Mission driven. Service oriented. Member (em)powered.
Mission and Vision | Strategies | Values | History
See Strategic Plan for 2021-2023 for more info.
Mission
A collaborative consortium based in Texas and rooted in higher education, the Texas Digital Library builds capacity among its membership for ensuring equitable access to and preservation of digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory.
Vision
The Texas Digital Library (TDL) will become a nationally recognized leader as a provider of essential, equitable, and sustainable infrastructure for libraries and cultural memory organizations, and its efforts will help to transform society through the radical broadening of access to valuable research, teaching, and cultural heritage materials.
As a center for expertise and excellence, it will be a sought-after partner by other consortia, institutions, and funders, and will serve as a model of community-based collaboration in service of Open Access, Open Data, Open Education, and digital preservation.
TDL’s success will be bound to that of our member institutions and their workers. Through our collective efforts, we will prepare and empower a diverse and inclusive library workforce to meet the challenges of the moment by amplifying their unique contributions, enabling sustainable workloads, and fostering mutually supportive communities.
Strategies
- Strategy #1: Partner with members and like-minded external partners to broaden access to scholarly, cultural heritage, and educational materials.
- Strategy #2: Create value for members through shared resources.
- Strategy #3: Commit to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in order to ensure broad and equitable access to our tools, content, and communities.
- Strategy #4: Strengthen sustainability through membership growth and diversification of funding sources.
Values
Mission driven
We spread the cost of shared infrastructure among members who pool resources to expand access to research, storage, and curation tools for students and faculty. We are not a commercial vendor but are a partner, committed to our mission of enabling access and preservation of cultural heritage and scholarly materials for academic libraries.
Service oriented
We connect under-sourced, under-staffed libraries to affordable, open source technology solutions with secure storage and persistent services. We focus on providing services that meet real needs of libraries as effectively and quickly as possible.
Member (em)powered
Our members fund us, govern us, and provide oversight and direction to our work. But we also rely on members to power our work in other ways. TDL members to assist us with training efforts, lead committees and working groups, and lend their expertise to the technology-focused work of our staff.
We see our work as facilitative, enabling, and empowering. We aren’t doing the on-the-ground management of digital repositories – local librarians at our member institutions do that important work. Instead, we provide empowering infrastructure, training, and community development that makes that work possible in a more cost-effective way.
Open3 : Open Access, Open Source, Open & Transparent
There are three forms of openness that underpin our work:
- The services we provide facilitate the Open Access (OA) of materials – particularly of research and scholarship. OA is a foundational value of the Texas Digital Library.
- We both use and produce open source software applications – meaning software whose code is made freely available to all under an open source license. And we support the open source communities like Lyrasis and PKP that create the software we use.
- We strive to be open and transparent with our decision-making, our documentation, and our work.
History
The Texas Digital Library began in 2005 as a partnership between four of Texas’s largest Association of Research Libraries (ARL) universities: the University of Houston, Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas at Austin. TDL now represents large and small institutions from every region of Texas and has expanded to institutions outside of Texas. Any institutions are encouraged to seek membership in the consortium.
Though TDL staff works fully remote, we are headquartered at the Perry Castañeda Library on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Texas Digital Library would like to acknowledge that we are housed on the Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what now is called North America. Moreover, Texas Digital Library would like to acknowledge the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo / Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa, and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas.
More Information
If you are interested in collaborating with the Texas Digital Library or would like additional information about joining our member consortium, please email us at info@tdl.org.