Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
Program Steering Committee Nominations
Members: Upcoming Vote to Amend Bylaws
Save the Date: 2019 Member Meeting
HathiTrust is Hiring an Enterprise Architect
HathiTrust Partners with UK Libraries to Explore the Extent of Digitization
Save the Date for Member Webcast: “Discovering — or Rediscovering — HathiTrust”
REMINDER Call for Proposals: HTRC Advanced Collaborative Support
From the Collection: Newly Opened Worldwide Public Domain Collection
Introducing the Princeton Prosody Archive
Copyright Review Program
US Federal Documents Program
HathiTrust Staff on the Road
News or Research to Share?
Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
We are pleased to announce that Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) has joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.
Program Steering Committee Nominations
HathiTrust will open its call for nominations for open positions on the Program Steering Committee (PSC) on April 24. Chaired by Karla Strieb of The Ohio State University, the Program Steering Committee advises the Board of Governors and Executive Director in developing, assessing, and implementing strategies for policies and programs of the HathiTrust. PSC members may serve as members of other working groups or task forces that are formed to help PSC accomplish its work. The Board anticipates appointing two new members at its June 3 meeting. More information will be shared with the entire membership when the nomination period begins.
Members: Upcoming Vote to Amend Bylaws
At its October 2018 meeting, HathiTrust’s Board of Governors reviewed a proposal to modify the organization’s Bylaws, and recommended the proposal be presented to the membership for approval this spring. This would amend the Bylaws so that, if an elected member is appointed to the Executive Committee, then their term on the board would extend to allow them to complete their Executive Committee term.
The amendment is intended to ensure continuity of leadership on the Board of Governors in exceptional situations.
Changes to HathiTrust Bylaws require a two-thirds majority of weighted votes cast by members. In May we will publish the specific changes proposed and the rationale for these changes. We will also likely hold at least one online information session and/or a recorded presentation on the topic. We anticipate opening the vote on these changes on May 28 and concluding it on June 18.
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.
HathiTrust is Hiring an Enterprise Architect
We are recruiting for an Enterprise Architect to lead planning, development, and maintenance of HathiTrust’s current and future technology infrastructure. The Enterprise Architect’s work will touch/impact/affect our entire portfolio of activities, including collection aggregation and management, long term preservation, discovery and access, rights management, and the application of computational methods to these services and to the HathiTrust collection. We will begin reviewing applications on May 6 and hope to complete the search this summer. For more information and to apply, see https://www.hathitrust.org/enterprise-architect.
HathiTrust Partners with UK Libraries to Explore the Extent of Digitization
HathiTrust has begun a one-year project to investigate the development of a collaboratively sourced global dataset of digitized texts, which could serve as a registry of works digitized by libraries. This work will take place under a planning grant awarded by awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom, through which HathiTrust will partner with the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, Research Libraries UK, and Information Studies at the University of Glasgow.
As part of the work, HathiTrust will undertake preliminary data analysis to better understand the extent of digitization across these partners, and to help assess the partners’ collective capacity to develop this resource. Through a pair of workshops in the United Kingdom, the project team will also explore the potential for such a resource to improve researcher discovery and collective understanding of the impact of mass digitization. Stay tuned for more updates as the project proceeds! Find more information on the grant project website.
Save the Date for Member Webcast: “Discovering — or Rediscovering — HathiTrust”
Staff from new member institutions, as well as from long-time members, are invited to attend a webcast this spring to discover — or re-discover — HathiTrust. Topics will include an overview of the HathiTrust collection, services, and involvement opportunities, as well as demonstrations of basic search and access for the digital library and where to get started with text and data mining using the HathiTrust Research Center.
Save the date: Thursday, June 6, 2:00-3:00 pm ET
Complete registration information and a webcast streaming link will be sent to member representatives and primary contacts.
REMINDER 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, and others who specialize in digital humanities or computational social science.
Proposals are due April 15, 2019.
Full application information is available here: https://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_sp19acs_rfp
From the Collection: Newly Opened Worldwide Public Domain Collection
Caption: Corn Spurrey
Title: Farm Weeds of Canada
Authors: George H. Clark and James Fletcher
Illustrator: Norman Diddle
Published: Ottawa: F. A. Acland, 1923. Contributed by University of Michigan (HathiTrust member since 2008).
HathiTrust recently opened 48,000+ items in 30+ languages in the Newly Opened Worldwide Public Domain collection. All of these are viewable globally. With thousands of contributions from member libraries, HathiTrust is uniquely positioned to increase public access to these items available in its digital repository and to preserve these items for access long into the future. See the complete Newly Opened Worldwide January 2019 Public Domain Collection.
NOTE: Items determined to be held in copyright are generally not available for full view or to download even by the member institution that contributed the item, except under certain circumstances permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Introducing the Princeton Prosody Archive
Meredith Martin, founder and faculty director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, conceived of the Princeton Prosody Archive during her graduate studies. What began as a collection of texts about versification now includes the study of poetry, grammar, literary history, phonetics, phonology, and many of the complicated ways these discourses converge and diverge over the centuries.
The Princeton Prosody Archive is a full-text searchable database of the text of thousands of digitized books published between 1570 and 1923 based largely on items in the HathiTrust digital repository. The Archive collects historical document texts and highlights discourses about the study of language, the study of poetry, and where and how these intersect and diverge. The Archive’s public website includes searchable text from thousands of digitized works in HathiTrust. Search results include dynamic display of HathiTrust page thumbnails and each thumbnail links to the full item in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
Read more about history of the Princeton Prosody Archive and explore the seven unique collections and resources based on items digitized and contributed by HathiTrust members.
Is your institution using HathiTrust materials in a similar way? Do you have a new scholarly resource you would like to share with other HathiTrust member institutions? Please contact Jessica Rohr, member engagement and communications specialist, jbelle@hathitrust.org.
Image Source: Ellis, Alexander John. 1845. The Alphabet of Nature. London: S. Bagster and Sons. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hwssft
Copyright Review Program
Welcoming New Reviewers
Congratulations to the six new reviewers on the US Monographs copyright review project. They contribute six 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 their institutions who support them in giving their time!
Amanda Scott, Texas State University
Marsha Perry, Duke Law Library
Monica Moore, University of Notre Dame
Scott Pope, Texas State University
Terese Heidenwolf, Lafayette College
March’s overall Copyright Review Program statistics:
CRMS-US Reviews: March 2019
Public Domain Determinations = 4,562
All Determinations = 5,849
Overall
Public Domain Determinations = 272,875
All Determinations = 468,259
CRMS-World: March 2019
Public Domain Determinations = 3
All Determinations = 5
Overall
Public Domain Determinations = 162,649
All Determinations = 316,983
Featured Copyright Reviewer: Cynthia Baker
Cynthia Baker, Special Projects Assistant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Years working in a library: 27 years
HathiTrust start date: November 2016
Review statistics: 1,669 total reviews, 1,003 public domain determinations
“I’m a fan of the [HathiTrust copyright review program] and I enjoy talking about the project and my work, which is one of the more interesting things that I currently do. I believe in its mission and I’m very impressed that it trains workers from all over the U.S. and Canada using BlueJeans, which also facilitates the work togethers, where you get more insight into how the experts make decisions. And I’m impressed by the technology that facilitates the review process, even if you do have to learn to parse out technological problems and be patient ... I also appreciate that [program manager] Kristina Eden is responsive to feedback that results in improvements to the review process.”
US Federal Documents Program
15,000+ Federal Documents Newly in Full View
Last year, HathiTrust staff began to work within Zephir, HathiTrust’s metadata management system, to develop a protocol to better identify federal documents algorithmically upon deposit in HathiTrust. This effort has now has come to fruition! Many thousands of federal documents have been moved into full view as a result of better identification. Read more about it in this blog post.
Federal documents continue to be a significant portion of the overall HathiTrust collection. As of April 1, the HathiTrust federal documents collection stands at 1,338,491 volumes, which includes 32,431 serial titles, and 505,286 monographic titles. Our searchable collections enable focused discovery of U.S. federal documents in HathiTrust.
HathiTrust Staff on the Road
HathiTrust staff will be attending the following event. 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.
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.