Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
The Flipped Library: Emergency Temporary Access Usage and Support
2020 Member Meeting NEW Format and Save-the-Date
New Resources for HathiTrust Ingest of Locally Digitized Materials Now Available
Open Call for 2020 ACS Scholars due May 31
The HTRC ACS Awardees: Project Blogs
HathiTrust Access to 1.4 Million+ U.S. Federal Documents
News, Research, and Publications
Featured Copyright Reviewer: Grace Brooks
Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
We are pleased to announce that Carleton University, Mississippi State University, University of Guelph, and Vassar College have joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.
The Flipped Library: Emergency Temporary Access Usage and Support
HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service is now available to millions of current students, faculty, and staff on 165 campuses around the world. HathiTrust staff are reviewing feedback and data suggesting that ETAS has achieved its goal to help academic communities continue to learn, teach, and conduct research during the pandemic.
During the month of April, a total of 30,723 individual patrons checked out an average of 2 titles a day. From doctoral students completing dissertations to faculty delivering online lectures, the individuals using ETAS resources are expressing their gratitude. Danielle Charette, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago writes, “Not sure I've ever tweeted at the library before, but just want to say that the number of texts @UChicagoLibrary has rapidly made available via the @hathitrust is remarkable — and much appreciated.”
Awareness of ETAS resources is due, in part, to successful campaigns mounted by member libraries in late March and April. With usage up overall, it’s clear that HathiTrust member librarians continue to promote the digital library as a whole. All 17.4 million digitized items were contributed by our members, making the HathiTrust Digital Library the only digital library curated and stewarded by the academic community, for the academic community.
What’s Next for ETAS?
Usage Data Reports
Later this month, all libraries using ETAS will receive usage reports by email outlining the number of unique check-outs, users, renewals, and individual item IDs for the service at their library. These will be sent to the named ETAS contact and a webcast will be available for those wishing additional support in interpreting the reports.
Future of ETAS
As member libraries and institutions evaluate various scenarios for re-opening, HathiTrust is also evaluating the future of ETAS in the nuanced pandemic era. HathiTrust will continue its own planning in close consultation with members. In the meantime, if your library has already made plans to resume regular operations, or otherwise permit access to print collections, please contact feedback@issues.hathitrust.org.
ETAS Member Success & Support
If you have an ETAS success story from a patron or technical trick to share, please pass it on to Jessica Rohr at jbelle@hathitrust.org.
ETAS Resources
Explore the resources below to find additional ways to promote the service and aid discovery of Emergency Temporary Access Service items.
Integrate ETAS Records
Help users easily locate HathiTrust records by integrating them into your catalog.
Submit New Print Holdings
Update your holdings to permit ETAS access to titles. These are processed monthly.
Read Your Overlap Report
Find information about your collection and what’s available in ETAS.
Promote & Support ETAS
Peruse HathiTrust and member-created videos, blogs, and social media and contribute your own for others to use.
A recording of the May 6 ETAS Virtual Office Hours session is now available on the HathiTrust YouTube channel. A schedule of future sessions on Improving Discovery of ETAS Resources and Interpreting ETAS Usage Reports is forthcoming.
2020 Member Meeting NEW Format and Save-the-Date
In response to the COVID-19 global crisis and its impact on the academic library community, HathiTrust has made the difficult decision to modify the 2020 annual member meeting format from an in-person event to a virtual event. While the meeting details and activities are not yet fully developed, HathiTrust staff and the Annual Member Meeting Program Committee are taking a creative approach to re-shaping this event as an opportunity to introduce new audiences and ideas.
The business portion of the event will take place as planned on October 22, 2020. The Board of Governors will hold their meeting in virtual form, on Wednesday, October 21. More details will be sent to member representatives and primary contacts in the coming weeks.
Annual Member Meeting Program Committee: Jeffry Archer (McGill University); Mark Christel (Grinnell College); Sharon Farb (UCLA); Holly Mercer (University of Tennessee-Knoxville); Matthew Sheehy (Brandeis University)
New Resources for HathiTrust Ingest of Locally Digitized Materials Now Available
To support current, as well as future contributions, HathiTrust refreshed the ingest-related content on our website to improve clarity and provide more context for contributors to HathiTrust. While our technical requirements have not changed, we identified several opportunities to improve our existing web documentation, including:
removing outdated and irrelevant information
replacing technical jargon with plain language, and
providing clearer distinctions between requirements and recommended best practices
We made revisions to the following pages:
We also created two new pages, as follows:
The new Technical Requirements for Digitized Page Images Submitted to HathiTrust page replaces the University of Michigan Digitization Specification previously available on our website.
The new Submission Package Requirements for Digitized Content Submitted to HathiTrust page replaces the HathiTrust Cloud Validation and Packaging Service document.
Together, these new and updated pages provide comprehensive information on the requirements and process for locally digitized material submitted directly to HathiTrust. Thank you to all those who reviewed and provided feedback on earlier versions. If you have any questions or suggestions for additional improvements to these pages, please contact HathiTrust collection services librarian Natalie Fulkerson at nfulkers@hathitrust.org.
Open Call for 2020 ACS Scholars due May 31
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) requests proposals for its Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) Program, a scholarly service offering collaboration between researchers and HTRC staff to solve challenging problems related to computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus. We seek to collaborate with researchers who have independently begun an HTRC project that they have set aside for reasons such as difficulty with dataset creation, questions about tool use, or lack of support generally.
Previous ACS awardees are not eligible. We will review proposals on any topic that makes use of HathiTrust content and/or HTRC tools and services for text and data mining research.
ACS awards are delivered in the form of HTRC staff time and compute resources. Each awarded proposal will receive access to HTRC staff to collaborate on the proposed project during the award period beginning July 1, 2020 through no later than January 31, 2021.
Submission Deadline: May 31, 2020 at 11:59 p.m. ET
Find submission guidelines and links to past ACS projects on the ACS webpage.
The HTRC ACS Awardees: Project Blogs
The 2019-2020 Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) awardeesare starting to wrap up their projects, collaborating with HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) staff. The 2019-2020 ACS awardees have shared interim project updates in the blog posts below.
Read all the blogs on the HTRC documentation site or click on the titles below for individual blogs.
A Half-Century of Illustrated Pages: ACS Lab Notes
ACS awardee: Stephen Krewson (Yale University)
. . . Right now, sitting on a supercomputer named Big Red at Indiana University, is a rather remarkable dataset: every illustrated page from every Google-scanned volume in the HathiTrust Digital Library for the period 1800-1850 . . .
HTRC & Me
ACS awardee: Dan Sinykin (Emory University)
. . . In fall 2018, the study of contemporary literature changed. HathiTrust opened its vault of copyrighted material to computational scholarly use . . .
GlobalNames and the HathiTrust
ACS awardees: Dmitry Mozzherin and Matt Yoder (Species File Group, Illinois Natural History Survey, Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois)
. . . The idea is straightforward, find a biological name like Homo sapiens (humans) [or] Apis mellifera (the Western honey bee) . . . and you may discover information important to scientists "nearby.” In the context of the GlobalNames project finding a name means parsing digitized literature or datasets, small or large. . .
Semantic Phasor Embeddings
ACS awardees: Molly Des Jardin, Scott Enderle, Katie Rawson (University of Pennsylvania)
… By creating compact, non-expressive, non-consumptive representations of individual volumes as vectors … we want to make the work of synthesizing the data produced by digitization projects easier, to tell stories that could not have been told before ... and to investigate the internal structures of texts at larger scales.
HathiTrust Access to 1.4 Million+ U.S. Federal Documents
By Federal Documents Advisory Committee | www.hathitrust.org
Are you now faced with the difficult path of continuing your scholarly work remotely? Have a research question involving federal government information? Or just looking for interesting reading? During the current health emergency when many libraries are closed, HathiTrust’s U.S. Federal Documents Collection remains open for use, with resources addressing government response to pandemics throughout U.S. history.
Read the full blog post for search tips and curated Federal Documents collections.
News, Research, and Publications
Documents to the People (DttP)
HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents Program Update
Author: Heather Christenson, HathiTrust Program Officer for Collections and Federal Documents
HathiTrust Copyright Review of State Government Documents
Author: Kristina Eden Hall, HathiTrust Copyright Review Program Manager
Gary Price, “HathiTrust Announces Emergency Temporary Access Service,” infodocket.com, March 31, 2020.
Roger C. Schonfeld, “Research Library Digitization Has Found Its Moment,” www.sr.ithaka.org/blog, April 21, 2020.
Michelle Simone, “HathiTrust: A Digital Library Revolution Takes Flight”
UC News, May 14, 2020.
Featured Copyright Reviewer: Grace Brooks
Grace Brooks, Information Resources and Services Supervisor/Manager 4 in Acquisitions Services, Pennsylvania State University
Years working in a library: 28
HathiTrust start date: May 2012
Review statistics: 15,769 total reviews; 10,614 public domain
I have completed reviews for three different projects (World - Commonwealth, US State Government documents, and Crown Copyright) over the last several years. It is great to be able to contribute to the various projects and to make works accessible.