Purpose – To help information professionals learn about issues and considerations in portal building. Design/methodology/approach – The University of North Texas Libraries’ Portal to Texas History provides long-term storage and access to digital copies of important original materials illuminating Texas's past. This paper describes the development of the Portal technology and content – presenting objectives, processes, and future plans – and defines the larger goal of facilitating collaboration among resource-holding institutions. Findings – Practical aspects of creating and populating the portal include development of specifications and standards, construction of an application framework, selection of content, production of metadata, and refinement of user interfaces. Planned future enhancements to the Portal will augment sustainability and provide added value for users. The portal project may also serve as a catalyst for wider collaborative efforts in digitization. Originality/value – The Portal to Texas History project's experiences described in this paper will inform other stakeholders seeking to develop innovative uses of Portal technologies.

Considering the value of dates in the life cycle of the digital resource, capturing and storing dates metadata in a structured way can have a significant impact on information retrieval. There are a number of format conventions in common use for encoding the date and time values; the Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) is one of the most expressive. This paper presents results of an exploratory analysis of representation of dates in over 8 million metadata records from one of the largest digital aggregators, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and compares it to EDTF specifications. This benchmark study provides empirical data – at both the individual provider level and the group level (content hubs or service hubs) – about the overall level and patterns of application of date metadata in DPLA metadata records in relation to EDTF.

By Mark E. Phillips and Kristy K. Phillips, Published on