Abstract
Purpose
The Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) supports newspaper preservation and access for any title in Texas, from any date, any location and representing any community. As an active member of the Texas Press Association, TDNP also supports large-scale preservation of born-digital newspaper PDF issues for member publishers. This paper aims to explore how the early days of TDNP built a strong foundation of collaboration and support for large-scale preservation projects, including support for preserving a state press association PDF newspaper collection.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is a case study of a collaborative endeavor to create a large-scale, statewide digital newspaper preservation hub in Texas. This paper details how individual partnerships led to new and larger partnerships. Figures and tables represent numbers of partner institutions served, numbers of newspapers preserved and screenshots of how these items appear within collections on the digital repository environment of The Portal to Texas History. This paper concludes with recommendations for groups interested in developing their own collaborative projects.
Findings
As a case study, the data explored include numbers of partnering institutions, materials contributed by partnering institutions and how these numbers help to forward the TDNP agenda.
Practical Implications
The final recommendations are lessons learned through collaboration, and the implications are real-world advice from the partners developed through the TDNP.
Originality/value
Hosting over 3.25 million pages of newspapers, the TDNP has become an enormous hub of newspaper preservation in Texas, and it is unique in the numbers of partners it supports and the numbers of pages it is able to host for free access via The Portal to Texas History. This paper is intended to help other groups across the world build their own collaborative preservation efforts, and it offers pragmatic advice derived from hands-on experience.