Partners and Stakeholders

Digital Collections does not operate in isolation. Our systems, projects, and services depend on ongoing collaboration with other units across the Libraries and University, as well as external partners in the broader scholarly communication and cultural heritage community. This page identifies who those partners are and where to learn more about how we work with them.

Internal Library and Campus Partners

  • Cushing Memorial Library and Archives (Special Collections) — the source of most of our cultural heritage collections: rare books, oral histories, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, maps, and newspapers. See Cultural Heritage Collections for collection-level detail.

  • Center for Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) — submits Digital Humanities project requests that are routed through the DPMT service track for digitization and technical support on materials not owned by the Libraries or University.

  • Technology Services — a campus partner on infrastructure and deposit processes for some of our legacy systems. We interact with them through the help desk and on Slack.

  • Cataloging and Metadata: is responsible for all descriptive metadata for all projects.

  • Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) — provides the computational infrastructure behind some of our AI/ML initiatives, including metadata enrichment and captioning pipelines.

  • Academic departments and colleges — content and subject-matter partners for specific collections and projects, such as the College of Medicine and the Department of Hispanic Studies. See Cultural Heritage Collections for examples.

  • Digital Project Management Team (DPMT) — the cross-functional team that reviews and prioritizes incoming digital project requests. Any stakeholder proposing a new digital collection or project works with DPMT first; see the DPMT process documentation for how project intake works.

  • Project stakeholders and curators — the individuals and departments who submit project proposals (“IDEA Documents”), select and describe materials, and make access-rights decisions for their collections.

External Partners

  • Texas Digital Library (TDL) — a consortium we partner with to host and support open-access journal publishing through Open Journal Systems (OJS). See tdl.org. For questions, use the help desk form.

  • Texas A&M AgriLife and the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) — University partners whose scholarly output is collected and preserved in OAKTrust alongside the University’s own.

  • EZID / California Digital Library — the persistent identifier service we use to mint and manage ARKs. See ezid.cdlib.org.

  • Crossref: the persistent identifier service we use to mint and manage DOIS. See crossref.

  • The DSpace community (Lyrasis, 4Science, and other contributors) — the open-source community behind DSpace, the platform underlying OAKTrust. We currently use vanilla DSPACE.

  • The Archipelago community (Metropolitan New York Library Council and the broader GLAM community) — the open-source community behind Archipelago Commons, our digital asset management platform for cultural heritage materials. See Products and Product Ownership for more on this relationship.

  • IIIF Constortium: a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. It’s also an international community developing and implementing the IIIF APIs. IIIF is backed by a consortium of leading cultural institutions, of which we are one. See iiif

  • AllMaps: makes it easier and more inspiring to curate, georeference and explore collections of digitized maps. We are a contributing institution. See allmaps

  • Fromthepage: a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries where volunteers transcribe, index, and describe historic documents. We are a participating member. See fromthepage

Working With Our Team

  • To propose a new digital project, start with the DPMT intake process rather than contacting Digital Collections staff directly — see the DPMT process documentation and Department and Supervisor Onboarding Checklist for where that fits into a new team member’s first week.

  • To weigh in on the direction of a specific application or platform, reach out to that system’s Product Owner. See Products and Product Ownership.

  • For unfamiliar terms or system names used above, see Glossary.