OVERVIEW: In 2015 the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) received approximately seven terabytes (TB) of electronic records from the outgoing administration of Texas Governor Rick Perry. This marked the first official transfer of electronic records to TSLAC and was coupled with financial support from the governor’s office to create a digital archive. In 2016 TSLAC received an appropriation from the Texas Legislature to continue the development of the Texas Digital Archive (TDA). As of January 1, 2025, the TDA has over 250 TB of data and over 36 million digital objects.
This presentation will look back at the lessons learned in the development and implementation of the Texas Digital Archive over the last ten years centering on:
- Invisible Labor - From developing finding aids to creating metadata for the collections, getting things ready for ingest into the TDA requires lots of work outside of the digital archive. We will discuss the issues and challenges of arrangement and description, the work of digitization and getting the files ready for the TDA, and how we standardized several metadata schemas into a workable solution.
- Relationship Building – We will talk about how we work with our information technology (IT) staff to deal with differences and changes the IT needs of the TDA present and will discuss how we are working to overcome years of not having the resources to accept electronic records and getting agencies to transfer records into the TDA.
- Policies and procedures – Archives and records management policies and procedures drive information management programs. We will discuss how we developed internal policies governing metadata, naming and date conventions, transfer methods, and handling electronic media.
- Sustainability and investment – To make any preservation solution last it needs to be sustainable. We will talk about how we navigate having to rebid the digital archive every five years and outline the request for proposal process. Long-term sustainability is all about storage and how you need more storage than you think. Access is preservation and we will discuss our efforts to make the TDA more visible and more important to our agency, the state, and the people of Texas.
This presentation is being offered as a case study in building and maintaining a sustainable and growing digital archiving solution. While focused on a state government solution, the target audience is anyone wants to build or sustain a digital archive.
Benefits to NAGARA membership would include identifying “hidden” needs and costs in developing a digital archive; demonstrating the advantages of developing relationships with IT personnel and state agencies; showcasing the types of policies and procedures needed to maintain a digital archive; outlining strategies for making the archive sustainable over time.
GARA CERTIFICATE CORE COMPETENCY AREA: "Archives and Long-term Preservation"
TARGET AUDIENCE: Federal, Tribal, State, Local, and Public Institutions of Higher Learning
FOCUS AREAS: Archives, Technology Tools
PRESENTER: Mark J. Myers, Electronic Records Archivist, Texas State Library and Archives Commission