Digital Library Projects

• The George Bush Digital Library is being developed in collaboration with the George Bush Presidential Materials Project, a unit of the National Archives and Records Administration. The Bush Library materials are comprised of over 36 million pages of documents, 1.5 million photographs, 6,000 hours of audio/video, and 40,000 museum artifacts. The Center is working with the Bush Presidential Library archivists to make these materials widely available on the Internet. Center researchers will also be engaged in developing computer-based tools for use by the archivists as well as scholars studying the Bush presidency and administration.

• The CSDL is working with Professor Eduardo Urbina of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages on two digital library projects. The Cervantes International Bibliography On-line and the Anuario Bibliografico Cervantino, compiled with the assistance of an international team of collaborators, attempt to solve the problem of currency, thoroughness, and accessibility which now hampers research on Cervantes by publishing a comprehensive record of all significant books, articles, dissertations, reviews, and other scholarly materials related to his works and life.

• The TAMU Herbaria Project is being developed in conjunction with Professors Hugh Wilson and Jim Manhart of the Biology Department and Professor Steven Hatch of the Rangeland Ecology and Management Department. Over 250,000 dried plant specimens are housed in two herbaria on the Texas A&M Campus and provide a focus for study by the Bioinformatics Working Group, consisting of representatives of the CSDL and the herbaria. Current projects include the generation and networked dissemination of a unified database of herbarium specimen data, support for an extensive image gallery, examination of graphical map-based visualizations of plant distributions, and work, in conjunction with the BONAP project, towards computerization of a consistent national taxonomy.

• The CSDL is a participating member in the Flora of Texas Consortium. The goal of this project is to create a digital library containing approximately 6,000 taxa of native and naturalized vascular plants of Texas accessible via the Internet. These materials will be widely used in support of floristics, plant community studies, regional biotic histories and synonymies, distribution maps, and to provide access to illustrations and images of the flora of Texas. This project is being developed in conjunction with Professor Hugh Wilson of the Biology Department and Professor Steven Hatch of the Rangeland Ecology and Management Department.

• A digital image library is being developed in collaboration with the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service to deliver training information, course materials and research on the Internet. This library will contain more than 20,000 high-resolution color images and will be used to train meat inspectors.