Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
We are pleased to announce that University of Kentucky has joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.
Board of Governors Winter 2019 Meeting
The Board of Governors held their Winter 2019 meeting via video conference on February 26. At the meeting, the Board reviewed the end of year 2018 budget and 2019 plans. They approved moving carryforward funds from Operations to Reserves to fund future infrastructure purchases and increase emergency funding to eight months of operating expenses. The Board reviewed the results of the votes on the new Member Criteria and new Fee Model and discussed next actions and a communications plan. Mike Furlough reviewed potential changes to the HathiTrust logo and marks.
Members Vote to Approve Fee Model, Member Criteria Proposals
In late February, the HathiTrust membership approved both the Member Criteria and Fee Model Change proposals with greater than a 2/3 majority of weighted votes and with 107 of 127 voting members responding. The HathiTrust Board of Governors reviewed the results. Both the institutional and weighted vote came out in favor of the proposals. The weighted vote below summarizes the election outcome:
Member Criteria: Yes = 133 No = 2 Abstain = 2
Fee Model: Yes = 132 No = 4 Abstain = 3
The Member Criteria went into effect immediately. The Fee Model proposal, which introduces three tiers based on each member's annual Total Library Expenditures, will go into effect in 2020. See the HathiTrust website for details on the voting outcome, what changes to expect, and when.
Members with additional questions about the results should contact Mike Furlough (see Staff page).
Save the Date: 2019 Member Meeting
The 2019 Member Meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 23 at the Loews Chicago O’Hare Hotel. More details will be sent to member representatives and primary contacts in the coming months.
Call for Proposals: HTRC Advanced Collaborative Support
The HathiTrust Research Center is currently accepting applications for its fourth round of Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) projects. Awarded projects benefit from HTRC staff time and expertise, technical guidance and support, and compute resources in order to complete a HathiTrust-related text and data mining project.
Project teams must be led by a team member with a full-time appointment at a HathiTrust member institution but may include collaborators from non-affiliated institutions. Awardees may include faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, librarians, those who specialize in digital humanities, computational social science, or other academic staff.
Proposals are due April 15, 2019.
Full application information available here: https://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_sp19acs_rfp
From the Collection: Scripps Institution of Oceanography Collection
Caption: Sperm Whales at Dinner
Title: Creatures of the sea : being the life stories of some sea birds, beasts and fishes
Author and Artist: Frank Thomas Bullen, Author; Theo. Carreras, Illustrator
Published: London: Religious Tract Society, 1904. Contributed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (HathiTrust member since 2008).
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography Collection in HathiTrust is the second largest collection in HathiTrust, containing over 111,350 items, books, technical reports, and series in oceanography, earth and marine sciences, plus Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) publications, with 21,649 items available open access (OA), with full text online viewing and downloading.
Thanks to the work of the UC San Diego Library, five hundred more volumes of the SIO collection were opened in December for full access in HathiTrust via Creative Commons licensing. Additional volumes will be opened when authors and publishing groups, and rights holders, allow access to their publications by completing the HathiTrust Creative Commons Declaration Form.
HathiTrust Participates in Accessible Materials Grant
Federating Repositories of Accessible Learning Materials for Higher Education (FRAME), a two-year project funded by a $1,000,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Virginia, aims to address challenges faced by students with print disabilities when accessing academic materials. Students with print disabilities require text that has been reformatted for screen readers, text-to-speech software, or other forms of audio delivery, often with human intervention. Without collaboration across campuses, wasted effort and delayed service are certain.
HathiTrust is one of three digital repositories serving on the grant, along with Bookshare and Internet Archive. The pilot group funded by this grant includes six other universities with a history of leadership on accessibility: George Mason University, Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois, Northern Arizona University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vanderbilt University (current HathiTrust members in boldface). The joint work under the grant will reduce duplicate remediation efforts across participating universities.
Read more on the HathiTrust news site.
Copyright Review Program
February’s overall Copyright Review Program statistics:
CRMS-US Reviews: February 2019
Public Domain = 3,688
All = 5,553
Overall
Public Domain Determinations = 268,313
All Determinations = 462,410
CRMS-World: February 2019
Public Domain = 46
All = 56
Overall
Public Domain Determinations = 162,646
All Determinations = 316,978
Featured Copyright Reviewer: Jenn Phillips
Jenn Phillips, Information Resources and Services Support Specialist, Penn State Altoona
Years working in a library: 21
HathiTrust start date: May 2015
Review statistics: 38,080 total / 30,328 public domain determinations
“I like working with the CRMS project because I like being able to figure out if a work is in copyright or can be opened digitally. I also like being able to see the interesting works that have been chosen as candidates for digitization.”
Shared Print Program
Phase 2 of the Shared Print Program is reaching its successful conclusion. Retention proposals for physical volumes corresponding to 1.2 million monograph titles in HathiTrust have been delivered to the 60+ member libraries participating in Phase 2.
The Retention Models Working Group made two recommendations in fall 2018 represented in the current retention proposals:
- Retain up to 5 copies of each title
- Distribute the retention commitments geographically across North America
These retention proposals represent titles that were not committed for retention in Phase 1 and were produced by OCLC Sustainable Collection Services in the analysis commissioned by HathiTrust and begun in August 2018. HathiTrust Phase 2 Retention Libraries have confirmed their commitments by the end of February 2019 with some extensions through March.
Sign Up to Help Improve the HTDL
In the following weeks, when you log into the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL), you will be greeted with a message that invites you to be added to our user research contacts list. As part of a fresh focus on the user experience of the HTDL, we are conducting usability tests and interviews and are requesting participation from more users in our research.
Please consider signing up when you see this message (or sign up now by going to http://eepurl.com/gbk5Jb). Joining this list means that you permit us to contact you about future opportunities to participate in usability tests, surveys, etc. You are not required to participate in any activities unless you wish to do so.
You do not need to be affiliated with a member institution to participate in user research for the HathiTrust Digital Library.
In the News, Publications, and Research
Presentations
J. Stephen Downie (Co-Director of HathiTrust Research Center; Associate Dean for Research & Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois).“HathiTrust Research Center: Creating New Opportunities in Support of Scholarly Text Mining,” keynote presentation at
(Re-) Mining Text: From Traditional to Digital, Digital Scholarship Symposium, Chinese University of Hong Kong, March 2019.
HathiTrust Staff on the Road
HathiTrust staff will be attending the following events. Please contact us if you wish to meet us!
April 10–13: Association of College and Research Libraries conference, Cleveland, OH: Eleanor Dickson Koehl (presenting), Jessica Rohr, Sandra McIntyre, Angelina Zaytsev. Follow the @hathitrust Twitter account and #acrl2019 during April for more information.
News or Research to Share?
If you or a patron at your institution has news to share regarding a publication, presentation, grant, or research underway related to HathiTrust, we’d love to hear about it. Please share with Jessica Rohr, member engagement and communications specialist, at jbelle@hathitrust.org.