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The Portal to Texas History

The Portal to Texas History is an online digital library of rare historical and primary source material from or about Texas, created and maintained by the University of North Texas Libraries.1 It gathers newspapers, maps, photographs, letters, books and government documents contributed by hundreds of partner institutions and private collectors, and since 2007 it has digitized Texas newspapers for national and state programs.12

Origins

The UNT Libraries began planning the Portal in 2002 as a gateway to historical materials held by private collectors and by partners such as libraries, museums, archives and historical groups, with sustainability over the long term as a stated design goal.2 A Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund grant from the State of Texas paid for the start of the project. By the end of 2004 the site was online with five partners and more than 6,500 digital images, and it was drawing about 1,000 visitors a month.2

Growth came through partnership. The Texas State Historical Association became the 100th partner in 2009, the 300th partner joined in 2016, and the 400th in 2018.2 The partner roll includes the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the Dallas Historical Society and the Texas General Land Office.3 The Portal describes its partners as including private and family collectors as well as libraries, museums, archives, churches and historical organizations.4

Newspapers

In 2007, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Portal began digitizing Texas newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program, whose pages appear both on the Portal and on the Library of Congress site Chronicling America. The same year the UNT Libraries established the Texas Digital Newspaper Program to serve communities whose papers fell outside the national program’s scope.2

The Portal’s own milestones record the growth: one million newspaper pages in 2013, 2.5 million in 2014, 4 million in 2016, 5 million in 2017, 6 million in 2018, 7 million in 2019 and 8 million in 2020.2 Its equipment history shows two routes to a page. A scanner bought in 2010 allowed in house digitization of newspapers from microfilm, and a planetary scanner bought in 2013 allowed physical newspapers to be scanned in full color.2 The difference between an image made from film and one made from paper is the subject of the essay on what a scan leaves out.

Other collections

The Portal’s search filters list newspapers, photographs, maps, letters, books, pamphlets, postcards, legal and legislative documents among its resource types.5 Notable additions recorded in its history include the Texas General Land Office’s historic county maps in 2010, Kennedy assassination materials in 2013 and the Barbara C. Jordan archives collection in 2015.2 The land office maps are cadastral maps of original surveys in each county, most of them manuscripts drawn by the office’s own draftsmen.6

Since 2006 the Rescuing Texas History program has offered digitization mini grants to institutions and individuals. It was first funded by the Summerlee Foundation and was conceived as a way to preserve items at risk from handling, age or poor storage.7

Scale and technology

In September 2026 the Portal’s statistics page reported 2,574,943 items made up of 23,660,723 files, 561 partners and 899 collections, with more than 179 million total uses.8 The site is built from open source components, including the Django web framework and the Solr full text indexer. It describes digital objects with the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard and a locally qualified Dublin Core called UNTL, and gives persistent links through Archival Resource Keys.9

Use on this site

The Portal appears in this site’s own research trail. The legislative directory used in tracing a delegate through three records cites a newspaper list found through the Portal. Record types of the kinds the Portal holds are examined in the studies of county marriage books, of newspaper advertising as economic evidence and of how photograph captions are tested. Related institutions are listed in the reference index.

References

  1. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, About the Portal. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, History. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  3. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, Partners. ↩

  4. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, Collaboration. ↩

  5. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, home page and search filters. ↩

  6. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, GLO Historic County Maps. ↩

  7. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, Rescuing Texas History. ↩

  8. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, Statistics. ↩

  9. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, Technology. ↩