The University of North Texas Libraries received just over $1 million in grants and contracts in 2011 to research the digital preservation field and to digitize content.

When the Texas State Legislature passed House Bill 51 in 2009, UNT accepted the challenge to become a national research university. Already recognized by the Carnegie Foundation as a research university in the high research activity category, UNT proposed a new 10-year, two-step strategic plan for research in April 2010 with the goal of obtaining the prestigious Tier One status.

Mark Phillips, assistant dean for digital libraries, said UNT is trying very hard to bring about $1 million in grants and contracts each year to coincide with the University’s Tier One research initiatives.

Phillips said an annual goal that size is uncommon for a university library.

“Very few libraries around the country are as involved in receiving grant funding and going out and trying to bring in contracts that create content and provide access,” Phillips said. “We’re kind of in an odd boat with trying to do so much.”

Expanding external research funding is a major component of the challenge. UNT plans to emphasize cyber security and web archiving on all levels. UNT Libraries has devoted itself to improving in terms of services, collections and facilities by 2015, according to Dr. Martin Halbert, UNT’s dean of libraries.

The July 2011 Ranking Web of World Repositories, which measures global visibility and impact, ranks UNT’s Digital Library as 12th in the U.S. and 51st in the world.

The Background

The UNT Libraries digitized beginnings stemmed from its initial involvement in web archiving in 1996.

Early on, UNT collected defunct federal websites and its contents before anyone else thought to do so. Thus, the CyberCemetery, an archive of government websites that are no longer in operation, was created.
According to Phillips, digitization projects were initiated from that point onward. Heavy investment at UNT in data management and preservation began in 2003.

Phillips said digitizing became a priority to the university once a digital future became apparent at the turn of the millennium. UNT created its Digital Library not long after and has advanced its contents ever since.

According to its website, the UNT Digital Library aids the university’s “research, creative and scholarly activities and showcases content from the UNT Libraries collections.”

There are two major interfaces of the Digital Library: The Portal to Texas History and the UNT Digital Library. Both collections comprise of 225,000 items total – the equivalent to six million pages of content, Phillips said.
During the fall 2011 semester alone, 1.3 million uses of the content within the UNT collections were heavily utilized, he said.

The Portal to Texas History focuses on Texas history. There are over 200 partners across Texas that work in collaboration toward expanding and digitizing the content in the collection. The UNT Digital Library is more UNT focused and contains content that does not fit into the Portal to Texas History criteria, Phillips explained.

Halbert, whose office wall displays four framed “teachable moments” from the Portal to Texas History collection, said very few other states have done a project like it. The UNT Digital Library is noted in the country for its statewide initiative he said, but that is not to say there are not other statewide digitization efforts within Texas.

“I don’t think any of them are as good as ours,” Halbert said. “I don’t think any of them are comprehensive in terms of the access to historic state newspapers, for example.”

Putting it in Perspective

Texas Women’s University has also started an initiative to digitize its own Women’s Collection. However, Special Collections Coordinator Kimberly Johnson said TWU has nothing to the scale and size that UNT has.
Johnson said TWU’s collection has 8,000 items online, compared to UNT’s 225,000. She speculated only 10 percent of TWU’s current archives to be digitized. While the UNT Digital library employs 18 full-time employees, TWU only employs three. Although TWU has its own digital initiatives it is working on, TWU has contributed some of its Women’s Collection to UNT’s Portal to Texas History.

The city of Denton’s public library has also collaborated with UNT by contributing county histories, photos, letters and books, to name a few. Leslie Couture, a special collections librarian at the Emily Fowler Library, said she appreciated UNT starting locally when it began the Portal to Texas History initiative. Couture said the public library gave UNT all of the most important materials it had.

Gaining access to the UNT Digital Library, as well as TWU and Denton’s public library, is open to all. Phillips said UNT information is discoverable by anybody; however, a minimal portion is restricted due to copyright issues. For example, the College of Music recordings would only be available to the UNT community.

Although they have different plans for digital initiatives and ways of achieving those initiatives, UNT, TWU and the Denton public library all share a common thread: all said more resources are needed to keep up with technological demands; they constantly maximize all of their resources.

The Issue at Hand

Since 2000, UNT Libraries has received nearly $5.5 million in grants and contracts toward various digitization initiatives.

Despite the millions received over the last decade, Halbert said UNT Libraries are underfunded. He said a more balanced budget model needs to be established in order to help the Libraries receive the funds needed to expand its research capacity.

“Half a million people come in our doors every year; millions of people access all of these digital resources we have, but for research efforts and targets we have as a university, we’re going to have to come up with more money,” Halbert said.

UNT students currently pay $16.50 per semester credit hour for the library student use fee, with a cap at the 15 credit hour mark. That amount has remained unchanged since 2004. In the face of growing research initiatives and stretched resources, Halbert would like to see the fee increased.

“Grant fees have to fund grant activities,” Halbert said. “You can’t fund bread and butter things, keep the lights on, with grants. You have to have basic infusions of funds from the University and specifically on research initiatives.”

Dreanna Belden, assistant dean for external relations, shared Halbert’s position.

She said grant money alone does not cover all the resources the UNT Libraries need and the way the library is currently funded, compared to the University’s peers, is a critical issue.

“In comparison to other Texas institutions, we don’t spend the money for [UNT] Libraries or invest in [UNT] Libraries at the level most other Top Tier universities do,” Belden said.

Ninety-eight percent of the UNT Libraries current budget model comes exclusively from the student use fee, placing a burden on semester enrollment totals.

Belden said the way enrollment has been, UNT Libraries receives between a two and three percent increase every year, whereas the millions spent on electronic resources grows over eight percent every year. “It’s basically eating itself up,” Belden said. “It’s been a problem for quite some time.”

The 2010-2011 fiscal year was the first time UNT’s Libraries budget had a negative pullback, Belden said. According to the University’s website, UNT’s Libraries budget decreased from $17,508,295 in the 2011 fiscal year to $16,099,726 in the 2012 fiscal year. Belden noted the number of credit hours signed up for during the fall 2011 semester was less than that of the spring.

“[The budget] wasn’t cut; it’s all based on enrollment,” Belden said. “Enrollment fell this semester and that’s where [funding] all directly comes from.

The Proposal

Halbert, Belden and other UNT Libraries associates met with UNT’s Student Government Association on Nov. 30 to discuss the problem at hand.

Halbert presented the statistics, highlighting the positive changes the Libraries have made and what plans are in the works for more access. He also presented comparisons of other Texas University’s libraries budget funding and where UNT stands among them.

Halbert asked the SGA to consider a budget increase proposal spelled out in five goals.

Those goals include high quality library services in line with top tier ambitions, a shared burden of increased funding, a 50-50 split between students and university resources, a slow increase of the student use fee of no more than $1 per year over multiple years, expenditures per student at UNT matching or exceeding Texas Tech’s library within five years, and an evaluation of the results after five years.

The SGA understood the urgency of the presentation, Devin Axtman, director of student affairs for the SGA, said in an e-mail interview. The SGA will ultimately wait until official numbers come out for the 2011-2012 academic fiscal year before informing students about the specifics of an increase, Axtman said.

“SGA will take into consideration student opinion every step of the way,” Axtman said. “We would have events, whether it would be Senate meetings or special events, with opportunities for students to ask library administrators questions.”

Axtman said he personally understands the need for an increase. He said nobody likes paying for an increase, but sometimes it is necessary.
If a compromise cannot be reached, Halbert said cuts to library services and maintenance, along with major impacts on collection development, would be affected.

Phillips said it is a constant battle between wants and needs when it comes to resources.

“This is pretty common with almost all researchers: we try to make our dollars go about as far as they possibly can, because we never have enough,” Phillips said.

Halbert said if UNT does not at least approach Texas Tech University in library expenditures per student, it would not be viewed as a major research institution contender in the North Texas region or at the state level.

“If we really want to be a top-tier, top quality student experience,” Halbert said, “than we’ve got to provide the services, the information resources, that students need for their learning outcomes to have a good experience in learning.

— Candace Lindsey / Contributing Writer, North Texas Daily