April 2018 Update

April 2018 Update

Top News

Passing the Baton: New Program Steering Committee Chair

In March, the Board of Governors appointed Karla Strieb as the next Chair of the HathiTrust Program Steering Committee, succeeding John Butler, Associate University Librarian for Data & Technology at the University of Minnesota, who completes his two-year term as Chair in June.

HathiTrust Executive Director Mike Furlough says, “John has been a very influential part of HathiTrust’s development throughout our history.  He has helped to develop the role of the Program Steering Committee and advanced critical work on metadata policies and collection quality.”  John served as an inaugural member of the PSC in 2013 and as a member of the Strategic Advisory Board, a predecessor to the PSC, from 2010 to 2012. 

On her new role, Karla Strieb, Associate Director of Content & Access at The Ohio State University Libraries, says, “Doing our HathiTrust work is so important to the community now, [and] has deep implications for the future of libraries, learning, and scholarship too. I’m very grateful to be part of such a team of talented, committed folks as we help the HathiTrust staff lead, manage, and steward this unique organization.”

Karla’s appointment begins July 1, 2018. As PSC chair, she will also serve as an ex officio member of the Executive Committee and the Board of Governors.

Learn more about the Governance of HathiTrust and other volunteer, member-driven working groups.

PSC Call for Nominations Opens April 16

Each year HathiTrust seeks new members to join the Program Steering Committee.  The PSC is charged with reviewing HathiTrust’s development agenda, shaping initiatives and strategies for Board discussion and decision-making, and considering the implications of those initiatives for the future. This year’s call for Nominations opens on April 16 and members will receive an email notification at that time requesting their recommendations.

Copyright Review Program

Congratulations to the following people who completed training on U.S. Monographs 1923-1963 copyright review. They volunteer 6 hours of their work schedule each week to open up public domain books for both member and non-member access in HathiTrust.  Thank you to all of their institutions who support this collaborative use of their time!

• Laura Burtle, Georgia State University
• Anne Conway, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Bill Corey, University of Virginia
• Linda Fredericksen, Washington State University
• Kip Hannan, UCLA
• Callie Holmes, UCLA
• Sue Perry, University of California Santa Cruz
• Fred Rowland, Temple University
• Melde Rutledge, Wake Forest University 

Opening Works in HathiTrust via Creative Commons License

With the help of the University of Michigan Copyright Office, we have updated the HathiTrust form for rights holders wanting to open their publication(s) via a Creative Commons license.

If you are a copyright holder or a representative of a copyright holder of a work in HathiTrust and would like to authorize the work to be opened for full view, the updated form enables you to select a Creative Commons license by which to do this.

Save the Date:  Opening Works via Creative Commons License Webinar

Tuesday, May 8, from 2 to 3 pm ET, Copyright Review Program Manager, Kristina Eden, will present a webinar introducing the permissions process to member libraries.

Webinar objectives:

• Understand the permissions process and opening a work in HathiTrust with a Creative Commons license

• Learn about the support available from HathiTrust to member institutions embarking on local rights permission projects

HathiTrust member webinar: Opening Works via Creative Commons License

Join the webinar via BlueJeans: https://bluejeans.com/379611243

HathiTrust Research Center

HTRC Offers New Monthly Office Hours

The HathiTrust Research Center now offers a support service for research and teaching with HTRC called HTRC, Help! Scholars and librarians with questions about computational text analysis using HathiTrust corpus data can now join monthly virtual office hours, held the second Wednesday of each month at 3:00 p.m. ET. An expert from the HTRC will answer questions and discuss research projects. Additionally, extended answers to frequently asked questions about HTRC are shared online.

Upcoming office hours dates: April 11, May 9, and June 13.

Join office hours (via Zoom): http://go.illinois.edu/htrchelp-live

Have your own question about computational text analysis or other HTRC questions? Ask it here: htrc-help@hathitrust.org.

Register for Digging Deeper, Reaching Further Workshops in May and July

Registration is now open for two additional “Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources” workshops.  Workshops will be held in Houston on May 18 and San Diego on July 10.

These 1-day workshops introduce library and information professionals to text mining and related digital scholarship methods, with a focus on the tools and data from the HathiTrust Research Center. The aims of the DDRF workshops are to empower librarians to become more conversant in digital scholarship and engage with digital projects at their institutions.

All are encouraged to attend and no experience is necessary!

The full calendar and registration forms for upcoming DDRF workshops are at: http://teach.htrc.illinois.edu/workshop-schedule/

Contact htrc_workshop@library.illinois.edu with any questions.

This workshop series is funded in part by IMLS award #RE-00-15-0112-15.

Shared Print Program

HathiTrust has received signed MOUs from all 49 Retention Libraries that committed to retain 16 million print holdings during Phase 1!

Work underway in Phase 2 includes selecting a provider for collection analysis services, who will help us analyze and prioritize print retentions to cover the remaining HathiTrust digital monographs that received no commitments in Phase 1.

In the next month or two, the HathiTrust Shared Print Program will issue a “call for participation” to recruit HathiTrust member libraries that may be willing to retain print volumes in the next round (both current Retention Libraries and members that did not participate previously). Be on the lookout for this invitation!

In mid-March, Lizanne Payne spoke about “HathiTrust and Shared Print Agreements in North America” at "A Matter of Trust: Cooperative Print Storage and Shared Archiving Initiatives," a conference hosted by the University of Basel, Switzerland. See the conference program (see April 15, Session 4 Shared Archiving 2, 11:30-12:30 p.m.) or view her presentation directly here.

U.S. Federal Documents Program

HathiTrust’s federal documents collection has reached nearly 1,120,000 documents! In the first three months of 2018, 20 different HathiTrust member libraries contributed a total of 7,660 documents. Especially large contributions came from University of California, Riverside (3,054), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1,954), and from the University of California Southern Regional Library Facility (1,176).  For more information on the federal documents collection, including monthly statistical views, please see the Collection Profile.

The 2018 HathiTrust federal documents user needs investigation started with an initial dig into collection analytics, revealing that items in the federal documents collection get a lot of use – almost 13.5 million page views in 2017. 

The most popular document of 2017 was History of Wages in the United States, from Colonial Times to 1928 (contributed by UC Santa Cruz).

Additional program activities include a collaborative collections enhancement project (“gap filling”) and work to open more federal documents to end users via improved metadata handling processes.

For more information on what we’ve been up to, read the full April 2018 Program Update.

Interview with Boston University Professor Cathie Jo Martin

HathiTrust Enables Close Reading of British and Danish Coming‑of‑Age Novels

 Boston University Professor of Political Science, Cathie Jo Martin, seeks to understand how reformers in Britain and Denmark in the 18th and 19th centuries thought about education. She uses computational linguistics techniques applied to literature to do so, including manuscripts found in the HathiTrust digital repository. For her article forthcoming in the July 2018 issue of World Politics, Professor Martin used corpora of British and Danish literature and employed the services of the HathiTrust Research Center, analyzing word frequencies surrounding snippets of text related to education words.

"I am so grateful to HathiTrust for answering endless questions at the beginning of my research. . . I simply could not have written the article without the resources provided to me by HathiTrust."

Read an interview with Professor Martin on her work, the HathiTrust resources she found most useful, and her ideal dining companion if time and space were no limitation . . .

Boston University has been a HathiTrust member since 2011.

In the News & Publications

The HathiTrust Federal Documents Program: Towards a Digital U.S. Federal Documents Library at Scale

By: Heather Christenson, HathiTrust Program Officer, Federal Documents and Collections
Against the Grain
December 2017 – January 2018, p. 23–24

“As of this writing, forty-nine [HathiTrust] member libraries have contributed digitized federal documents to HathiTrust.  This total includes contributions from FDLP collections as well as documents from collections developed to meet needs and purposes outside of the FDLP.  The HathiTrust digital collection brings all these documents together in a large-scale aggregation of federal documents that reflects the scale and scope of FDLP collections, but also draws richness from the inclusion of topically-focused documents collections.” 

How a Book Warehouse is Changing Columbia’s Library System

By: Kara Schechtman
Columbia Spectator
March 8, 2018

“Lizanne Payne, the shared print program officer at HathiTrust who served as a consultant during the developmental phases of ReCAP’s Shared Collection, tells me that nobody could have anticipated ReCAP looming over Columbia’s future.”

The three founding members of ReCAP are also members of HathiTrust (Columbia, Princeton, and New York Public Library) and have committed their matching Shared Collection volumes also to the HathiTrust Shared Print Program.

HathiTrust Staff on the Road

HathiTrust staff will be attending the following events.  Please contact us if you wish to meet us at any of these events!

• Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Spring Meeting, April 12-13, San Diego, CA: Sandra McIntyre
• Association of Research Libraries Spring 2018 Meeting, April 24-26, Atlanta, GA: Mike Furlough
• Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2018, June 3-6, Ft. Worth, TX: Sandra McIntyre
• American Library Association Annual Conference 2018, June 21-26, New Orleans, LA: Heather Christenson, Lizanne Payne, Valerie Glenn

News or Research to Share?

If you or a patron at your institution has any news to share regarding a publication, presentation, 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.

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