Top News
Save the Date: 2017 Member Meeting
The 2017 Member Meeting will be held November 2, 2017 at Loews Chicago O’Hare. A link to the room block will be sent to member representatives and contacts when available.
Registration Open for Webcast: “Discovering the HathiTrust Digital Library Collection”
Members are invited to a webinar exploring how to use the HathiTrust Digital Library. Topics that will be covered include: an overview of the HathiTrust collection, how to search in HathiTrust, how to access content in HathiTrust. Members can select one of two dates to attend the webinar:
Tuesday, March 28, 2017 @ 10:00-11:00 AM EST
Wednesday, April 5, 2017 @ 4:00-5:00 PM EST
For those who are unable to attend either viewing, we will post the recording to the HathiTrust YouTube channel afterwards. Register online.
Board of Governors Held 2017 Winter Meeting
The HathiTrust Board of Governors held its regular winter meeting by phone on March 2, 2017. This was the first meeting for new Board members Joe Lucia, Temple University, Kevin Smith, University of Kansas, and Sarah Thomas, Harvard University. This was also the last meeting for Anne Kenney, Cornell University, before her retirement in April. She will be replaced on the Board by Beth McNeil, Iowa State University.
During the meeting, the Board discussed the process for extending or updating the standard HathiTrust member agreements. Mike Furlough reviewed current policy and practices for accepting collection deposits by non-member institutions. The Board requested a more detailed investigation of costs associated with these deposits, and referred other unresolved policy issues to the Program Steering Committee (PSC) and the Collections Committee. Finally, the Board discussed separate but related planning efforts underway in 2017. HathiTrust has engaged a consultant to continue an examination of HathiTrust’s fee model and its membership strategies, continuing work begun by the Committee on Membership and Finance last year. The Board also confirmed plans and processes for a strategic visioning retreat to include the Board and PSC in mid-June.
Updates
U.S. Federal Documents Program Update
Implementation of the HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents Program is progressing on a number of fronts. Earlier in the year, Program Officer Heather Christenson completed an assessment of the U.S. Federal Documents Registry in order to plan for greater use and further development if needed. The assessment concluded that we should not embark on a new phase of development, but instead should focus on actively using the Registry, and in the process, get a finer understanding of how it might be developed further for HathiTrust’s needs. In the coming months, we will use it as a tool to engage with members for collection-building projects and requests (such as digitization projects and collection comparisons), and will leverage this work to specify further development needs. TheRegistry web interface will continue to be available.
In January 2017 HathiTrust staff completed an initial overall analysis of the current HathiTrust federal documents collection to inform collection development strategies, but also to serve as a feasibility test for determining a variety of metrics based on the data available to us and to establish a baseline for reporting on the collection. In addition to the overall analysis, we also performed a test to determine comprehensiveness of digitized versions of a few key federal document titles within HathiTrust. Details can be found in a newblog post andreport on the project.
The Program Officer has been working in consultation with the Fed Docs Advisory Committee (FDAC) on key policy areas such as ensuring that federal documents are considered in the Shared Print Program and staking out a “collection framework” to delineate collection development priorities beyond mass digitization. High priorities for the coming months include further exploration of new digitization strategies and development of pilot project(s), focused projects to dig deeper into metadata issues in order to more accurately identify collection gaps, and work to find optimal ways to leverage the Registry to share data with HathiTrust members for collection analysis.
For more information, please see the U.S. Federal Documents Program Update, March 2017.
Research Center Data Capsule service expands features
The Data Capsule service has undergone considerable enhancements over the last two months. With an influx of additional hardware, the service can now support more simultaneous users, and an individual user can check out a Capsule that has a larger number of cores and more memory than before.
The environment within a user's Capsule has gotten easier to use too through three new tool, which together provide a quick-start analysis environment for a user who is working in their Capsule.. Through a new single command ("htrc download"), a user can readily import full-text volumes and metadata directly from the HathiTrust to their Capsule. The new command "htrc run mallet" invokes a MALLET natural language processing workflow and the command “htrc run topicexplorer” invokes the Topic Explorer topics visualization tool. Finally, through a new Python tool, a user can easily test workflows in maintenance mode or on their home computer through a mock test environment. This final feature is suited to a user who is developing and testing a new tool that they will eventually run in their Capsule against the HathiTrust. The Python software development kit (SDK) is available athttp://github.com/htrc/HTRC-PythonSDK/
HTRC and D2I to host an IDEASc fellow
This semester HTRC and the Data to Insight Center are hosting a fellow from the Integrated Doctoral Education with Application to Scholarly Communication program (IDEASc, http://info.ils.indiana.edu/IDEASc/index.html) funded through a grant from IMLS. Pei-Ying Chen, a second-year doctoral student in information science at Indiana University Bloomington, will get hands-on experience with Data Capsule and other HTRC tools, help evaluate them and provide feedback to the team on how to improve the user experience for two groups of users: researchers who analyze HT data and librarians who provide support for HT services. Pei-Ying holds a dual B.A. in foreign languages and literature and sociology from the National Taiwan University and an M.A. in history from the National Tsing Hua University. Her interests are in scholarly/science communication and changes in higher education from gender and organizational perspectives.
CRMS Program Update
On The Road
HathiTrust staff will be attending the following events over the next few months. Please contact us if you wish to meet us at any of these events!
CNI Spring Meeting, Albuquerque, NM, April 3-4, 2017 - Sandra McIntyre
DPLAFest 2017, Chicago, IL, April 20-21, 2017 - Angelina Zaytsev, Kristina Eden, Mike Furlough, Eleanor Dickson
Angelina Zaytsev, Kristina Eden, “Harnessing Volunteer Power for Operational and Programmatic Success” https://dplafest2017.sched.com/event/9klY/harnessing-volunteer-power-for-operational-and-programmatic-success
Eleanor Dickson, “HathiTrust Research Center Lesson Plan Jam” https://dplafest2017.sched.com/event/9kkr/hathitrust-research-center-lesson-plan-jam
ARL 2017 Spring Membership Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, May 2-4, 2017 - Mike Furlough