One Million and Counting: A Copyright Review Milestone
Register for Community Week Sessions: July 11-14
Welcoming Janet Swatscheno to HathiTrust and HathiTrust Research Center
Join the HathiTrust User Support Team: Call for Participation
Metadata Quality Improvement Project Now Underway
From the Collection: LGBTQIA+ Resources collection
One Million and Counting: A Copyright Review Milestone
The HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has met a milestone: the review of more than 1,000,000 books! The program launched in 2008 with three consecutive IMLS National Leadership grants to responsibly ascertain copyright status of works in the HathiTrust collection. On June 2, HathiTrust reached the review of its 1 millionth HathiTrust item, bringing the total number of U.S. public domain determinations in the collection to 570,594. Read the complete announcement.
Register for Community Week Sessions: July 11-14
The full schedule of HathiTrust Community Week virtual sessions the week of July 11-14 are now posted online and open for registration. Sign up for 1, 2, 3, or all sessions! Join colleagues from Notre Dame, University of Missouri, University of Arkansas, Harvard University and more for sessions that include using HathiTrust links in local resources, serial copyright review projects, text and data mining, collection strategy, assessment, and promoting HathiTrust to your campus and library community.
HathiTrust Community Week virtual sessions are free to attend and open to anyone with an interest in or responsibility for HathiTrust at their own institutions. Sessions will be recorded and made public.
Register for HathiTrust Community Week Sessions
Welcoming Janet Swatscheno to HathiTrust and HathiTrust Research Center
Janet Swatscheno recently joined HathiTrust in a dual role as Digital Scholarship Librarian and Associate Director for Outreach & Education at the HathiTrust Research Center.
“We’re all so pleased to have Janet on board. She brings the expertise we need to help build the capacity of scholars at all levels to conduct deep research within the digital library,” said Heather Christenson, Collections & Access Lead and Program Officer for Federal Documents.
Most recently, Janet held the position of Digital Publishing Librarian and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). In this key HathiTrust role, Janet will bring expertise to HathiTrust in establishing and maintaining digital services, and conducting digital humanities outreach in the form of virtual and in-person training.
Join us in welcoming Janet and read the full announcement online.
Join the HathiTrust User Support Team: Call for Participation
HathiTrust is seeking new members for the HathiTrust User Support team. This is a great opportunity to get involved with the day-to-day work of HathiTrust and to learn more about HathiTrust’s general operations. HathiTrust User Support is an asynchronous user support team that communicates with patrons via a ticketing system. User Support members respond to problem reports and questions about services. HathiTrust does not provide in-depth reference services. Messages are submitted by member libraries, by students and faculty, and by public users from around the world.
Interested member library employees should apply using this form. Nominations are due by Friday, July 1st, and training occurs in August. User Support members are expected to serve four hours per two week period. This includes being on call one day every two weeks and following-up on messages as needed. Individuals must be currently employed at a HathiTrust member library. Participation in HathiTrust User Support constitutes service to the profession.
This is a good opportunity for the following individuals:
New library professionals looking to acquire experience in user services.
Current experts in user or access services who wish to learn more about HathiTrust services.
Digital conversion experts or catalogers interested in improving the quality of the HathiTrust collection.
We have vacancies in all three subgroups. In the application form, please indicate the team of greatest interest.
General Support team members do initial review of tickets on their scheduled day, answer basic questions, and refer tickets to other people as needed.
Bibliographic Corrections team members review catalog error reports and work with contributing libraries to receive metadata corrections. Familiarity with MARC format is required.
Digital Objects Quality Corrections team members review content quality problems and work with Google and contributing institutions to improve the quality of content scans.
Questions about the work of the HathiTrust User Support team? Please contact Val Waldron, Chair of HathiTrust User Support, at vwaldron@hathitrust.org.
Metadata Quality Improvement Project Now Underway
One recommendation from the Community Metadata Strategy Task Force is to provide support for member libraries to improve metadata quality. The Metadata Quality Improvement Project kicked off this past month with a cohort of seven pilot libraries: Cornell University, Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, University of California - San Diego, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia.
All the bibliographic metadata in the collection originates from member institutions that have deposited scanned objects with HathiTrust. To support remediation and enrichment work on those records, the initial phase of this project offers full-text access to the HathiTrust corpus to catalogers from the seven depositing institutions.
Each of the participating member libraries will focus on a specific project within their own library and re-submit remediated content to HathiTrust. In addition to improving the overall quality of the HathiTrust collection, the program supports our members' diverse internal projects, initiatives, and goals.
Pending the successful completion of the pilot phase of the project in early September, the intent is to then open up participation to all depositing members for similar metadata quality improvement efforts. Further expansion to more member institutions may be considered at a later date.
From the Collection: LGBTQIA+ Resources collection
Caption: The collection is the largest collection of LGBTQIA+ resources publicly available in Collection Builder.
Collection Title: LGBTQIA+ Resources*
Collection Owner: Clair Kronk, PhD, Yale University
Collection owner Clair Kronk, Biomedical informatician and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Medical Informatics at the Yale University School of Medicine, initiated this collection as a starting point to investigate use of LGBTQIA+ language by those within the community. Clair is known for her transformative Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation (GSSO) ontology, created to “provide a reliable resource, focused mostly on LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual/aromantic, and other umbrella gender and sexual minorities), to facilitate communication between LGBTQIA+ persons and health professionals. Since then, it has evolved into a truly inter- and transdisciplinary vocabulary, being utilized in archival work, natural language processing applications, and in providing materials for professionals and non-professionals alike, including non-LGBTQIA+ persons.”
*Description: This public collection compiles items in the HathiTrust collection created by members of the LGBTQIA+ community about LGBTQIA+ lives, culture, and persons. While the majority of the collection is limited by copyright law, the collection metadata may be downloaded in a text or JSON file and used as a bibliography to locate the items in print collections or to advance research in other ways.
Photo Credit: Robert Anasch on Unsplash