West Texas History Project Awarded Grant to Create Historical Resources

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., granted Angelo State University $69,999 to fund a project that will create informational resources focusing on history for schools and academic programs.

Angelo State will use the grant to fund a project titled "All History is Local: Celebrating the People of West Texas." Faculty and students in disciplines related to arts and humanities, such as history and political science, will work together to combine LOC digital collections with Angelo State’s collections to create teaching and learning materials, including informational stories and an interactive map. The resulting digital resources will feature the lived experiences of communities of color, specifically incorporating national and global themes and stories into West Texas’ cultural narrative.

For local and surrounding K-12 schools, Angelo State’s history project will facilitate lesson-planning by helping teachers incorporate digital primary source materials into their curriculum. Angelo State students and faculty assisting with the project will additionally host an outreach event and workshop to support K-12 teachers and faculty who teach courses in Angelo State’s ethnic studies minor.

“Funding from the LOC will be the catalyst that builds a new digital tool to bring stories, images and geospatial design to the LOC's primary source materials and those of our region's citizens that have been generously donated throughout the years to the Dr. Ralph R. Chase West Texas Collection of the PHL,” said Aubrey Madler, executive director of Angelo State’s Porter Henderson Library and primary director of the project.

The informational resources that the project will create will be open online, so the public can access them. Anyone with internet access will be able to click on the link and view the product. “It’s more of a gateway to multiple digital archives, so it’s using Library of Congress resources to highlight those resources as one of the main goals of the project,” said Shannon Sturm, the associate director of the Porter Henderson Library and co-director of the project. Madler added that the project will also utilize resources in the West Texas Collection as part of the digital archive. The project’s resulting resources will function as an interactive tool linking LOC resources with the West Texas Collection’s resources.

There will be no login or related requirement to use the resources once they go live. “The chair of the department of political science and philosophy, Matthew Gritter, is also a co-director of the project. Employing students as part of the project will involve hiring students who can write short documents on given key topics, events or elements of history that highlight West Texas while still relating it to national contexts. On the technology side, students with skills in the mapping software, Geographic Information System, will also be hired for the project.

The project plans on hiring students for the spring semester for a pilot phase and a sampling of materials available to launch in the summer. The project will also feature a teacher workshop where the education department and the area’s K-12 teachers will look at how to use primary sources in the classroom to meet the standards.

The LOC awarded Angelo State the grant through its Connecting Communities Digital Initiative, which funds only minority-serving public colleges and universities. Angelo State was eligible to apply for the grant because the U.S. Department of Education has designated it as a “Hispanic Serving Institution.” Angelo State has held this status since 2010 and, in 2023, also earned the national Seal of Excelencia. The LOC has slated three awards for this year, including Angelo State’s history project grant.