Strategic Advisory Board Meeting Minutes - December 16, 2010

Update and discussion of HathiTrust developments and operations, John Wilkin

• Very successful year for the partnership
• Closing the calendar year with:
  • 52 partners, 13 sustaining
  • Close to 8M digital files, about 2M PD in the repository

• Additional work being done on:
  • HT cost model—with a call for catalog data from the partners.
  • Reindexing and optimizing the data base
  • Beefing up full-text search

• Ingest is going well, Yale, Madrid, PD materials
• Copyright review management system, follow-on grant, focus on non US copyrighted material; seeking additional support from partners.
• Research of and about the corpus indicates:
  • Approximately 50% orphan works, 30% PD, 20% in copyright material

• John Butler raised the question about the connection between Bamboo and HT.
  • It would be disappointing if Bamboo and HT didn’t make connections. 
  • There is overlap (people and institutions) and there are folks working to bridge Bamboo to HT—especially in the area of collections interoperability issues. 
  • Hoping that tools that get developed in Bamboo could interact with HT and other major digital library services.

Update and discussion from SAB working groups and committees.

Discovery Interface working group—John Butler.

• Full-text working group targeting filtering and faceting—seen as quick wins.
• The following recommendation to the HathiTrust SAB:  HathiTrust WorldCat Local Catalog Release was endorsed and approved by the SAB.
  • The Discovery Interface Working Group recommends, with reservations stated below, that the HathiTrust proceed with releasing and evaluating the HathiTrust WorldCat local interface as a prototype catalog.  The current HathiTrust catalog interface (using VuFind) would continue to be the default catalog interface until the prototype can be broadly and openly evaluated and demonstrated to provide superior overall service and value over the current catalog interface.

• Discussion summary:
  • Let public give the WC interface a try. 
  • It is a prototype. 
  • Evolutionary nature of search interfaces.
  • Public will see bibliographic records and not full text for non HathiTrust files, e.g. Internet Archive
  • Copyright rules apply.

• Concerns raised:
  • How configurable is the WC interface?
  • Tell the public that they are in WC and not HT digital library?

• OCLC sees value in the project.
  • WC is tied into the management of collections. Getting records into WC is a big win. We are less satisfied how it might work as an interface to the HT catalog. 

Collections Committee—Bob Wolven

• Committee is organizing and prioritizing its work, sorting through charge, dividing up work.
• The OCLC/DLF discussions about the need for digital masters—how does this fit with HT?  Relevant to HT?
• Multiple formats—holdings information. Beyond print monographs?

Communications Working Group—Sarah Pritchard

• Concerns about cross communications needs of the partnership; education; instructional materials.
• Actively working on a formal communications and marketing plan
• Attuned to the relationships between various communication mechanisms and the governance structure—some recommendations or programs may wait until after the October 2011 Constitutional Convention.

Next SAB call:  January 20, 2011 2pm Central