January 2018 Update

January 2018 Update

January 31, 2018

Fulkerson and Rohr Join HathiTrust Team

HathiTrust is pleased to announce the appointment of Natalie Fulkerson and Jessica Rohr to the HathiTrust central staff. Natalie Fulkerson (upper right) is joining HathiTrust as Collection Services Librarian, coming from Layman Poupard Publishing. Jessica Rohr (lower right), formerly a Senior Communications Specialist for the University of Michigan Information and Technology Services, will serve as Member Engagement and Communications Specialist. See the full announcement here.

Welcome to New Members

We welcome Carleton College, University at Buffalo, and University System of Georgia as new members of the HathiTrust Community.

6 Million Open Books!

The University of California, Riverside, deposited HathiTrust’s 6 millionth open digitized book in January.   The specific item, volume 3 of Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, first session (1975),  includes documentation supporting the committee’s investigation into the intelligence activities of the Internal Revenue Service.  It also explains why the IRS thought the Roaring 20s came to Atlanta in October 1970. Full Blog Post

2017 Recap

It might be a cliche to say so, but 2017 was a busy year for HathiTrust.  Space doesn’t permit us to write at length about our accomplishments and milestones, but we wanted to highlight some greatest hits:

• Our collection hit two growth milestones in 2017. We reached 15 million works in February and  16 million in November.  The University of Virginia was our largest single contributor, depositing more than 500,000 volumes. 
• We welcomed 10 new members in 2017:  Dickinson College; Graduate Center, CUNY; Macalester College; Southern Methodist University; Texas Christian University; Union College; University of Mississippi, University of Oregon; Virginia Commonwealth University; Wichita State University.
• 37 members contributed 1.2 million volumes in 2017.
• We completed the first phase of our shared print program.  49 of our members have agreed to retain 16 million volumes for 25 years; these correspond to 4.8 million monograph titles in HathiTrust.  In 2018 we will begin collection analysis to support the second phase of the program. 
• We began charting our strategic directions for 2019-23.  We hosted a number of online events to discuss a draft vision, and made this the focus of our 2017 member meeting, attended by 100 representatives from 70 institutions.  We’ve been working on revisions to our plan based on what we heard at that meeting and should have a final version available in the spring.
• Executive Director Mike Furlough testified before the House Committee on Administration in support of revisions to legislation governing the Federal Depository Library Program.
• We recruited and hired brand new staff (see the story in this update).
• We re-launched our copyright review program to focus on US monographs published between 1923 and 1963 and U.S. state and local government documents published between 1923 and 1977. Over 25 volunteer reviewers examined a total of 83,572 titles in 2017.

Research Center UnCamp Held in Berkeley

Over 140 people attended the fourth HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley Libraries on January 25 and 26.  In addition to keynotes focused on methodologies of text and data mining, researchers from the fields of digital libraries, literary history, the history of social movements, digital pedagogy and information science also presented their work and its intersection with HathiTrust. We will have a more complete recap in our next update, but in the meantime slides and notes from the presentations can be found at https://osf.io/view/htrc_uncamp2018/.

Spring Workshop Registration Now Open: HTRC Text Mining for Librarians

Are you a librarian who is interested in learning more about digital humanities methods and text mining?

Registration is now open for spring 2018 workshops in Boston, Dallas, and Lawrence, KS as a part of the IMLS-funded project “Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources” (DDRF) project. These one-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.

Digital Preservation and Access

Next week, look out for the release of HathiTrust’s Annual Collection Growth and Usage Report. The 2017 report departs from the 2016 report, which looked at overall usage patterns for all users. In this year’s report, we dive into two different subgroups of users, members and genealogists, and investigate the behaviors of these users. Doing this investigation helps us understand what loyalty looks like in web analytics data.

Some interesting data we are exploring relates to usage by members. Tracking member usage can be complicated because users are not required to log in to view HathiTrust content. Users tend to log in primarily when they find relevant content that they want to download or save to a collection, which means login data allows us to infer success rates for users’ searches.

In the report, we will review different methods that we  can use to track usage, including the sites directing the user o HathiTrust. We then examine correlation between user location (referrer) and frequency of login once in HathiTrust.  Preliminary data suggests that users who are referred from a university’s website (typically a library catalog) tend to log in more frequently. More analysis will be shared in the report. 

Copyright Review Program

Congratulations to the people who finished copyright review training in US State Government Documents in December. We are sure to accomplish more with so many new people!

• Ana Ramirez Luhrs, Lafayette College
• David Frank, University of Pittsburgh
• John Griffin, University of Florida
• John Sanders, University of Mississippi
• Laura Sare, Texas A&M University
• Lisa Di Valentino, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Maria Scheid, The Ohio State University
• Marlys McGuire, University of Minnesota
• Michelle Hubbell, Cornell University
• Michelle Nair, Cornell University
• Nat Bender, University of Pennsylvania
• Rachel Caldwell, University of Tennessee
• Shawn Jasper, University of Pennsylvania
• Zach Coble, New York University 

Institutions taking part in copyright review for the first time in 2018 are:

Georgia State University, Lafayette College, Temple University, Texas A&M University, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, University of Florida, University of Mississippi, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, University of Tennessee, University of Virginia, Wake Forest University, and Washington State University. 

Thank you to those reviewers who will be continuing for an additional year:

Maryanne Alos (Amherst College), Naomi Rubin (Boston College), Caitlin Finlay (Cornell), Wendall Sullivan (DePaul), Chris Case (Johns Hopkins), Louise Robertson (McGill), Daniel Biddle (NYU), Grace Brooks (PSU), Melanie Rinker (PSU), Nicolle Nicastro (PSU), Jenn Phillips (PSU), Jennifer Block (Princeton), Judy Marsh (Stanford), Cynthia Baker (UNC Chapel Hill), Cyndie Cowan (UNC Chapel Hill), Elissa Mondschein (University of Arizona), Lura Joseph (UIUC), Qiang Jin (UIUC), Jeremy Smith (UMass Amherst), Greg Nichols (U Mich), Heather Shoecraft (U Mich), Rory Segety (U Minn), Sandra Cressman (U Minn), Melissa Aho (U Minn), Marlys McGuire (U Minn).

U.S. Federal Documents Program

The HathiTrust US Federal Documents Program has been busy this past year. In 2017 we made progress in defining our collection priorities, adding to the collection, improving discovery, and providing value by promoting awareness of our collection and making it available for new uses. Approximately 33,000 US federal documents were added to the HathiTrust Digital Library in 2017 from 35 libraries, including major contributions from University of California, Riverside; University of Virginia; and Northwestern University. As of January 1, HathiTrust now preserves and provides access to 1,054,845 digital US federal documents. A year-in-review of 2017 and more details are available in the full January 2018 Program Update.  

Unfortunately we experienced technical difficulties during our December webcast Never a Dull Moment: Finds from the HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents Collection. The webcast has been rescheduled for February 14 at 1:00 p.m. EST, so please mark your calendars! Updated access information will be sent to those who have registered, and we will post a link to the recording.

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!

• ALA Midwinter Meeting, February 9-13, Denver, CO:  Lizanne Payne, Valerie Glenn
• 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