============================ Digital Collections Services ============================ The Digital Collections Services unit supports the creation, management, and dissemination of the Texas A&M University community's scholarly, creative, and cultural heritage materials. We provide modern repository and publishing services to ensure long-term access to the university's digital assets. A public-facing overview of our services is also available on the Libraries website: `library.tamu.edu/digital-collections `_. ---------- Who We Are ---------- Digital Collections is currently organized around two areas of repository stewardship, with two additional positions being added to grow our technical and AI/ML capacity: * **Digital Collections Librarian** - stewards the systems and workflows that manage digitized and born-digital cultural heritage materials, including rare books, oral histories, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, maps, and newspapers held by Special Collections. * **Institutional Repository Administrator** - stewards OAKTrust and the systems that manage the University's scholarly output. * **Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Librarian** *(new)* - leads the integration of AI and ML tools into library workflows, with a focus on metadata creation and enrichment, automated captioning pipelines, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for digital collections. This role partners closely with Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) to deploy and scale these tools responsibly. * **Repository Applications Librarian** *(new)* - designs, develops, and maintains the digital repository infrastructure behind both our cultural heritage and institutional repository systems, including metadata pipelines, ingest workflows, and web archiving efforts built on Browsertrix. Together, this team designs, builds, and maintains the repository infrastructure, metadata practices, and emerging technologies that allow the Libraries to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials at scale. ------------------------------------- OAKTrust and Institutional Repository ------------------------------------- `OAKTrust `_ is Texas A&M University's open access digital repository for collecting, preserving, and sharing the scholarly output of the University and its partners, such as Texas A&M AgriLife and the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX). It expands access to research, ensures long-term preservation of digital works, supports evolving models of scholarly communication, and strengthens community understanding of the impact of higher education. Related resources: * `Explore OAKTrust `_ * `Share Your Scholarship `_ * `Repository Policies `_ ------------------------------ Open Access Journal Publishing ------------------------------ The Libraries partner with the `Texas Digital Library `_ to help Texas A&M editors and journal teams launch, host, and manage fully open-access journals. We provide guidance on editorial oversight, accessibility, and best practices to increase the visibility and impact of scholarly publishing. Related resources: * `Discover Our Open Access Journals `_ * `Start a Journal `_ * `DOI Support `_ -------------------------------------- Exhibits and Other Digital Collections -------------------------------------- Historically, our cultural heritage program has used a diverse set of tools to deliver teh unique historical and archival materials held by Texas A&M's Special Collections. These collections include rare books, oral histories, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, maps, and newspapers. Our digital collections and exhibits make these resources accessible online, enabling discovery, research, citation, and creative reuse. Related resources: * `Browse Digital Collections and Exhibits `_: This is how cultural heritage collections have been traditionally served. * `TAMU Digital Collections `_: the future way we will provide access. -------------------- Growing Our Capacity -------------------- Two new positions are expanding what Digital Collections can offer: **AI and machine learning services.** We are building AI/ML-driven solutions for metadata creation and enrichment, automated captioning, and large-scale text and media processing, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for advanced querying of digital collections. This position will ensure our AI and Machine Learning practices are scalable, sustainable, and used responsibly, and is guided by policies and best practices developed with library and campus stakeholders. **Repository applications and web archiving.** We are investing in the repository applications that power both our cultural heritage and institutional repository systems — improving discovery, access, preservation, and interoperability, and streamlining metadata and ingest workflows across platforms. This includes new web archiving capabilities using Browsertrix to capture ephemeral or at-risk web-based cultural heritage materials, in collaboration with curators and collection owners.