New Board Members
The members of HathiTrust have elected two member representatives to serve on its Board of Governors beginning in 2020:
Elaine Westbrooks, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (three-year term ending in 2022)
Holly Mercer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (three-year term ending in 2022)
Exiting the Board at the end of 2019 is Kevin Smith, University of Kansas. Mercer was previously elected in 2018 to a one-year term to complete the term of Sarah Thomas (who retired from Harvard University) and will now continue to serve a full term through 2022.
The HathiTrust Board of Governors has ultimate responsibility for HathiTrust's activities, strategy, finances, and operations. It includes six at-large members elected by the membership and six members appointed by the founding institutions, which include the University of Michigan, Indiana University, the University of California, and the members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
Announcing the NEW Metadata Sharing and Use Policy
The HathiTrust Metadata Policy, Strategy, Use and Sharing Advisory Group (MUSAG) worked to create a new HathiTrust Policy on Metadata Sharing and Use, and, in June of this year, the Board of Governors approved the policy. This commitment to broader sharing of metadata is significant for research, discovery, and dissemination of the scholarship under our collective stewardship.
Karla Strieb (The Ohio State University), Chair of the HathiTrust Program Steering Committee, says, “I am happy to share the Policy with you now, and to outline the steps we are taking to implement the policy and ensure HathiTrust-managed metadata is shared as freely as possible.”
The policy provides a broad framework for sharing and using HathiTrust-collected, -managed and -generated metadata. To encourage discovery of materials, research, and for a variety of current and future uses, the new policy states that HathiTrust will provide open access to HathiTrust-collected, -managed and -generated metadata where it has been determined that legal, contractual, policy, ethical, practical, and strategic considerations allow.
HathiTrust appreciates the dedicated work of MUSAG members, and particularly MUSAG chairs Tim Cole (University of Illinois) and Stephen Hearn (University of Minnesota), and subteam chair Patti Martin (University of California, now retired).
Read the full policy and the announcement email online.
Blog Post: It's No Secret - Millions of Books are Openly in the Public Domain
In a recent blog post, Kristina Eden, program manager of HathiTrust’s award-winning copyright review program, and Greg Cram, Associate Director of Copyright and Information Policy at New York Public Library, discuss the complexities of copyright law, public domain determinations, and the partnership between HathiTrust and long-time HathiTrust member, New York Public Library.
The HathiTrust and NYPL partnership is just one example where new access to old data is helping improve ongoing work in copyright. NYPL’s recent project to enable more accurate searching of copyright records will assist copyright reviewers from HathiTrust member libraries who conduct the necessary manual work to ensure the broadest access to items in the public domain.
Read the complete blog post by Greg and Kristina on the HathiTrust website.
Greg Cram will also present at the 2019 Annual Member Meeting: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Public Domain of the 20th Century.
Looking Forward to the 2019 Member Meeting, Oct. 23
An advance welcome to the more than 90 member libraries registered to attend the 2019 Annual HathiTrust Member Meeting: Driving and Supporting Change in the Research Ecosystem.
Thanks to the recommendation of the Member Meeting Program Planning Committee, the meeting will include its first guest speaker, Neela Banerjee, investigative journalist at Inside Climate News. Banerjee will present Mapping the American Anomaly: How Our Investigative Journalism has used Archives to Document Climate Denialism in the United States. Banerjee co-presented at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL/ALA conference in July 2019.
The full 2019 Member Meeting agenda and titles of 2019 lightning talk presentations by HathiTrust members are online. Details are subject to change.
For more information, see 2019 Member Meeting or contact Melissa Stewart with questions (mmstewa@hathitrust.org).
HTRC Workshop Series for Fall 2019
There are still a few seats available for fall HathiTrust Research Center workshops! The workshops are generously hosted by HathiTrust member institutions. And while the hosts do get priority registration, five seats in each workshop are reserved for attendees from other HathiTrust member institutions. Spots will be allocated in the order of registration.
Register using the links below:
West Virginia University (November 4 & 5) Librarian workshop | Researcher workshop
McMaster University (November 14 & 15) Librarian workshop | Researcher workshop
University of Nevada, Las Vegas (December 5 & 6) Librarian workshop (full, names will be added to waitlist) | Researcher workshop
Each training includes a full-day workshop for librarians and a half-day workshop for researchers. Register, or share the news with your community.
More details can be found here: https://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_workshops.
VPAT & Accessibility Service Updates
You can now read about HathiTrust accessibility conformance in our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)®. A VPAT is a common format used to report on how well a product conforms to accessibility guidelines. The most recent VPAT and a summary can be found on the Commitment to Accessibility webpage.
In order to provide better support for your patrons,librarians, and staff, we have also updated documentation and agreements for our accessibility services. This includes the following:
The main Accessibility webpage, aimed primarily at patrons with print disabilities, now links out to various subpages and provides information about interacting with HathiTrust books and the Digital Library.
The Commitment to Accessibility webpage provides our most recent VPAT and documents the work we have done to ensure the accessibility of theDigital Library.
The Accessible Text Request Service webpage provides patrons with information about using this service and the terms of use.
The Accessible Text Request Service configuration webpage provides librarians and staff at member libraries with information about signing up for this service and how to assist patrons.
Working with legal counsel, we have reviewed and updated the terms under which we can provide the HathiTrust Accessible Text Request Service (previously referred to as the “Print Disability Proxy Service.”) This service can now be extended to all HathiTrust member libraries that are located in a country that has signed and ratified the Marrakesh Treaty.
Blog Post: HathiTrust’s Role in International Registry Grant
In 2019 HathiTrust has partnered with the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, Research Libraries UK, and the University of Glasgow to explore the development of an international registry documenting all works digitized by research libraries. Funded by the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council, the one-year planning grant supports work to develop international collaborations, feasibility studies, and some limited data analysis.
HathiTrust Collection Services Librarian, Natalie Fulkerson, recently published a blog post highlighting HathiTrust's role in the data analysis portion of the project.
Copyright Review Program
September’s overall Copyright Review Program statistics:
CRMS-US Reviews: Sept 2019
Public Domain = 5,018 (73%)
All = 6,863
Overall
Public Domain Determinations = 467,181(56.5%)
All Determinations = 827,523
Featured Copyright Reviewer
Jonah McAllister-Erickson, Scholarly Communication Specialist, University of Pittsburgh
Years working in a library: 21
HathiTrust start date: October 2017
Review statistics: 5,632 total reviews; 4,973 public domain
“My favorite part of copyright review is seeing some of the strange agriculture research station reports made available. Who would have guessed there are several reports on how to make grain silos from plywood?”
Reminder: Discover and Digitize Your 1924 Public Domain Items
Use the data in the 1924 Report for Members below to compare with your collections and digitize 1924 publications that HathiTrust does not yet have in its collection. The spreadsheet lists all 1924 publications in HathiTrust, both US and non-US. Some are already open through copyright review, Creative Commons licenses, or federal government authored works. Any that are not yet open are expected to become open in January 2020.
1924 Report for Members: https://bit.ly/2M2Idsz
The dataset follows the hathifiles format, which is described at https://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles_description
If you have plans to digitize and submit your content to expand the HathiTrust collection, we’d love to hear it! Send your plans or questions about the report to feedback@issues.hathitrust.org. Read the original article in the July/August newsletter.
Shared Print Program
New Resources for Shared Print Retention Libraries
We are pleased to announce a new resources folder for Retention Libraries, which includes workflows and answers to commonly asked questions. This folder includes policies and best practices for making commitments, including reviewing and submitting files, and options for discovery of commitments in local systems. If you think of something that you would like included, please contact Heather Weltin (weltin@hathitrust.org,) the Shared Print Program Officer.
HathiTrust Shared Print Commitments and OCLC's Shared Print Registration Service
As you may know OCLC, working with CRL, was awarded a Mellon Foundation Grant to develop a process for registering shared print commitments. HathiTrust is actively engaged in these discussions with OCLC regarding how best to develop a process that enables programs, such as HathiTrust, to facilitate registration of shared print commitments for their members. Although the registry is not ready for wide-scale HathiTrust commitment registration, we have been working with OCLC on a way for our WorldShare Management Services (WMS) Retention Libraries to register their commitments. This was crucial because of the need for WMS Libraries to register these to aid discovery and collection management processes. We recently hosted a webinar for those members to facilitate the registration process. A link to the recording and the instructions for WMS Libraries can be found athttps://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JI5xl40xQsx8QopJpDXyixQFauLDF5IN.
For non-WMS Libraries, we recommend that non-WMS HathiTrust Retention Libraries continue to hold off registering their HathiTrust commitments with OCLC until the service has been finalized. We are continuing to monitor the work being done and will report back to you with some additional documentation when we believe it is better able to support your use.
HathiTrust Staff 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.
October 23: HathiTrust Member Meeting, Rosemont, IL: HathiTrust Staff
November 12-14: DCDC 2019: Navigating the Digital Shift, Birmingham, UK. Mike Furlough and John Walsh (presenting)
December 9-10: CNI Fall Forum, Washington, DC. Mike Furlough
News or Research to Share?
If you or a patron at your institution has news to share regarding a publication, presentation, grant, or research underway related to HathiTrust, we’d love to hear about it. Please share with Jessica Rohr, member engagement and communications specialist, at jbelle@hathitrust.org.