The Portal’s partners include private and family collectors as well as institutions such as libraries, museums, archives, churches, and historical commissions. Placing materials on The Portal to Texas History is a great way to provide free public access to people wanting to connect with your information and materials. Working with us also means that an electronic copy of your material is digitally preserved for the long-term—peace of mind in case your physical collection is ever threatened by disaster, deterioration, or theft.

Partnership Models

We offer a variety of partnership models based on who is responsible for key elements of the work. The partnership model is one factor that affects your costs for the project. As you think about what portion of the work you might want to undertake in-house, you will want to learn About Metadata and About Scanning Your Materials.

Model 1

• You provide information about your collection, prepare and ship your materials

• We scan and describe your items (create metadata), and process, upload, and digitally preserve your final content

Model 2

• You provide information about your collection, prepare and ship your materials, and describe your items (create metadata)
• We scan your items, and process, upload, and digitally preserve your final content

Model 3

• You provide information about your collection, scan your items, and send the digital images to us
• We describe your items (create metadata), and process, upload, and digitally preserve your final content

Model 4

• You provide information about your collection, scan your items, send the digital images to us, and describe your items (create metadata)
• We process, upload, and digitally preserve your final content

Funding

In most cases, funding is needed to pay for staff and equipment to complete your project.

Partner-funding

• You can use your own funds to pay your portion of the digitization costs.

Grant-funding

• Third Party Grants–You may be able to obtain funding from a private foundation or granting agency.
• Portal to Texas History Mini-Grants–Periodically we are able to offer competitive mini-grants for digitization of materials that meet specific thematic and/or physical criteria. Please see the Funding Opportunities page for more information.

Your Responsibilities as a Partner

We’re delighted to have you as a partner. In order to ensure that we can handle your materials in the safest and most efficient manner, we ask that you:

• Complete the project agreement (Word | PDF) and/or online rights agreement (Word | PDF)
• Obtain permissions and copyright clearances if needed for your materials
• Carefully follow the instructions on this site for documenting and handling your collection
• Comply with Scanning Standards and Metadata Input Guidelines
• Make reasonable progress on completing your metadata records (applicable only to partnership models 2 and 4)
• Communicate your needs and concerns to us
• Promptly pick up your finished physical materials–usually within three weeks (applicable only to hand-delivered materials)
• Pay when invoiced (applicable only to partner-funded projects)

Our Responsibilities to You

Our goal is to efficiently digitize and process your collection so that it is available in the Portal as soon as possible. We will:

• Keep the partnership agreement on file
• Accurately account for your items while they’re in the Digital Projects Lab
• Safely handle and store your physical materials
• Communicate our questions or concerns about your project
• Send you status updates as requested
• Provide you with information about using our systems
• Furnish you a digital copy of your materials
• Promptly ship your finished physical materials to you (applicable only to materials originally delivered by shipping)
• Invoice you for cost recovery (applicable only to partner-funded projects)
• Maintain your collection in the Portal