HathiTrust Update on April Activities
Top NewsUniversity of Oregon Joins HathiTrust
We welcome the University of Oregon as our newest member. This brings total membership in HathiTrust to 127. See a list of our total membership here.
Upcoming Webinar: Using the HathiTrust Federal Documents Collection
On May 3, Program Officer Heather Christenson will present a webinar as part of the U.S. Government Publishing Agency's FDLP Academy webinar series. The webinar will provide an overview of our HathiTrust Federal Documents Collection and will explore how to use HathiTrust to access approximately 900,000 Federal documents that have been digitized from print. It will also feature remarks from GPO regarding practices for compliance with the rules and regulations of the Federal Depository Library Program in the context of collection management and digitization. The webinar is open to all, but requires registration. for more information, please see the FDLP Academy website.
Call for Nominations: Program Steering Committee May 3; Collections Committee May 18
On May 3, the Board of Governors will send a call via email to Member Representatives for nominations to serve on the Program Steering Committee (PSC), commencing in July 2017. The Program Steering Committee "Reviews HathiTrust's development agenda, shaping initiatives and strategies for Board discussion and decision-making and considering the implications of those initiatives for the future." For more information, see https://www.hathitrust.org/psc.
Immediately following the close of the PSC nominating period on May 17th, a call will be issued for nominations for the HathiTrust Collections Committee. Reporting to the PSC, the Collections Committee is responsible for collection development activities and policies and charged with making key recommendations about the content included in HathiTrust. Read the full Committee charge here: https://www.hathitrust.org/collections-committee-charge.
HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Seeks proposals for Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) Projects
The HathiTrust Research Center has released its annual call for proposals under the Advanced Collaborative Support Program (ACS). This program matches selected researchers with consultants at the Research Center, who provide extended, expert guidance in the use of the HathiTrust collection and services and tools of the Research Center. Projects selected for this program often serve as pilots or prototypes for larger-scale projects, and several ACS awardees have later sought and received grant funding to extend their work. The ACS program allows the Research Center team to identify projects that can most directly benefit from its services and programs, as well as those that can in turn help us develop and refine our service offerings.
Previously awarded projects for 2015 and 2016 are available here and here.
We especially seek proposals from researchers at HathiTrust member institutions, and multiple awardee slots are reserved specifically for these researchers. Please encourage your subject librarians and librarians who support digital scholarship at your institution to share this call for proposals with members of your community who may be interested.
Full details and contact information for the program are included here.
Shared Print Retention Proposals Under Way
Member libraries have begun submitting proposed shared print retention commitments under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. So far, 22 member libraries have proposed to retain over 8.1 million volumes. Based on estimated retentions from the other 30+ participants, we expect that several million more volumes will be added to the total for Phase 1.
Final work is under way on the policies and business model principles. Assuming approval of the MOU by the Board of Governors in June, we would then ask the Retention Partners to execute the MOU and confirm their already-identified retention commitments. The goal is to have final shared print retention commitments for Phase 1 completed in summer 2017.
HathiTrust Staff Lead Session at DPLAfest 2017
Angelina Zaytsev, collection services librarian, and Kristina Eden, copyright review program manager, led the session "Harnessing Volunteer Power for Operational and Programmatic Success" at DPLAfest 2017 in Chicago on April 21. They are featured in this American Libraries blog post about the conference.
Copyright Review Program Update
All 24 volunteers on the review project US Monographs 1923-1963 have completed training and we've already seen a dramatic increase in the number of copyright determinations we are able to achieve each month. In the coming months we anticipate our statistics will continue to rise as volunteers gain experience and confidence in identifying public domain volumes.
Executive Director Responds to Backchannel and Atlantic Articles about "Failed" Google Books Project
In April two different journalists published articles covering the history and current status of Google Books. On April 11 Backchannel published “How Google Book Search Got Lost,” followed by The Atlantic’s “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria.” Executive Director Mike Furlough thought that neither one grasped the successes of the Google-Library partnerships, so he took to Twitter to share his thoughts: https://storify.com/MikeFurlough/what-libraries-did-with-google-books
HathiTrust on the Road
HathiTrust staff will be attending the following events over the next few months. Please contact us if you wish to meet us at any of these events:
- ARL 2017 Spring Membership Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, May 2-4, 2017 - Mike Furlough
- ACRL New England Conference, Burlington, VT, May 12, 2017 - Lizanne Payne
- Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene, New York, NY, May 13-14, 2017 - Heather Christenson
- Digital Preservation Network Member Meeting, Atlanta, GA, May 23-24, 2017 - Sandra McIntyre
- American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, June 23-27, 2017 - Heather Christenson, Valerie Glenn, Mike Furlough, Lizanne Payne