The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is an online archive and finding aid for transgender-related materials in digital and physical collections. It provides a single search engine for researchers to locate and use materials from more than sixty international colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections, including materials hosted by the DTA itself.
The DTA includes born-digital materials, digitized historical materials, and non-digital archives, with a focus on "non-normative gender practices" before the year 2000. [1] The DTA co-locates and provides direct access or links to materials from numerous institutions including (but not limited to) Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, GLBT Historical Society, Leather Archives and Museum, Transgender Oral History Project, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. [2] The DTA applies its own consistent metadata schema to all items. [3] The items include newsletters, periodicals, photographs, and zines, and—according to one of the originators of the project—"anything related to 'trans-ing gender.'" [3]
Planning for the archive began in 2008. [1] The resource was developed in response to several challenges in conducting research on transgender history. Materials documenting transgender history are widely dispersed, and the level of description and access for materials varies widely. [2] Because the term transgender is relatively new, materials processed in archives prior to the 1990s may not contain the now widely accepted descriptive term. [4] The DTA makes available materials that were previously unavailable online or very difficult to find in archival collections. [2]
In 2017, the digital repository received the C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists, which honors "finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids". [5]