Top News
Updates
Charting HathiTrust’s Strategic Directions: Update
Last summer we began work to define HathiTrust’s next strategic directions for 2019-2023. We published a draft plan in late summer, then held several webcasts to discuss these proposals with members. At our 2017 Member Meeting we devoted nearly the entire day to these issues and left tremendously energized by the membership’s clear commitment to HathiTrust and our mission.
We’ve spent the last several months taking those comments into account and working on a final version of our plans. Thanks to the candid advice the membership offered, our final strategic directions will be a much stronger, more actionable set of plans. The Board of Governors meets in March to review the progress and finalize our plans. We anticipate sharing HathiTrust’s 2019-2023 Strategic Directions with our members in early spring.
Save the Date: 2018 HathiTrust Member Meeting
The 2018 HathiTrust Member Meeting will be held on October 30, 2018, at the Loews Chicago O’Hare hotel. The focus of this year’s meeting will be celebrating HathiTrust’s 10-year anniversary. A link to registration and room block will be sent to member representatives in the spring.
Researchers Present Work at Annual Research Center UnCamp
More than 150 people attended the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) UnCamp 2018, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley Libraries. The diverse set of attendees, drawn from university academic units, university libraries, non-profit groups, and other partners, represented more than 80 institutions, including more than 60 HathiTrust member institutions.
The keynotes, delivered by Liz Lorang and Leen-Kiat Soh (University of Nebraska Lincoln) and David Mimno (Cornell University), focused on methodologies, challenges and possibilities of text and data mining. In addition, researchers from the fields of information science, digital libraries, literary history, digital pedagogy, non-consumptive research, cultural analytics, and the history of social movements presented their work and its intersection with the HathiTrust Digital Library.
For the first time, UnCamp included a Call for Proposals for panels and posters, and the new session and format was a big success, allowing leaders in the above fields the chance to speak about their work and offer unique perspectives on both the state-of-the-art and future research and practice avenues that would leverage HathiTrust data and service. Slides and notes from the presentations are available on the UnCamp OSF site.
HathiTrust would like to extend sincere thanks to University of California Berkeley and UCB Libraries, sponsors and hosts of this year’s UnCamp. Additionally, thanks go out to sponsors California Digital Library, University of Illinois Libraries, the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences, Indiana University Libraries and Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. Most of all, we would like to thank all of the UnCamp participants who contributed greatly to the event’s success.
For questions about UnCamp, or HTRC, contact htrc-help@hathitrust.org.
Accessing Members-only Services with OpenAthens instead of Shibboleth
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 new service enables Macalester to offer access to HathiTrust members-only services, such as full-book download for public domain volumes, to its students, faculty, and other affiliates. It also enables Macalester to set up access to HathiTrust in-copyright volumes on behalf of members with print disabilities.
This pilot to accept identity data from the OpenAthens system establishes the possibility for additional HathiTrust members to choose to use OpenAthens instead of Shibboleth, as long as they are also members of the InCommon Federation.
OpenAthens is a hosted identity provider service created at the University of Bath in the UK in 1996 and managed by Eduserv. It is now commonly used by educational institutions and healthcare organizations in parts of Europe and Asia, with new member institutions in North America. Like Shibboleth, it is compliant with the Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0) standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. It manages single sign-on for users to a variety of service providers — e.g., publishers and other authenticated access sites like HathiTrust — through its gateway.
Thank you to Katy Gabrio, assistant library director for collection development and discovery, and other staff members at Macalester College for their work on this pilot effort. We look forward to exploring this expanded service with other HathiTrust members.
Engaging the HathiTrust Collection: By the Numbers
We are pleased to announce the release of the 2017 Collections Growth and Usage Report. This report includes an initial look at usage by members and will be of interest to librarians who think about usage statistics. This is the beginning of a deeper dive into understanding member usage, as well as assessing engagement by different groups of users, including researchers and genealogists.
One of the preliminary findings in this report is that referrals from websites (as opposed to direct traffic or using web search engines) tend to result in more engagement by users overall.
Copyright Review Program
U.S. Federal Documents Program
On February 14, Federal Documents Analyst Valerie Glenn presented the webcast Never a Dull Moment: Finds from the HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents Collection. Slides and a recording are available, and if you’d like to dive in further, all the documents mentioned in the presentation are available in full view in the Never a Dull Moment collection.
Shared Print Program
Phase 1 of the Shared Print Program is complete, with 49 member libraries agreeing to retain more than 16 million volumes representing 4.8 million titles. All but two of these libraries have executed the Shared Print Agreement (MOU), and the remaining two are well on their way to signature.
Now we are on to Phase 2! During calendar year 2018, we are working on two major initiatives: 1) build on the shared print metadata for services to HathiTrust members, and 2) identify the next round of retention commitments. We will be announcing more information about how HathiTrust member libraries may participate as we progress with these implementation steps, but, for now, please see this presentation about Phase 2.
News from Our Member Community
In the News
Women Were Better Represented in Victorian Novels Than Modern Ones
Big data shows that women used to be omnipresent in fiction. Then men got in the way.
By Kat Eschner
smithsonian.com
February 14, 2018
“Built by study author Ted Underwood, a professor of English and of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, and his coauthor information scientist David Bamman of University of California at Berkeley, the algorithm analyzed the characters and authors of 104,000 novels . . . The novels were selected primarily from the HathiTrust Digital Library and represented a selection of bestsellers from the years 1703 to 2009.”
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!
Cooperative Print Storage and Shared Archiving Initiatives conference, March 14-16, Basel, Switzerland: Lizanne Payne
EAST Shared Print Summit, April 5-6, Boston, MA: Mike Furlough, Lizanne Payne
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
Grant-funded Digitization
As a reminder for our members, if you’re seeking grants that include funds for book scanning, HathiTrust is happy to serve as the preservation and access location named in your digitization and hosting plan proposal. Please feel free to consult with us on grant language and content contribution by submitting a request to feedback@issues.hathitrust.org.
Newsletter Update
Beginning with the next issue, the HathiTrust Update will be published at the beginning of each month rather than the end of the month. The next issue will be published the first week of April.
News to Share?
If you or a patron at your institution has any news to share regarding a publication, presentation, or research underway related to the HathiTrust digital repository, we’d love to hear about it. Please share with Jessica Rohr, Member Engagement and Communications Specialist, at jbelle@hathitrust.org.