material type. You can also look by decade or language. A lot of the Texas state materials are published in other languages. We have a large number of Spanish language materials. A lot of the state materials are being released in Vietnamese. So we are broadening the language offerings to see what our state is offering. And you can look at other types of coverage that are included as well. So if you're interested in what our attorney general had to say, then you're welcome to come in and have a search. And so once I search, you'll see that my results were limited greatly by then if I were to click on this first one, just for example, it'll bring up that particular item that if I scroll down, if I scroll down slightly, you can see that it will take me straight to the pages in which my search term was found. So if I click there, it'll give me even a little breakout of what and where the search query was located in the document. So that's a pretty handy tool to have. And then you can always get back to where you want it to be. They do a great job of including breadcrumbs to get you back where you need it to be. So the home will actually take you all the way back home. Some of the materials are available as a PDF download. Some are not. Some are individual to file, so that's something to keep in mind. You can usually request higher-resolution copies of materials. So if there's a photograph or a poster that you're interested in having a high-rise tip for, we can generally provide that to you. If you request a high-resolution test of a larger document, we're probably going to decline that request just because it is time-consuming. And we'll only manage to send individual files of multiple pages of a document. So even when we get requests about that, we had a request recently from a gentleman, I think, in Sweden, Switzerland, that's part of an algae research program. And there's an old ag bulletin that we have in the digital library, and he wanted just maybe a half a dozen pages with images that they could include on their websites. We were happy to accommodate that type of request. Are there questions? I can't see the chat, but I can figure out how to bring this up. There was one question about whether or not y'all are the official repositories of the state. It doesn't sound like it. It's not official, no. But we do have that memorandum of understanding, and it was renewed, I think, two years ago. And then Jim is – some of the questions are coming to me privately, but Jim was asking what platform is used for the portal. Good question. Is that actually a homegrown platform? It's all built in-house. We also have our metadata standards. So although if you look at one of our records, you can pull a double-encore version of our metadata, but ours is not strictly adherent to double-encore. So here you can come in to look at the metadata. But yes, everything is built in-house, and it was recently changed – the platform was changed and updated, so those of you that have seen it before probably looks different now. And I did pull up the digital library, and the search functionality in the digital library is exactly the same. So if you're familiar with one, you become quickly familiar with the other. I have to say the harvesting of all the walls is pretty impressive. We started that a couple of years ago, and it's become more automated. And there's some information on that Texas Laws and Resolutions page that discusses it. The first year we had that collection, we had a student really engaged in creating metadata for that particular collection. But since then they were able to automate it so that our students have to do very little if they need to pull with that collection. Are they just pulling from the website? Yes. Oh, wow. So I think from the Secretary of State's website. Okay. Let me see if I can. Sorry, you make everybody nauseous by scrolling. And since I'm not in digital projects, I know the public side of it. I know how to find stuff. I know why people might be interested in using it. But some of the tech on the back end I'm not necessarily with. I do know that we use characteristics to do harvesting calls. Or could you talk a little bit about how you use this in teaching and integration classes? Yes. Great question. We had a couple of years ago now. I can't remember a class that was interested in local issues. I think it was even an English class. I don't know how they ended up doing that. But we were able to use the portal to look at some of the more localized issues that might affect people. So in Texas, as I'm sure some of you might be experiencing in your home states, they're doing a lot to take away local control. And so there's a lot going on here. So that's a great way to show how local control is being affected by those that are working their way through the state legislature. With the Texas Publications collection, we've also been able to take on some collections from local libraries that are discarding materials. So within that text publications, we have a large number of San Antonio municipal documents. And so that's a great way to learn if you have any of San Antonio or interested in San Antonio local issues to see what the municipal government was producing. We also, when Dallas Public decided to discard their state collection, we had that collection as well. And so we are hoping to use that to backfill in what we are able to provide access to through the portal. So our collections mainly start 2008 when the depository program was sensitive. But having those Dallas collections will allow us to backfill, hopefully, to the historic materials that most of us might still have on ourselves. Plus we're hoping that maybe there's some Dallas municipal materials in there that we can provide access to. Locally, we've not been a municipal depository. We've left that to the public library. So I love local government and would love to have more of that included. This totally doesn't answer your question, but just was a tangent that I ran off on. So I think with regard to teaching, because the portal is so broadly inclusive of materials, so you could find information in the Laws and Resolutions archive or in Gamma's Laws or the Session Laws, and then be able to couple that with the newspaper collection so that you're getting not just what was happening in the legislature, but also what was being discussed at the local level, because we do have a lot more. We are constantly adding to the newspaper collection. And so it would be a great way to look at especially local and energy issues. The one big thing we get here is, of course, we're doing it at UNCG. It's the slavery stuff. Do you have a window into that issue? That's a great question, because the earlier Laws would post-date Civil War, but the newspapers certainly would perhaps include legacy information. And we have Martin Halbert, who's now at UNCG. That used to be our dean has interest in that topic as well. And then we have a local faculty member that has done some text mining of the newspapers to look for escaped slave notices and tracked those. And that's just another cool way to use these collections too, is that if you have the technological wherewithal or a really smart student to help you, you can come in and mine these collections and then use that information elsewhere. So this gentleman has actually created some maps that track some of the escaped slave project. And so it's really cool. His name is, I think, Sean Treat. So if anybody felt interested, you could Google him up and see what he's done in that area. But it's primarily been mining the newspapers for advertisements for escaped slaves. And then even because we have the full of the War of the Rebellion, that may be of interest to people that are doing history of slavery or history of Civil War. I encourage everybody to take some time and explore both the portal and the digital library. We have government information collection collections. Our department is known as Govern Vote Connection. And we have collections, so it's a map full in both that may be of great interest. Well, thank you very much, Robbie, for going through this. Yeah, thank you.