November 2017 Update

Top News

Member Meeting Held November 2

The 2017 HathiTrust Member Meeting was held at the Loews Chicago O’Hare Hotel on November 2. One hundred attendees from 70 member institutions attended.  The meeting kicked off with eight lightning talks presented by attendees, which highlight projects and services their libraries have undertaken with support of HathiTrust.  Also during the meeting Executive Director Mike Furlough and Board of Governors Incoming Chair/Treasurer John Culshaw presented on the 2018 budget and summarized the Board’s current review of the fee model. 

The majority of the  meeting focused on HathiTrust’s strategic direction. Attendees were given the opportunity to review the draft vision, strategic directions and objectives and organizational values document. Then time was allotted for small group discussions to provide feedback on the document. 

Attendees offered a wide range of opinions and ideas about the plan, its structure, and the details included.  Having spent the remainder of the month reviewing the notes, we are just starting to to work on the final revisions that will address these comments and questions.   We’ll continue to work on this through the the next couple of months and present a final version in late winter or very early spring. 

Links to the notes and slides from the meeting can be found here: https://www.hathitrust.org/2017-member-meeting 

2018 Budget and Fees Approval

We have concluded the annual vote on the HathiTrust budget and the membership has voted to approve the 2018 budget and fees. We will be invoicing members in January 2018 for payment.

Board of Governors Fall Meeting Report

The Board of Governors held their Fall meeting at the Loews Chicago O’Hare hotel on November 1, prior to the Member Meeting. 

In Chicago, the Board continued its review of HathiTrust’s membership fee model. The current fee structure, in place since 2013, includes an equal share paid by all members to support openly available collections, and a variable cost for each member that is based on the degree of overlap between a member’s collections and those of HathiTrust. It was put in place to promote wider involvement in HathiTrust and to relate a member’s fee to the value of their benefits and services.  Our current review has considered how the model could be simplified, rendered more predictable, and continue to promote membership in HathiTrust.  This review will continue into 2018 with regular updates to the membership on our progress. 

The Board also discussed principles for multi-year budgeting in relation to the development of strategic directions, and policy issues related to the Shared Print program and the distribution and sharing of metadata. 

This was the last meeting for outgoing Board Members Joe Lucia of Temple University and Betsy Wilson of University of Washington. We thank them for their service to HathiTrust!  Kenning Arlitsch of Montana State University and Yolanda Cooper of Emory University join the Board on January 1. 

Lastly, Günter Waibel of California Digital Library was appointed to the Executive Committee as Chair-elect/Treasurer beginning in January.

Program Steering Committee Report

This past quarter, the Program Steering Committee (PSC) continued to review and guide the work of its committees and advisory and working groups in areas of programmatic planning, development and improvement.  This has included: 

• The Collections Committee has begun work that will ultimately result in a HathiTrust collections policy. 
• The Metadata Policy, Strategy, Use, and Sharing Advisory Group (MUSAG) has continued focus on a metadata sharing policy, which was reviewed in draft form by the Board at its recent meeting.
• The Quality Assurance and Standards Working Group delivered a draft schema for recording metadata that would document quality indicates about digital objects in HathiTrust. 

Additionally, PSC has engaged with the Executive Director on the strategic planning initiative throughout 2017, including contributing to the development of an environmental scan and articulating a current and prospective view of the HathiTrust portfolio.

New Copyright Review Volunteers Complete Training

Congratulations to first people who completed copyright review training for US State Government documents and are now working on live reviews.

• Jonah McAllister-Erickson, University of Pittsburgh
• Jennifer Needham, University of Pittsburgh
• Lisa Gregory, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Thanks to their exceptional work and reliability, we extended invitations for two people to become expert reviewers.  Rory Segety of the University of Minnesota has been with us since 2014. He has become an expert reviewer for the US Monographs project. Nicolle Nicastro from Pennsylvania State University has been with us since 2012 and she will be working as an expert reviewer on the US State Government Documents project. 

Phase 1 of the Shared Print Program is nearly complete as almost all of the expected 49 Retention Libraries have signed the Shared Print Program Agreement. HathiTrust is distributing files to each Retention Library containing its final shared print commitments for local use and analysis. We have encouraged Retention Libraries to record these commitments in their local collection management system as required by the Disclosure policy, and have issued updated metadata guidelines to facilitate that work. In a webcast for Retention Libraries on November 14, OCLC presented an update about the upcoming Shared Print Registration Service for disclosing retention commitments in WorldCat. OCLC anticipates releasing the service by the end of the year, which would allow HathiTrust libraries to begin using it later this winter.

Register for December 13 Fed Docs Program Webcast 

Webcast: Never a Dull Moment: Finds from the HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents Collection 

Government documents aren't always thought of as very exciting, but the U.S. government is one of the world's largest publishers and often produces material on some unexpected topics. The HathiTrust Digital Library contains more than 1 million U.S. federal government documents - and they aren't all rules and regulations. Join Valerie Glenn on December 13 at 1:00pm ET for a look at some of the more lighthearted items in the collection. Participants will come away with a greater awareness of HathiTrust federal documents content and collections. 

Register at https://goo.gl/2PhSSw 

News from Our Member Community

Our members sometimes publish articles highlighting how they participate in HathiTrust activities or detailing how to use HathiTrust services.   The University of Minnesota Library recently published an item in the newsletter continuum: news from @umnlib titled Making the public domain accessible, which described Minnesota’s participation in HathiTrust’s Copyright Review Program.

California Digital Library has published a report titled Representing HathiTrust Resources in your Local ILS.  This report was written to document how HathiTrust resources could be made discoverable in the local library catalogs of University of California campuses.   Many other libraries will find that it includes guidance that may be useful in other libraries as well.

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!

• Coalition for Networked Information Fall Membership Meeting, December 11-12, Washington, DC:  Mike Furlough.
• HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp 2018, January 25-26, Berkeley, CA: Mike Furlough, Sandra McIntyre, Valerie Glenn, Heather Christenson, Angelina Zaytsev, Kristina Eden.