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June 2020 Update

Welcoming New Members
ETAS Continuation, Usage, and Webinars
No Board of Governors Election in 2020
HathiTrust Supports Financial Resilience in the Digital Humanities
2020 Member Meeting & Community Week: “HathiTrust & Interdependence”
HTRC Extracted Features Dataset
HathiTrust Research Center: Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) Awardees for 2020
New Copyright Review Project Responds to Remote Work Needs
From the Collection: U.S. Civil Rights Commission
The Partnership for Shared Book Collections
OCLC Shared Print Registration Service
HathiTrust Staff Coming to a Screen Near You

Welcoming New Members

We are pleased to announce that the Central Michigan University, University of New Hampshire, University of Ottawa, University of Oxford, and William & Mary have joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.

ETAS Continuation, Usage, and Webinars

As academic libraries consider plans for campus re-openings, many members are asking about the future of the Emergency Temporary Access Service. Executive Director Mike Furlough outlined current plans for the continuation of the service in a message to members on May 22. While we do not intend an indefinite extension of the service, there is no planned date on which it will end. We know that some of you may wish or need to rely on continued access to ETAS in order to protect the health and safety of your employees and users. Our goal is to support you in doing that while the need is there. HathiTrust intends to provide the service where print collection access continues to be substantially disrupted due to public health issues. 

The message also provides guidelines related to print circulation and operating status. In the meantime, if your library is making plans to resume regular operations, or otherwise permit access to print collections, please contact feedback@issues.hathitrust.org. 

For those assessing the service, ETAS contacts at institutions now receive weekly usage reports outlining the number of unique check-outs, users, renewals, and individual item IDs for the service at their library. A recording of the June 9th webinar is available for those who were unable to attend. Read more about ETAS Usage reports on the HathiTrust website. 

Information for Members
Information for Users

Webinar Recordings:
ETAS Usage & Overlap Reports, June 9, 2020
ETAS Virtual Office Hours: General, June 17, 2020

No Board of Governors Election in 2020  

In 2018 and 2019, Kenning Arlitsch (Montana State University) and Yolanda Cooper (Emory University) were both appointed as officers to the Executive Committee, thereby extending their terms on the Board of Governors by one and two years, respectively, as per new criteria put in place by member vote. As a result, there are no seats up for election to the Board of Governors in 2020. The next round of nominations for new members to the HathiTrust Board of Governors will take place in 2021. 

HathiTrust Supports Financial Resilience in the Digital Humanities

This spring, after a competitive application process, the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) invited HathiTrust to participate as one of six organizations in a three-year initiative, “Building Financial Resilience in the Digital Humanities.” Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program provides technical assistance to build capacity for  more adaptable organizations that carry on the important work of developing, preserving, and disseminating scholarly work in the humanities. Other organizations in the cohort include the HBCU Library Alliance, Humanities Commons, Rhizome, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA).  More information about the program is available on the NFF website: https://nff.org/news/nff-selects-cohort-digital-humanities

2020 Member Meeting & Community Week: “HathiTrust & Interdependence”

In response to the COVID-19 global crisis and its impact on the academic library community, HathiTrust has modified the 2020 annual member meeting format from an in-person event to a virtual event. The member meeting itself kicks off a week-long series of member- and staff-led panels, presentations, and sessions focused on the HathiTrust community.  The meeting and the HathiTrust Community Week sessions are open to anyone affiliated with a member library. 

Member Meeting: 1:00-4:30 pm (ET), Thursday, October 22

HathiTrust Community Week: 30 min - 60 min sessions throughout the week of October 26–29

There is no registration fee for attendance. Registration for individual sessions is forthcoming.

HathiTrust was founded by academic libraries recognizing that their greatest strength was in collaboration, a type of interdependence that still exists today. Prevalent in more recent years is the influx of libraries looking beyond their campus to achieve more. HathiTrust currently facilitates interdependence across our members by building co-operative services based on the collective collection.

Read more about the agenda and program on the 2020 Member Meeting web page.

HTRC logo

 

 

 

HTRC Extracted Features Dataset

The newest version of HTRC’s Extracted Features dataset (v.2.0) is now available for download!

The Extracted Features files that comprise the dataset consist of volume- and page-level data for 17+ million volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library. There is one file for each volume represented in the dataset, which is a snapshot of all volumes in HathiTrust as of spring 2020.

The files position researchers to analyze texts from HathiTrust, regardless of those texts’ rights status, on their own machines, without exposing the full text as it appeared in the original volume.

The data in the files include:

  • Bibliographic metadata
  • Computationally-inferred metadata about the page, such as its language and line counts
  • Tokens (words), parts of speech, and their per-page counts

Overall, the dataset represents more than 6 billion pages of text, and nearly 3 trillion tokens,  from the digital library.

Not only does this dataset release extend the number of volumes in HathiTrust available as Extracted Features, it also represents a major shift in data format, showcasing for the first time HTRC’s experimental work with Linked Data as envisioned in the Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME metadata framework. The bibliographic metadata contained in the files was converted from MARC to BIBFRAME and then included in the Extracted Features files. As such, the dataset includes Linked Data such that names in the files are linked to external authorities when possible.

Learn more about the release and data schema 

Download Extracted Features 2.0 files 

 

HathiTrust Research Center: Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) Awardees for 2020

HTRC has selected 3 projects to participate in its Advanced Collaborative Support program for 2020. The awardees are:

 

  • “Surveying Applicability of Energy Recovery Technology for Waste Treatment,” Aduramo Lasode (University of Minnesota)
  • “Detecting and Transcribing Arabographic Texts,” David Smith (Northeastern University), Matthew Thomas Miller (University of Maryland), Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna), and Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University, London)
  • “Tracing the Shifting Rhetoric of Ethnoracial Difference in Federal Responses to Education, 1958-2018,” Andrés Castro Samayoa (Boston College)

 

Projects benefit from dedicated staff time and expertise and compute resources to complete a text and data mining project using data from HathiTrust and tools and services from the Research Center. 

Read more about the selected projects 

New Copyright Review Project Responds to Remote Work Needs 

The Hupmobile

Caption: The Hupmobile for 1916 by the Hupp Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, is one of thousands of items with an “undetermined” copyright status that may be eligible for public domain access.

With their libraries closed, a few HathiTrust members inquired about copyright review as a remote work option for a few employees. HathiTrust responded by starting up an easy-entry project around publication dates. There are tens of thousands of volumes in HathiTrust where an initial pass at copyright leaves the volume “undetermined” typically because of uncertainty in publication date or country.  We identified around 15,000 volumes where a human review of the contents could more easily determine that HathiTrust can open them as public domain. If you know of any records where the contents should be pre-1925 but are not open as public domain in the U.S., you can submit them to Kristina Eden Hall at keden@hathitrust.org for review by the project.

From the Collection: U.S. Civil Rights Commission

Police Practices and the Preservation of Civil Rights

 

 

 

 

 

Caption: From a consultation conducted in 1979.
Document title: Police Practices and the Preservation of Civil Rights
Collection Title: U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Authors:  United States Commission on Civil Rights
Published: Contributed by Library of Congress

The collection includes federal papers on civil rights topics including reports on women and poverty in the 1970s; fair housing; school desegregation; and unemployment and underemployment among blacks, hispanics sic, and women from the 1980s.

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections

This month HathiTrust became a member of the Partnership for Shared Book Collections, a federation of monograph shared print programs in North America. The Partnership’s vision is to ensure the long-term preservation of, access to, and integrity of monographic print resources. As the largest monograph shared print programs this membership is important for HathiTrust, and will help us connect more with the shared print community overall and guide future projects and collaborations for our program. 

OCLC Shared Print Registration Service

OCLC has recently launched their updated OCLC Shared Print Registration Service which is a culmination of work they undertook as part of a Mellon Foundation Grant to improve discovery and disclosure of shared print retention commitments. At this time, HathiTrust is asking all retention libraries to register their HathiTrust shared print commitments in the OCLC Shared Print Registry by the end of 2020. 

The good news is that HathiTrust can do this work for you! 

We will be hosting a webinar on July 7, 2020 at 2:00 pm CT/3:00 pm ET. If you would like to attend, please register at https://forms.gle/L8h58MU1fw6mFQp6A and an invite will be shared with you closer to the event. 

We will also need all retention libraries to let us know by July 21, 2020 if you will be registering your own commitments, or if you would like HathiTrust to do this work on your behalf by filling out this survey. Following our webinar on July 7, we will be sending next step instructions to all respondents. Whether HathiTrust does this work for you, or you register them yourselves, instructions for our program can be found at https://www.hathitrust.org/resources-retention-libraries#eight under the “Disclosure” section. 

HathiTrust Staff Coming to a Screen Near You

HathiTrust staff will be presenting or have recently presented at the following online events. 

 

 

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