Advisory Board
The Advisory Board for the Cathy Nelson Hartman Portal to Texas History Endowment served during the duration of the National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant from 2015-2020, and included:
- Cathy Nelson Hartman
- Bob Biard
- William D. Elliott
- Michael Gillette
- Robert Gonzalez
- Terrie Gonzalez
- John Krahmer
- Michael Moore
- Kathleen Murray
- Danielle Cunniff Plumer
- Edward J. Smith
- Darryl Tocker
Advisory Board Biographies
Cathy Nelson Hartman is the former Associate Dean of the UNT Libraries, and the founder of The Portal to Texas History, a collaboration between Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies and educators to present Texas History materials online. Since its inception, the Portal has grown to include over 300 cultural heritage partners across Texas which provide online access to nearly seven million digital files encompassing the rich history of our state. With over 600,000 visitors a month, the Portal serves up iconic treasures of Texas history to a global audience. As a Primary Investigator, Cathy was awarded grants from foundations, state and national agencies totaling over six million dollars in external funding during her career. She served as the Asst. Dean for Digital and Information Technologies from 2005-10, and became Associate Dean in 2010, taking on a pivotal role in managing library operations. In addition to bringing in substantial funding for UNT, Cathy has also given back. In 2012, she established the Cathy Nelson Hartman Portal to Texas History Endowment to enable UNT to extend the impact of the Portal by creating a permanent, sustainable source of income.
Bob Biard is General Counsel of the Texas Lottery Commission. The Lottery Commission combines the functions of state government and business enterprise, generating over $4.3 billion in annual sales to provide over $1 billion each year to fund public education and veterans' assistance. Bob previously served as Executive Assistant to two statewide-elected Texas Railroad Commissioners, and practiced energy and administrative law in the public and private sectors for over 20 years. He has B.S. and J.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed the Governor's Executive Development Program at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. His commitment to Texas history is rooted in his family's 1846 migration to Texas. He has preserved his 19th-century South Austin home as the surrounding neighborhood redeveloped and transformed into a residential and commercial destination. An avid collector of Texana, Bob was born in Tyler and has lived in Midland, Plano, Denton, and Austin. He is a member of the Sons of the American Revolution.
William D. Elliott is a partner with Elliott Thomason & Gibson, LLP in Dallas, Texas. His law practice focuses on representation of families and their businesses. He consults with these families on business, tax and estate planning issues that arise. Mr. Elliott is Board Certified in Tax Law, Texas Board of Legal Specialization and Board Certified in Estate Planning and Probate Law, Texas Board of Legal Specialization. A native of Sherman, Texas, William Elliott’s law school education is Southern Methodist University School of Law (J.D. 1973) and New York University School of Law (LL.M. in Taxation 1974). Elliott is a fellow in the American College of Tax Counsel. He has served in the leadership of the State Bar of Texas including the position of past-Chair of the Board of Directors. He is a past-Chair of the Section of Taxation of the State Bar of Texas. Elliott is also is a member of the Board of Directors of the North Texas Tollroad Authority. Elliott has written extensively, including FEDERAL TAX COLLECTIONS, LIENS AND LEVIES, Warren Gorham & Lamont, New York, New York (2d ed. 2012) and TEXAS TAXES ANNOTATED, West (2011) (co-authored with Scott Morris) as well as his regularly featured column in TAXES, THE TAX MAGAZINE (published monthly by CCH, a part of Wolters Kluwer).
Michael L. Gillette has been Humanities Texas’s executive director since 2003. His former positions include directing the LBJ Library’s Oral History Program from 1976 to 1991 and serving as director of the Center for Legislative Archives from 1991 to 2003, with responsibility for the official records of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives at the National Archives. Gillette serves on the advisory board of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, the board of directors of the Congressional Education Foundation, and the board of visitors of Southwestern University. He is a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas and served as its president in 2009. His previous affiliations include the board of directors of the Everett Dirksen Congressional Leadership Center and the Law Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Program. Gillette is the author of Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History and editor of Texas in Transition. His newest book, Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, was released by Oxford University Press in December 2012. He received his B.A. in government and his Ph.D. in history from The University of Texas at Austin.
Robert Gonzalez is Vice President of E.H. Whitehead Enterprises Inc. and KTLU/KWRW, Inc. A 1976 graduate of the University of Texas-Austin, Mr Gonzalez, along with his wife Terrie, have successfully led two companies for 30 years which were started by Terrie's parents in 1950. Both media companies have been distinguished with awards from the Texas Press Association and Texas Association of Broadcasters. Mr. Gonzalez serves on several charitable boards of directors in East Texas and has held positions of leadership in the local chamber of commerce as well as economic development efforts in the local area.
Terrie Gonzalez is President of E.H. Whitehead Enterprises (the Cherokeean Herald newspaper) and KTLU-KWRW Inc. She is a 1975 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. With generous support from the Tocker Foundation, the archives of the Cherokeean Herald, dating to the early 1900s, were digitized from microfilm to PDFs, and the East Texas weekly was the first Texas newspaper to go live on the Portal to Texas History. Terrie was named the 2015 Businesswoman of the Year by the Rusk Chamber of Commerce, and she and Robert serve together on the Legislative Affairs Committee for the Texas Press Association to protect First Amendment rights and Freedom of Information. She donated equipment and helped establish a new wing at the Waco History and Natural History Museum which features a complete hot-type printing shop from the Alto Herald.
John Krahmer has B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Iowa and an LL.M. degree from Harvard University. He is currently the Foundation Professor of Commercial Law at the Texas Tech University School of Law. He has received the Texas Tech University President's Awards for Outstanding Research and for Outstanding Teaching. He has also received the Texas Tech University Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Teaching and is a six-time recipient of the Student Award for Outstanding Teaching. In addition to authoring more than thirty articles and six books on commercial law, he has supervised research leading to enactment of historic preservation laws in Texas. He is currently working on a project to digitize historical documents on the development of the Uniform Commercial Code.
Michael Moore is an historian who specializes in the history of Southeast Texas and its interpretation by museums and historic sites. A native of Seguin, Texas, he has degrees in history and public history from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston. For 22 years he served as the Director of the Fort Bend County Museum Association in Richmond, where, due to his leadership, he received awards from the Texas Historical Commission, the Texas State Historical Association, and the “Nancy Hanks Award for Professional Excellence” of the American Association of Museums. He served as initial chair (2004-2006) of the Steering Committee of the Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative, now called Texas Heritage Online. In this role, Michael led representatives of universities, state agencies, libraries, and museums toward collaborative access to digital heritage collections throughout the state. He also compiled the first Strategic Plan (2005) that codified organizational plans, which—in part—led to grants for implementation through the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Since retiring from the Fort Bend Museum in 2006, he has devoted his time to his family farming/ranching operations, volunteer efforts to preserve the San Felipe archeological site, and writing a history of Austin's Colony. He serves as the President of the San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site.
Kathleen Murray, recently retired, was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Texas Libraries. Since 2000, she conducted user studies for state and national digital library and Web archiving projects. Most recently she was project manager and a principal researcher for two research projects funded by National Leadership Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services: Optimizing the User Experience in a Rapid Development Framework (2007-2009), and Classification of the End-of-Term Web Archive (2009-2012). An avid genealogist, Kathleen has presented programs at state and national conferences, as well as to local genealogy groups.
Danielle Cunniff Plumer is the statewide resource sharing coordinator at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. She manages the TexShare Consortium, a group of nearly 700 academic, public, and special libraries who participate in various statewide resource sharing programs, and consults on other strategic initiatives. From 2005 to 2011, she coordinated the Texas Heritage Online program at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, assisting participants from the library, archives, and museum communities with digital library projects. She has also taught graduate-level courses on digital preservation and curation, metadata, digitization, and online exhibits for the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas State University. She earned an M.S. in Information Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2003. Prior to that, she earned a Ph.D. in medieval English literature at the University of California, Davis.
Edward Smith is the Executive Director of the Abilene (TX) Library Consortium, a nonprofit that delivers high-quality library services, shares resources, and collaborates with member libraries. In this role, he directs a large-scale grant-funded digitization project. He holds Masters degrees in English and Library Science. He also has served on the Executive Board of the Texas Library Association and currently serves on the Board of Directors at the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature.
Darryl Tocker is the third Executive Director of the Tocker Foundation since its inception in 1964. Before joining the Tocker Foundation in 1990, Darryl Tocker was a financial analyst with the Zale Corporation from 1981 to 1995. In addition to his role with the Foundation, Darryl Tocker has served as President of the Friends of Libraries and Archives of Texas, the support organization to the Texas State Library. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Texas Book Festival and the Executive Board of Raising Austin, Inc. Mr. Tocker also serves on the Advisory Board of the University of Texas, School of Information. Mr. Tocker’s affiliations include his long time memberships in the American Library Association, Texas Library Association, and Conference of Southwest Foundations.