Perspectives from HathiTrust

By HathiTrust Federal Documents Advisory Committee

HathiTrust Shared Print Program - From Task Force Recommendations to Today 

By Heather Weltin, HathiTrust Shared Print Program Officer

 By Angelina Zaytsev

By Heather Christenson

By Paul Fogel, Manager & Technical Lead, Mass Digitization, California Digital Library

By HathiTrust

"I want to understand how reformers in Britain and Denmark in the 18th and 19th centuries thought about education and I use computational linguistics techniques applied to literature to do so."

By Sandra McIntyre, Director of Services & Operations

Working with the library staff at Macalester College, we have successfully set up log-in access to HathiTrust member services for the first time using OpenAthens rather than Shibboleth for providing information about users’ identities. 

"The Roaring 20's returned to Atlanta, Georgia, on October 24-28, 1970.” 

This sentence appeared not in the style section of the Atlanta newspaper but at the start of an interoffice memo between Internal Revenue Service offices.  The full memo and the backstory can be found in the six millionth openly available item deposited in HathiTrust, digitized by the University of California, Riverside.  

Fifty HathiTrust member libraries have proposed to retain more than 16 million volumes for 25 years under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. These volumes correspond to more than 4.8 million individual book titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library (about 65% of all HathiTrust digital monographs). This is a significant step toward the primary goal of the program: to ensure that print copies of all HathiTrust digital holdings remain available to scholars for many years to come. The Shared Print Program is a core program of HathiTrust, supported by and benefiting all of the more than 120 HathiTrust members.

By Heather Christenson

by Sandra McIntyre

Thirty-eight HathiTrust staff members met February 2-3 in Chicago for the first-ever HathiTrust all-sites staff workshop. The attendees included managers, librarians, developers, systems administrators, and graduate students who work at HathiTrust’s distributed sites, including the sites at the University of Michigan, University of California, Indiana University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

By Mike Furlough

Note: This message was sent to HathiTrust members on December 20, 2016

Written by Mike Furlough

Note: this is the lightly edited text of a talk presented at the 2016 CRL Collections Forum, @Risk: Stewardship, Due Diligence, and the Future of Print in Chicago, IL on April 14, 2016. 

The audio for this talk is available on YouTube.  

By Aaron Elkiss, University of Michigan Library, Cross-posted from the University of Michigan Library Tech Talk Blog

By Dan Cohen and Mike Furlough

The Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust have had a strong relationship since DPLA’s inception in 2013. As part of our ongoing collaboration to host and make digitized books widely available, we are now working to see how we can provide our services to exciting new initiatives that bring ebooks to everyone.

The Humanities Open Book grant program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is exactly the kind of program we wish to support, and we stand ready to do so.  Under this funding program, NEH and Mellon will award grants to publishers to identify select previously published books and acquire the appropriate rights to produce an open access e-book edition available under a Creative Commons license.  Participants in the program must deposit an EPUB version of the book in a trusted preservation service to ensure future access.  

By Mike Furlough, Executive Director, HathiTrust

Since I started as Executive Director of HathiTrust in May of this year, I have done nothing but learn: learn about the organization, our operations, our finances, our people, and our partnership. I have traveled quite a bit, especially this fall, paying visits to HathiTrust members (thank you, libraries of Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Harvard, and Northwestern), several meetings of library organizations and consortia (thank you TRLN, GWLA, COPPUL, and ASERL), as well as a couple of special focus meetings on digital humanities and newspaper digitization (thanks to you all as well).

By Heather Chistenson, HathiTrust Communications Working Group

With over 10 million volumes, and full text search free from commercial results ranking, HathiTrust is a go-to place for researchers who are serious about exploring the research library collection. Many technologists in our community who follow the HathiTrust Large-scale Search Blog are aware of the work that has been going on since full text search went into beta and then live on the HathiTrust site in 2009. We’re pleased to report that in 2012 HathiTrust continues to make progress with the implementation of more new advanced search features. With the leadership of Tom Burton-West at the University of Michigan, there have been two new feature releases in the past few months.

By Jenny Emmanuel, HathiTrust User Experience Advisory Group

The HathiTrust User Experience Advisory Group recently released a set of “personas” depicting typical users of HathiTrust Digital Library.  Personas are aggregate statements that display information about typical users and their needs.  They are a commonly used usability method that collects data from multiple sources, including website analytics, search logs, first person stories, researcher observations, and other methods which are then aggregated into a narrative to depict stories depicting who HathiTrust users are and how they used the information within HathiTrust. 

On October 8-9, 2011 delegates from across the U.S. and around the world gathered in Washington, DC for a landmark event, the HathiTrust Constitutional Convention. Our goals were to review the work and accomplishments of the now 3-year-old HathiTrust, and chart its future governance and priorities. Before the group were seven different ballot proposals that had been submitted by HathiTrust partners ahead of the meeting. On a beautiful autumn weekend, the delegates headed indoors, gathered around tables, and deeply engaged in the proceedings and discussion.