We at Texas Digital Library are continually inspired by the amazing work going on within our member libraries and other organizations throughout Texas and the region – work that furthers TDL’s mission of ensuring long term, equitable access to digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory. We are honored to play a part in facilitating some of that work, and the TDL Awards are an opportunity for us to recognize the labor, creativity, and expertise of the library and archives workers in our community.
Every year through the TDL Awards, we honor individuals and groups that have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of digital libraries in various areas, including:
- Excellence
- Individual Impact
- Outreach
- Scholarly Communication Impact
- Student Excellence
- Trailblazer
- Service to the TDL consortium
Below are the words of the nominations for each awardee, anonymized and edited for context and length.
Outreach Award: Texas History for Teachers Project
The Outreach Award honors an individual or team that demonstrates a creative, innovative, and successful approach to increasing accessibility of digital information, promoting engagement among new users, or increasing public awareness of an organization’s digital collections.
The recipient of the 2026 Outreach Award is the Texas History for Teachers Project (TX4T), part of The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries.
The Texas History for Teachers Project receives this reward in recognition of their outreach efforts providing 4th and 7th grade social studies teachers access to the most complete, free, authoritative, evidence-based historical content and best-practices pedagogical resources for teaching Texas history. The Texas History for Teachers Project produces a full, free Texas history curriculum that combines the very best of historical knowledge, educational pedagogy, and accessibility with all content mapped to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.
The Texas History for Teachers launched a website to create and host a broad suite of historical and pedagogical resources curated by leading experts in the fields of history and education. The outcome is a website that offers teachers a central hub for accessing this historical, pedagogical, and highly accessible OERs presented at three learning levels. To date, the Texas History for Teachers Project has published 10 unit plans, 140 lessons comprising 6,035 downloadable curriculum documents at three learning levels, as well as audio MP3 files, Spanish-language files, and BANA Braille Word documents. TX4T also published 56 videos to support learning, as well as two Virtual Field Trips to bring historical sites across Texas into the classroom with engaging videos and 3-D virtual environments. Texas History for Teachers Project Connects librarians, historians, faculty, classroom teachers, and students all alike sharing open education resources and no cost curriculum.
Student Excellence Award: Jacob Lord
The Student Excellence Award honors an individual student who has demonstrated overall excellence and significant contributions to digital library practice.
The recipient of the 2026 Student Excellence Award is Jacob Lord, Lead Descriptive Metadata Student Assistant, at the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries.
Jacob Lord receives this award in recognition of their outstanding contributions to multiple projects across UNT Libraries. Jacob helped expand the National Museum of the Pacific War Project to over 20,000 items in the digital archive as of February 2026. They assisted with original cataloging, answered research questions, and performed advanced metadata work. In addition to this project, Jacob conducted in‑depth research on personal letters, uncovering previously unknown correspondents for museum archivists, and investigated the use of music in internment camps during WWII, now available in the UNT Digital Library.
Jacob also completed high‑level description work for the Harris and Eliza Kempner Collection. They made more than 3,000 edits to items in the Kempner collection, significantly improving search and discovery for users of the Portal to Texas History.
Last but not least, Jacob contributed to quality control for the College of Music Lab Jazz Charts Pilot Project. This project required careful review of multiple instruments and parts across 35 different songs, ensuring that each instrument and part was digitized and sequenced correctly. Jacob identified several errors before the items were uploaded to the UNT Digital Library.
Individual Impact Award: Matthew McEniry
The Individual Impact Award honors an individual who has made significant contributions and improvements related to the field of digital curation and digital scholarship. Nominees have demonstrated their impact on fostering the development of students and early career professionals, facilitating communities, building infrastructure, and/or contributing to scholarship.
The recipient of the 2026 Individual Impact Award is Matthew McEniry, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at Texas Tech University (TTU).
Since 2019, Matthew has collaborated with campus partners, the TTU community, and organizations across Lubbock to digitize, curate, archive, and make available physical records as digital resources. His work with the Digital Scholarship Lab spans at least 61 unique collections, totaling 1,477,092 images and 18,463 PDFs.
Matthew also serves as the library’s Data Management Liaison, where he has helped the university meet data management plan requirements and has consulted on 54 federal grant projects.
In addition to his work as Director and Data Management Liaison, Matthew launched the TTU Digital Scholarship Internship Program. This program has provided students interested in digital cultural heritage collections with hands-on experience in processing collections, digitizing materials, and creating descriptive metadata.
Excellence Award: Texas Digital Newspaper Program
The Excellence Award honors a specific project that demonstrates overall excellence in one or more areas of digital curation or digital scholarship practice.
The recipient of the 2026 Excellence Award is the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) at the University of North Texas Libraries.
The Texas Digital Newspaper Program partners with communities, publishers, and institutions to promote standards‑based digitization of Texas newspapers and to make them freely accessible through The Portal to Texas History. TDNP represents a major digital preservation effort to save and provide access to Texas newspapers from any location, any date, and any media format.
The newspapers available in TDNP span the earliest to the most recent dates and represent communities across the entire Texas state. Across 13 languages and 2,019 titles, the TDNP collection currently contains 1,105,863 newspaper issues, representing nearly half of all items available on The Portal to Texas History.
TDNP is far from a one‑person operation! It includes a dedicated team of staff members, specialists, and student assistants, who make up a large portion of the program’s workforce. Student assistants receive training in physical and digital curation, technological workflows for managing large file sets, and digital tools for processing and moving batch files. Through this hands-on experience, students gain valuable skills they carry into their future careers.
The Texas Digital Newspaper Program serves as a hub for newspaper preservation best practices, supporting partners both within Texas and beyond in their digitization efforts.
Scholarly Communication Impact Award: Sabrina Davis
The Scholarly Communication Impact Award honors an individual or group that has demonstrated leadership in or advancement of scholarly communication.
The recipient of the 2026 Scholarly Communication Impact Award is Sabrina Davis, Access & User Services Librarian at Texas Tech University (TTU).
Sabrina previously served as the TTU Libraries’ Open Educational Resources Librarian for four years. During that time, she advocated for and promoted OER adoption among faculty, students, and administrators. She served as an advisor to the TTU community on scholarly communication topics and used her Creative Commons certification to instruct and educate faculty about open licensing and open access. She consulted with faculty on Creative Commons and copyright concerns, helping them redesign their courses by creating or adopting OER and regularly guiding them toward open access options.
As one of her nominators noted, she built an Open Educational Resources department from the ground up. She partnered with the library, the provost’s office, and TTU Online Learning to develop the OER Adoption Incentive Grant, which funds OER projects across the university. Beginning in 2022, she awarded seven individual grants and by 2025, that number had grown to sixteen. This grant program continues into the 2026–2027 academic year.
Sabrina also built relationships with the TTU Follett Bookstore advisory committee and created an additional adoption incentive grant that supports approximately fourteen instructors each year in transitioning their courses to OER. These services empowered faculty to explore, adopt, and create OER independently.
TDL Service Award: Kristin Clark
The TDL Service Award is given at the discretion of TDL staff to recognize a member of our community who goes above and beyond in service to the TDL consortium.
This year’s TDL Service Award recognizes Kristin Clark, Director of Digital Strategies and Scholarship at Texas Woman’s University (TWU).
Kristin Clark was awarded for her exceptional contributions to the TDL community and her leadership in advancing digital preservation efforts. In early 2020, as she began reviewing TWU’s digital preservation strategies, she reached out to TDL to explore partnership opportunities. From the outset, she demonstrated a thoughtful and well-informed approach, bringing research, a clear understanding of institutional needs, and precise questions grounded in standards and best practices.
Over the following years, she collaborated with TDL staff to strengthen TWU’s digital preservation program and led the institution’s participation in TXHub, TDL’s Digital Public Library of America harvesting initiative. Through this work, she consistently demonstrated a commitment to informed decision-making and knowledge sharing.
Kristin’s leadership was also instrumental in establishing TDL’s Digital Preservation Peer-Assisted Audit and Assessment Program. In 2025, she launched a pilot initiative with TDL member peers, guiding participants through collaborative assessment activities that resulted in clearly defined goals for their local digital preservation strategies. Her mentorship helped lay the foundation for an ongoing program that supports institutions in building confidence, sharing expertise, and fostering professional connections.
TDL Awards recipients were honored at the Opening Plenary session of TCDL 2026. Learn more about the TDL Awards and read about past years’ winners.