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As with most successful inventions, the archive was started to solve a problem. It was the early 2000s, and Hartman, then head of the government documents department for UNT Libraries, had been using the computer in her Willis Library office to research primary sources that she knew were online but couldn’t locate through the then available internet search engines. “We need some way to pull Texas history content together in one place online where it’s easier to find,” Hartman remembers thinking.

While a searchable online archive of digitized historical materials seems like a no-brainer today in a world where computers and internet use are commonplace, Hartman’s dilemma came at a time before the release of the first iPhone when computer ownership wasn’t as ubiquitous, and content on the internet was more static with limited user interactivity on pages. At the beginning of the 21st century, libraries and archives were dabbling in digitization of their unique materials, but no one had established a searchable online collection with quality scans and centralized digital infrastructure integrity that would have longevity as a scholarly research resource.

Enter The Portal to Texas History. Thanks to Hartman and UNT Libraries staff — Mark Phillips (’04 M.S., ’20 Ph.D.) and Dreanna Belden (’03 M.S.) — UNT launched the transformative collection of Texas history and culture in 2004 as one of the first online research resources of its kind available to both academic researchers and history hobbyists.

“The brilliance of the Portal is that it started when it did, before the tremendous value of digitizing historical documents was so clear to people the way it is today,” says UNT professor Andrew Torget, who specializes in Texas history and digital scholarship. “What made Cathy Hartman’s decision to begin building the Portal during the early 2000s so remarkable is that absolutely no one else was doing anything like it.”

Twenty years later, the Portal logs more than one million uses each month. It includes more than two million historical materials from newspapers and photos to maps, books, letters and other primary sources with collaboration from public and private partners throughout the state and beyond. It’s been named among the top online resources for humanities education by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For the industry, it’s helped establish best practices for digitizing documents and artifacts for preservation and made innovations in ways to design back-end digital infrastructures to make the archive searchable and remain accessible in the internet’s changing landscape. For scholars, it’s been a game-changing tool for research and education by opening access to a trove of Texas history at the click of a mouse.

Saving History

From the beginning, preserving artifacts that are most at risk has been at the core of the Portal’s mission. Ana Krahmer, director of the Digital Newspaper Program in UNT Libraries, got a call from concerned newspaper publisher Jeff Latcham in the summer of 2017 which prompted a trip to Aransas Pass on the Texas Gulf Coast.

“He said, ‘We’re one hurricane away from these two newspaper titles being entirely lost,’” Krahmer remembers as she and Latcham stood in the city’s library where the newspapers were archived — walking distance to the beach. That fall, Hurricane Harvey hit, and the library’s building was destroyed. Luckily, the archives of The Aransas Pass Progress and The Ingleside Index already were safe at UNT awaiting digitization for the Portal, and Krahmer says Latcham wrote to her expressing his appreciation.

“Every page we digitize is not just one person’s life, but an entire community’s life,” Krahmer says. “The fact that we preserve it and give access to it for the long term means that we’re keeping these communities alive.”

To date, UNT has digitized more than 11 million pages of newspapers —making the Texas Digital Newspaper Program the largest collection of one state’s newspapers in the U.S. It’s work the university has been doing since 2006 when it completed a pilot project with Ferris Public Library to digitize early issues of The Ferris Wheel newspaper. Then in 2007, UNT became a Phase 2 institution in the National Digital Newspaper Program, a collaborative effort of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress that has funded Portal efforts to digitize Texas newspapers. And thanks to generous funding from The Tocker Foundation over the years, UNT has been able to digitize newspapers from the state’s most rural towns.

Federal and private grants have been a key factor in the Portal’s growth. In 2002, Hartman applied for and received a $197,410 state grant from Texas’ Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund that served as the seed funding to develop the infrastructure for the Portal. Since then, UNT has received millions of dollars in grants from the NEH, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and The Summerlee Foundation, among others.

Pivotal to securing many of those grants that have expanded the scope and reach of the Portal was Dreanna Belden, who wrote several grant applications over the years. “Grant funding has enabled us to do things that we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise and add a lot of features that our users wanted,” says Belden, who is now assistant dean for external partnerships at UNT Libraries. “The Portal and how it opens up access to unique content is part of our mission as an academic library at a Tier One research university.”

Collaborating for Preservation

Pulling up to local libraries, museums and archives in the Portal’s early years, Hartman would give her elevator pitch and then ask them if she could scan their materials for inclusion in UNT’s burgeoning online archive. Mark Phillips, now associate dean for digital libraries at UNT, accompanied Hartman on many of those trips in the beginning, putting his digitization expertise to work.

Some institutions welcomed the opportunity for digital preservation while others were skeptical at giving online access to their institution’s cultural assets. “It was a process,” says Hartman, who is now associate dean of libraries emeritus at UNT. “Many people didn’t buy in on those first travels. They worried that if people could access their materials online, they would have no reason to come visit in person. But the more content we got online, the more interest we had from others.”

Today, the Portal has more than 500 partners from large state institutions like the Texas Historical Commission and Texas State Library and Archives Commission to local genealogical, historical societies and museums as well as public and academic libraries.

On average, projects can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to digitize, depending on the collection’s size, its condition and the types of materials it includes. Jake Mangum (’13, ’14 M.S.), project development librarian at UNT, says the items come to the Portal in all sorts of ways, from boxes of materials saved by a community member to digital files prepared by an archival professional. The oldest item in the collection is a coin that dates to ancient Greece and the newest are present-day items, such as recent editions of the Texas Register, a publication outlining state agency rulemaking for Texas.

“When you think of history, a typical person is thinking a hundred or more years ago and less about 30 or 40 years ago, but history is being made every day,” says Mangum, who began working for UNT Libraries as a student and has been in his current role with the Portal since 2015.

Innovating Digitization Practices

When the Texas Historical Commission provided filing cabinet drawers full of film negatives, it sparked a change in the way the Portal digitized film materials. “We went from a flatbed scanner that would take anywhere from three to five minutes to scan the resolution that we would need to doing a lightbox overhead camera system taking a photograph of film negatives. That cut the time down to under a minute,” Mangum says.

That kind of innovation in the moment has always been part of the Portal’s operations. “Technology becomes obsolete very quickly, so it was a constant process of having to update cameras, computers, scanners and other equipment used in digitization work,” Hartman says. “There’s so much knowledge that had to be grown on site.”

The bulk of digitization for the Portal is carried out by a team of trained students from a variety of disciplines, each of them bringing their unique perspectives to the work. Mangum remembers one student who engineered a 3D-printed piece in The Spark makerspace at Willis Library to help flatten a collection of political buttons. Then, there was a student who had a knack for capturing the visual content from even the most weathered glass negatives “They would almost be faded to nothing and there was a photography student who could take those glass negatives and with a bit of work just bring out so much detail that you couldn’t see with just your eyes,” Mangum says.

Phillips himself started work at UNT Libraries as a graduate student in library science and then got hired on full time as a digital projects librarian in 2004. Now he manages the Portal’s operation, including 22 full-time staff and up to 30 student assistants.

“We tend to retain students for a long time, so you really get to know people and they really develop a strong set of skills,” Phillips says. “It’s a nice learning opportunity for them and some have even decided to pursue careers in digital libraries or cultural heritage after working here.”

Phillips developed the digital infrastructure for not just the Portal, but the entire digital libraries at UNT. “Mark is one of the most gifted innovators. He had a strong vision for what a technology infrastructure needed to be very early on,” Hartman says. “And together with the support from UNT Libraries technology staff who brought up the many servers and storage required to host the Portal, we were able to sustainably grow and be successful.”

The coding and web infrastructure Phillips envisioned for the Portal is based on open-source components, many of which are made available for use by other libraries. He and his collaborators have authored many publications and papers and have presented nationally and internationally about the development of the technical infrastructure. His work to make library content more accessible to the public and his contributions to the library profession earned him the American Library Association’s Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award in 2021.

“It’s been really great to be able to see how the work that we do at the local level feeds into these national and international efforts,” says Phillips, who often gets contacted by other universities and institutions around the nation with inquiries about how to launch their own digital archives.

Opening Doors for Research and Education

Getting access to historical materials can be a barrier to research. Scholars need funds and the time to travel to cultural institutions that may hold the key materials for their project. For Torget, the Portal has changed his research into early Texas in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Even before joining the faculty at UNT, Torget discovered a digitized copy of Gammel’s Laws of Texas on the Portal as a graduate student in Virginia. The rare volumes of books from the 1890s became a fundamental source for both his first book and an online digital project about the movement of slaveholders in the Republic of Texas.

“It would be hard to overstate the incredible size and scale of what the Portal has put together,” Torget says. “For historical researchers like me who do this professionally, or for students and even people who are doing genealogy casually, access to the sheer mass of materials that the Portal has managed to accumulate means that you can find valuable sources about whatever you’re looking for, whether that is in newspapers, a memoir, or another source you never knew existed.  And that’s the magic of the Portal — it helps you find sources and make connections that you didn’t even know were out there.”

By the Numbers

It's a valuable tool for educators both at UNT and across the state. Torget and many other professors integrate the archive into their curriculum for foundational freshman courses all the way up to graduate-level work. Since 2005, the Portal also has provided resources for K-12 educators to use its primary sources in their teaching. Through the Texas History for Teachers program, educators have access to lesson plans, video lectures and student activities to make the Portal’s digital artifacts come alive in the classroom.

“I’ve had scholars tell me, ‘I use the Portal every day’ or ‘The Portal has completely changed the way I do research on Texas history.’ That’s when you know you’ve made a real impact in the field,” Hartman says.

But even with as many items as there are available online now, Phillips knows there are still millions more that can be added. A large-scale project currently underway, for instance, is digitizing thousands of items from the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg.

“The Portal continues to be a place where many researchers come both at UNT and around the world and there’s constantly content they’re asking for that we don’t have. Then, there are still many institutions that don’t have the resources to make this kind of content available online for the long term, so we can provide that service to them,” Phillips says. “There’s still plenty of work to be done, and we’re up for the challenge of making this historical content remain accessible for research for even more decades to come.”