This white paper provides a summary of grant activities and provides some best practices and lessons learned for other efforts to make out-of-print humanities books available in ebook format.

White paper discussing qualitative research conducted by the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries regarding perceptions of quality by metadata creators and their managers. These perceptions of metadata quality are intended to identify gaps in tools and interfaces used to create metadata.

This two-year project, led by the University of North Texas Libraries, will broaden access to 141 books selected by one of three publishers or by the UNT Libraries for their relevance to the history of Texas and Oklahoma. It will also broaden access to five humanities-related books to be selected once the grant starts. Those books not yet available online through the Gateway to Oklahoma History, Portal to Texas History, or UNT Digital Library websites will be digitized, with full-text searching, and added to the appropriate site. All books will be converted to EPUB and Kindle formats, made available to download with the digitized version online, and added to the UNT Library Catalog and to WorldCat. The project also includes the production of “print-ready” PDFs from the scans of many of the books to allow them to be made available for sale in print again using print-on-demand technology. This proposal was submitted in June 2015 and funded in December 2015 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for $95,599.