HTRC Background and Activities

The HathiTrust Research Center launched in 2011 at Indiana University and the University of Illinois after an RFP process initiated by HathiTrust in 2009.

During its first year, HTRC shared write-ups of its activities:

• April 2011 - September 2011
• October 2011 - March 2012

Subsequent reports were delivered to the HathiTrust Board of Governors annually.

Key activities

Technical development

2011-2013

• Built HTRC Portal and implemented SEASR text analysis tools within it.
• Developed a prototype Data Capsule secure compute system.

2014-2018

• Integrated HTRC Data Capsule secure compute environment in the HTRC Portal.
• Improved the HTRC Portal user interface and added the Workset Builder functionality.

• Launched HTRC Analytics as an updated version of the HTRC Portal.
• HTRC Extracted Features dataset v.0.2 and v.1.
• HathiTrust+Bookworm visualization platform v.1 and v.2.

Program development

• Hosted UnCamp Conferences at Indiana University (2012), the University of Illinois (2013), the University of Michigan (2015), and the University of California at Berkeley (2018).
• Completed three rounds of Advanced Collaborative Support awards, with 14 projects sponsored.
• Created the HTRC Non-Consumptive Use Research Policy and a terms of use agreement designed to expressly to support the policy (2016-2017).

Grant-funded projects

• Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (Mellon Foundation)
• Data Capsule for Non-Consumptive Research (Sloan Foundation)
• Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis+Data Capsule (Mellon Foundation)
• HathiTrust+Bookworm (National Endowment for the Humanities)
• Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources (IMLS)
• Data Capsule as Appliance (IMLS)

Looking to the future

In January 2019 HTRC began the next phase of the Research Center. In this stage, HTRC aims to provide researchers consistent, reliable access to HTRC research environments, and to update those environments with new tools and enhancements. It also seeks to develop and implement a framework for migrating HTRC work to core HathiTrust environments.