Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
February Board of Governors Meeting Summary
New HathiTrust Digital Collection Principles: Orienting Toward Justice
Slack Pop-up in March: LGBTQ+ Representation in HathiTrust Collections
Helping Your Community Use HathiTrust: University of California HathiTrust Support Site
Record Consolidation: For OAI Users
From the Collection: The U.S. Equal Rights Amendment
Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
We are pleased to announce that Drake University and Keio University have joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.
February Board of Governors Meeting Summary
The HathiTrust Board of Governors met on February 15, and welcomed new members Theresa Byrd, University of San Diego (2022-2024); Anne Houston, Lafayette College (2022-2023); Beth Namachchivaya, University of Waterloo (2022-2023); and Xuemao Wang, University of Cincinnati (2022-2024). During this meeting, the Board approved a proposed process to select a new chair of the Program Steering Committee to succeed Karla Strieb, Ohio State University, whose term ends this year. The next chair of PSC will be selected from current and recent members who have self-nominated for the role, and will be confirmed at the Board’s May meeting.
The Board also approved a proposal to establish a “quasi-endowment” by investing a portion of the HathiTrust reserves in the University of Michigan’s endowment pool for a period of five years; the income from this investment will be incorporated into the annual budget beginning in 2023. In addition to these actions, the Board reviewed and affirmed the importance of HathiTrust’s continued status as a hosted program at the University of Michigan; Executive Director, Mike Furlough, discussed the continuing work to develop a Code of Conduct with support from the University of Michigan.
The Board also devoted a substantial portion of the meeting to long-term planning in discussion with representatives from the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a consulting firm that HathiTrust has been matched with through the program Financial Resilience in the Digital Humanities. The board will meet again on May 3, 2022.
New HathiTrust Digital Collection Principles: Orienting Toward Justice
Our HathiTrust 2019-2023 Strategic Directions state that HathiTrust will “responsibly steward our collections and resources on behalf of HathiTrust member libraries;” “deepen and add breadth to the HathiTrust collections, guided by a targeted, intentional strategy for new and retrospective publications;” and “include many voices and perspectives in our collections.”
Executive Director, Mike Furlough, recently introduced the HathiTrust Digital Collection Principles, a collaborative effort between HathiTrust staff and members. Mike says, “HathiTrust emerged out of large-scale mass digitization programs, which have sourced the majority of our collection. As we enter our fifteenth year, it is time for us to begin taking a more active curatorial role in building the collection for future scholarship, and do so with a recognition that this scholarship will be shaped by a range of dynamic forces in the coming years.” The collection priorities orient toward justice, equity, and wide representation, and resilience in response to changing economic, social, and environmental conditions in support of scholarship and our libraries.
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Slack Pop-up in March: LGBTQ+ Representation in HathiTrust Collections
Slack Pop-Up in March: LGBTQ+ Representation in HathiTrust Collections Investigation
Wednesday, March 23, 2:00 pm EDT/11:00 am PDT #general channel
Are you interested in how HathiTrust is exploring the collection with a lens toward justice and equity? Have you encountered students or researchers looking for LGBTQ+ content in HathiTrust but who turn up empty-handed? Join Natalie Fulkerson, HathiTrust Collection Services Librarian, for a Slack chat on her investigation into LGBTQ+ collections and representation in the context of digital libraries and research. To take the project further, she would like to connect with colleagues who have first-hand experience with the struggles of helping people locate LGBTQ+-related material in HathiTrust.
Library professionals from member libraries are welcome to join their 250+ peers on the HathiTrust Community Slack. Please submit a request by emailing feedback@issues.hathitrust.org.
Helping Your Community Use HathiTrust: University of California HathiTrust Support Site
Many HathiTrust member libraries have created LibGuides and other instructional resources to help their patrons successfully use the HathiTrust Digital Library for teaching, learning, and research. A new web presence, designed for the entire University of California system, brings together multiple resources and findings on HathiTrust to support an extensive community of users.
Creator Renata Ewing, Access and Support Coordinator for Digitization & Digital Content at California Digital Library, says, “We created the UC Libraries HathiTrust Help Center to support UC’s work on HathiTrust related projects and to keep UC library personnel informed about UC's participation in HathiTrust. Our goal is to provide resources to increase awareness of and encourage engagement with HathiTrust and its community at UC.”
Keep an eye on social media for ideas, as Renata says that Twitter inspired the article on how to copy/paste text from a HathiTrust volume. Resources on the site address questions of “permissions and restricted UC content,” as well as provide information to help “campus contacts open volumes in HathiTrust.”
University of California HathiTrust Support Site
Record Consolidation: For OAI Users
If you are an active user of the OAI data feed, you may have noticed that we now report fewer items than in the past. HathiTrust has improved record matching among the millions of bibliographic records we manage. As a result, some records for items in HathiTrust have been merged. In those cases, we have set up redirects so that older catalog URLs will go to the newly merged record. If you notice any problems that may be related to this change, please contact us at feedback@issues.hathitrust.org.
From the Collection: The U.S. Equal Rights Amendment
Title: Equal Rights Amendment, Questions and Answers
Authors: National Woman’s Party
Published: Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946. (Contributed by Harvard University, HathiTrust member since 2011).
Originally proposed in 1923 by National Women's Party founder Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) seeks to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. This 1946 publication from the National Woman’s Party advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment in response to World War II during which women entered the workplace and male casualties left many families without a primary breadwinner. The amendment could have offered much-needed protections. The ERA was introduced in Congress each year until the 1970s.
In March 1972, the U.S. Congress passed the most recent version of the ERA by a vote of 84-8. (The digitized record of the 1972 Congressional hearing is restricted for online access due to the appearance of personally identifiable information in the proceedings.) Despite having achieved the required ratification by 3/4 of the states in 2020, the amendment has not been ratified.
Image Credit: Alfred T. Palmer, Women at work on bomber, Douglas Aircraft Company, Long Beach, Cali. 1942, Transparencies--Color, Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information color slides and transparencies collection (Library of Congress). https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsac.1a35341/