TARO Colleagues,
We’ve had an eventful year and look forward to other exciting years as we work to revamp the TARO site! This year we were awarded an NEH grant to redesign the TARO site, we continued to expand our membership, participated in the Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) initiative, and held Steering Committee elections in November.
2020 Steering Committee
- Chair: Rebecca Romanchuk, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, rromnchk@tsl.texas.gov
- Vice Chair: Robert Weaver, Texas Tech University, robert.g.weaver@ttu.edu
- Secretary: Irene Lule, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, irenelule@utmail.utexas.edu
- At-large member: Ada Negraru, Southern Methodist University, anegraru@mail.smu.edu
- At-large member: Penny Castillo, Dallas Historical Society, Penny@dallashistory.org
- At-large member: Rachael Zipperer, University of North Texas, Rachael.Zipperer@unt.edu
- UT Libraries representative: Aaron Choate, UT Libraries, achoate@austin.utexas.edu
- Programmers: J.J. Bennett and Joanna Jackson, UT Libraries, lib-taro@austin.utexas.edu
- Immediate Past Chair: Carla O. Alvarez, Benson Latin American Collection, UT Libraries, c.alvarez@austin.utexas.edu
News and Accomplishments
NEH implementation grant
In March 2019, we announced that TARO was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This implementation grant will allow us to redesign the TARO site and provides funding to hire a software developer for 2 years and a metadata librarian for 1 year.
New member repositories
In 2019, we added new repositories as part of the New Member Initiative (Summerlee Foundation grant funded project). Under this project, repositories create Word finding aids, which are reviewed by our QA Finding Aid Subcommittee, and then sent to a vendor to get encoded. The EAD finding aids returned by the vendor are then reviewed by the QA team before uploading to the TARO server. Here is a list of our participating repositories to date, they have all signed a project agreement:
- Harris County Archives (2018)
- Menil Collection Archives (2018)
- Fort Worth Jewish Archives (2018)
- Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum Research Center (2018)
- Catholic Archives of Texas (2018)
- Lamar University (2018)
- Harlingen Public Library (2019)
- Dallas Historical Society (2019)
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019)
- University of Houston – Clear Lake (2019)
In November 2019, a batch of 29 EAD XML files from Harris County Archives, Catholic Archives of Texas, and Lamar University Archives and Special Collections were uploaded to TARO.
We continue to add repositories as part of our regular process. This year the Emily Fowler Central Library, Denton Public Library and the Texas Christian University (TCU) joined TARO. We also started the process with the Vertebrate Paleontology Archive at UT Austin.
It’s very exciting to share news of our increased membership! This truly shows how vibrant our community is because current members continue to add content to the TARO site and new repositories are joining.
Looking Ahead
- January-December: continue to recruit repositories to participate under the Summerlee funded New Member Initiative.
- February: Kick-off, in person meeting of the Steering Committee and Subcommittee chairs with the software developer.
- May 21/22: TARO Brown Bag at SSA in Denton, Texas.
- May 30: New TARO membership period deadline for July.
- May/June: Metadata librarian hired under the NEH grant will start work.
- November 30: New TARO membership period deadline for January
You can find other information about upcoming work and the TARO redesign timeline here.
Stay in Touch
TARO Today: https://sites.utexas.edu/taro/
TARO wiki: http://texastaro.pbworks.com/
TARO Best Practices Guidelines: http://bit.ly/2AIonsy
Thank you!!!
I want to thank Samantha Dodd and Paul Fisher for their two years of service as At-Large members of the Steering Committee.
We all have a role to play to ensure TARO continues to be a vibrant and dynamic community resource! You can continue to add your finding aids, help us recruit new repository members, get involved with one of the subcommittees, participate in the TARO Brown Bag at SSA, and/or provide your feedback as requested by TARO reps.
– Carla O. Alvarez
2019 Chair of the TARO Steering Committee
