September 2018 Update

Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust

We are very pleased to announce that University of Colorado Boulder has joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.

2008-2018: The Founding of HathiTrust

This October, HathiTrust will celebrate its 10th anniversary. The organization’s pre-history began with Google in the early era of mass digitization and, since its founding in 2008, HathiTrust has grown into today’s robust and influential organization. What began as a risky venture into digital territory —  especially for academic and research libraries — is now a collaborative model for the future of supporting libraries and advancing scholarship. 

Today, HathiTrust comprises 140+ member institutions, preserves 16+ million items, and continues to advance its founding mission: to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.

The articles and press releases below summarize the early years leading up to the founding and the people and institutions who launched HathiTrust ten years ago.

Markoff, John and Wyatt, Edward. “Google is Adding Major Libraries to its Database.” New York Times [New York] 12 December 2004. Web.

HathiTrust. Major Library Partners Launch HathiTrust Shared Digital Repository: There’s an Elephant in the Library; Organizers Promise It Will Never Forget [Ann Arbor] 13 October 2008. Web.

Summer Board Meeting Highlights

The Board of Governors held its summer meeting by video conference on August 29 and took the following actions:

• The Board approved a proposal for operation of the HathiTrust Research Center, 2019-2023, which will be funded through co-investments by Indiana University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and HathiTrust. Over the coming five years, the Research Center will continue to offer services for users of all experience levels, but will expand its focus on outreach and education among the HathiTrust membership.  The Research Center will be led by director John Walsh at Indiana, who will work closely with co-director Stephen Downie at Illinois.
• The Board approved the slate recommended by the Nominating Committee for the 2018 Board of Governors election. The final ballot will include the following six nominees:

○      Mimi Calter, Stanford University

○      Bryn Geffert, Amherst College

○      Robert McDonald, University of Colorado Boulder

○      Holly Mercer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

○      Matthew Sheehy, Brandeis University

○      Kornelia Tancheva, University of Pittsburgh

Three seats will be filled in the election: two seats with three-year terms from 2019-2021 and one seat with a one-year term from January 1, 2019, through December 31, 2019. Member representatives were sent the ballot on September 4. The voting period will close on September 24.

• The Board discussed a preliminary 2019 budget and approved a provisional timeline for implementing a change to the current fee model. The final budget and fee model modification will be presented to the membership for approval in October.

Members: Register for the 2018 Member Meeting, Oct. 30

HathiTrust’s annual member meeting will honor the 10th anniversary of HathiTrust and look ahead to the future as members explore ways to support and implement the organization’s five-year plan as outlined in Strategic Directions 2019-2023:

This year’s dynamic and discussion-driven meeting will focus on several important issues:

• Changes to HathiTrust’s membership criteria
• HathiTrust's 2019 budget and adjusted fee model (HathiTrust will provide advance materials for this topic and the bullet above.)
• Strategic direction alignment with member goals
• Areas of potential collaborative work
• Highlights from member representatives

The meeting is open to member institutions only, and attendance from the member representative, director, or dean of each institution is encouraged. An appointed delegate may attend instead. It is important that attendees have voting authority, either as the official voting representative or with delegated authority.

This year’s meeting will take place October 30, 2018, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. CT at the Loews Chicago O’Hare Hotel located at 5300 N. River Road, Rosemont, IL  60018. Phone (847) 544-5300

For more information, please see the 2018 Member Meeting or contact Melissa Stewart with questions (mmstewa@hathitrust.org).

Call for Proposals: Member Meeting Lightning Talks

At this year’s upcoming Member Meeting, representatives from member institutions will honor HathiTrust’s 10-year anniversary and ignite the collaborative work that will spark the organization into the next decade. 

The call is open for members to submit proposals of short lightning talks addressing how HathiTrust membership has enabled their member institution to succeed in its goals. How has HathiTrust membership resulted in changes in your processes, practice, or thinking? Some areas to consider include Collections Development; Patron Services; Academic Research; Teaching and Learning; Space Planning or any other common challenge. 

Lightning talks should be no longer than five minutes, should be delivered by one person, and may include one Powerpoint slide if desired.

Please submit proposals using this Google form by Friday, September 14.

Any staff member of a member library may propose a lightning talk.  Although meeting registration is currently limited to one official representative from each member institution, slots will be available for lightning talk presenters to attend as well. For past examples, see the 2017 lightning talks beginning on slide 9 of last year’s member meeting presentation.

Thousands of Historical California Legislative Publications Digitized and Openly Available Online[1] [2] 

HathiTrust now includes 4,000 California Assembly and Senate publications in its digital repository, available as a featured collection available for reading access worldwide. The result of a collaboration between the California Office of Legislative Counsel and librarians at the University of California, Stanford University, and the California State Library, the project was initiated at the University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL) by Heather Christenson, the current HathiTrust Program Officer for Federal Documents and Collections. 

“Everyone on this project, from our partners in higher ed to the California state government, recognizes the importance of preserving government publications. We couldn’t have done it without collective will and effort, and HathiTrust’s commitment to digital preservation makes this possible,” says Christenson.

The collected California legislative materials include introduced bills, amended bills, and statutes of the California Assembly and Senate, some dating back to 1849, as well as published materials that support, augment, or contextualize the bills.

Anyone may access the public domain materials in the HathiTrust Digital Library to browse, read, or download one page at a time. Individuals affiliated with one of HathiTrust’s 140+ member institutions have special access to download full-work PDFs of the volumes.  Data mining and textual analysis can also be performed on the publications using tools in the HathiTrust Research Center.

The collection is not yet comprehensive, as there are gaps in the series for each publication type, and work will continue to locate copies of missing volumes, to digitize them, and to include them in this set of open materials.  To contribute to the efforts to complete and correct these materials, please send communications to HathiTrust at feedback@issues.hathitrust.org.

Read more detail on the project and the collection on the HathiTrust blog.

Copyright Review Program

New copyright reviewers sought to work on U.S. State Government Documents

Nominations for new copyright reviewers on the project U.S. State Government Documents 1923-1977 will open in just a few days, running from September 10 until October 1. Members of this group gain experience in copyright with a one-year work commitment to join our review team doing three hours a week of copyright review on state government documents in HathiTrust. No experience in copyright is necessary; HathiTrust will provide training. The nomination form will go out via email to HathiTrust primary contacts and be posted on the Copyright Review Program web page. Self-nominations are invited. A limited number of seats are available.

A call for nominations for another project, U.S. Monographs 1923-1963 will run separately early next year. Look for it in January 2019 with training to take place February through March. The Monographs project is a one-year commitment at six hours a week and focuses on more complicated monographic works.

For those deciding to which project to submit nominations, there will be an informational webinar about “Participating in the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program” on Tuesday, September 11, 2018, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. ET at https://bluejeans.com/330680501. No registration is necessary to attend the webinar.   

Visit the Copyright Review Program webpage for background on the program’s history and current goals.