Broadening Access to Books on Texas and Oklahoma: Application Cover Page and Narrative for Grant Application for Humanities Open Book Program Page: 5

                                
5

with special emphasis on Texas history and culture, military history, western history,
music and music biography, folklore, multicultural topics, natural and environmental
history, and culinary history. The UNT Press has nominated 66 books, all published on
behalf of the Texas Folklore Society, all of which are part of a numbered series. Of
these, 3 are out of print, and 31 are available only in hardcover. All are already online
in the UNT Digital Library and the Portal to Texas History.
" Portal to Texas History: Launched in 2004, the Portal to Texas History is a digital
library hosted by the UNT Libraries now containing over half a million objects digitized
from originals contributed by over 240 Texas libraries, museums, and historical
societies. Staff of the UNT Libraries have nominated 39 books already digitized and
available in the Portal to Texas History aside from those nominated by the TSHA or
the UNT Press. Of these, 19 were nominated based on their worthiness as historical
sources, and the remaining 20 were selected because they exhibited the highest
usage of all books in the Portal to Texas History.
In addition to the titles nominated by the organizations listed above, the UNT Libraries
Scholarly Publishing Services proposes inclusion in the project of 5 titles to be determined
once the grant starts. The UNT Libraries publish works of scholarship, both new and reissued,
under the Eagle Editions imprint. This is a for-fee service offered to members of the UNT
community; fees vary depending on the services desired. As part of this project, the UNT
Libraries will offer subventions to cover the Eagle Editions E-Book Creation fee for up to five
out-of-print humanities-related books ready to convert along with those nominated by the
other organizations.
Dissemination
A number of the proposed books have already been scanned and made free to read online,
with searchable text created using OCR, in one or more of the digital library platforms hosted
by the UNT Libraries-the Gateway to Oklahoma History, Portal to Texas History, or UNT
Digital Library. These platforms receive nearly a million unique visits per month in total,
largely from commonly used web search engines. However, there is no way to read this
digitized material offline. Since the total cost to produce an EPUB file of a book page scans
and OCR text is lower than for a book for which no form of digitization has taken place yet, the
UNT Libraries are able to propose conversion of more books in total for this grant than if none
had been previously digitized.
The ebooks, in both EPUB and Kindle formats, will be made free to download in the interface
that allows readers to browse and search the scanned version of the book. In addition, the
UNT Libraries will catalog the digital versions of the books included in the grant, adding
records to the UNT Library Catalog and to WorldCat.
Furthermore, titles proposed by the UNT Libraries, plus a handful of titles from the UNT Press
and the TSHA, will be made available for sale again using print-on-demand technology.