November 18, 2015
Top News
2015 Member Meeting Registration and Call for Presentations
The 2015 HathiTrust Member Meeting will be held on December 9 at the Big Ten Center near O’Hare Airport in Chicago. This is a members-only meeting, and all member institutions may send up to two persons to attend this meeting, including the official member representative. If the representative cannot attend, please designate an attendee who can, if needed, vote on behalf of the institution.
Following the model of the 2011 Constitutional Convention, library directors from state university systems or consortia that are HathiTrust members may also attend, although only themember representative for the consortia may vote. The final agenda for the meeting will be announced no later than the first week of December.
Please register by November 30 using the form at http://goo.gl/forms/wByh4aaVyj
With the additional registration space available, we are also inviting attendees to to give very brief presentations describing what your institution is doing with HathiTrust on your campus. Presentations may focus on the following topics:
- how you are using HathiTrust for collection development decisions or in the area of preservation
- projects focused on the ingest of locally-digitized materials into HathiTrust
- descriptions of outreach efforts to your patrons
- how you’ve implemented HathiTrust in your catalog, discovery systems, or library websites
- providing access to users with print disabilities
- unique cases of how your faculty and staff are using HathiTrust
- how your faculty using HTRC services or extracted feature sets for use in research.
Other topics are also welcomed. The presentations will be in lightning talk format, and each presenter will have somewhere between three and eight minutes to speak (final duration will depend on the number of responses). Timing will be strictly enforced, so practice ahead of time. One or two slides may be used by presenters and will need to be submitted to member organizers ahead of time.
Please submit your topic by Monday, November 23, 2015 using the form below. Speakers are encouraged to register for the meeting at the time of submission using this form: http://goo.gl/forms/HJX5YqTfrA
Kenney, Tabb, and McNeil Elected to Board of Governors
The members of HathiTrust have elected three individuals to serve on its Board of Governors beginning on January 1, 2016. Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch Librarian, Cornell University, and Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, will serve three-year terms that end in December 2018. Beth McNeil, Dean of Library Services at Iowa State University, will serve a one-year term. “Each of these three accomplished librarians will bring vision, wisdom and know-how to the Board of Governors, helping to ensure that the HathiTrust Digital Library will continue to innovate and thrive,” said Sarah Michalak, past chair of the Board and chair of the 2015 Nominating Committee.
https://www.hathitrust.org/election_results_announced
ECL/Copyright Comments
In June, the United States Copyright Office (USCO) released “Orphan Works and Mass Digitization” a detailed report proposing new orphan works legislation and proposing a pilot extended collective license for in-copyright, published works that have been digitized. In response to the USCO’s request for feedback on the collective licensing proposal, over 80 individuals and organizations submitted comments. HathiTrust is opposed to this pilot project, and it’s response, filed by Executive Director Mike Furlough, can be read HERE.
2016 Budget and Fees
HathiTrust is finalizing its budget and the 2016 member fees. These will be presented to the membership for review within the next several weeks.
Collections Survey Completed
Thank you to all of the member institutions that participated in the Survey on Collection Development Priorities. Preliminary results will be presented at the Member Meeting on December 9th.
MUSAG Update
The Metadata Use and Sharing Advisory Group (MUSAG) launched this month. The group held its first meeting and has begun work to establish its framework and goals. Look for an update and more information in the next newsletter.
ZAG Update
The Zephir Advisory Group continues work on drafting policies and procedures to address requests for Zephir data and functionality.
HathiTrust On the Road
HathiTrust staff will be attending the following event in December. Please contact us if you wish to meet us at this event:
CNI Fall 2015 Membership Meeting, Washington, D.C., December 14-15 - Mike Furlough
Ingest
Locally-digitized Content
A number of different institutions have submitted content for ingest: University of Washington and Utah State University have submitted some content and work is ongoing to bring these volumes in, while Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Missouri, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington, Columbia University (through Internet Archive) have successfully ingested content. We anticipate receiving locally digitized materials from Emory University soon, via the Internet Archive.
Bibliographic Data Management
In September and October 2015, Zephir loaded 86,563 new and 179,289 updated records from HathiTrust content contributors and has established metadata submission processes for several new content streams. Technical staff on the Zephir Operations team have been engaged in an infrastructure migration which will be completed by the end of 2015. In the coming months, the team will address how Zephir data is integrated into the HathiTrust User Support Working Group bibliographic corrections workflow.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in September/October is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information. The CRMS projects are funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
| October | Overall | ||
Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | |
CRMS-US | 508 | 711 | 175,794 | 329,520 |
CRMS-World | 2,704 | 6,273 | 130,374 | 244,469 |
Total | 3,212 | 6,984 | 306,168 | 573,989 |
US Federal Documents Registry
As of November 1, 2015 there are 653,821 US federal government documents in HathiTrust.
Work has continued to improve the US Federal Government Documents Registry. Project staff have held discussions about the basic infrastructure necessary for a beta release, which will include one Registry record with a unique identifier instead of the current model of clustering duplicate and related records. Additional work has been focused on refining the duplicate detection algorithm, incorporating stricter matching on identifiers such as OCLC number and SuDoc call number, and testing and modifying algorithms for searching the title and SuDoc fields. Staff continue to identify records for out-of-scope materials - to-date, roughly 5,000 individual records and over 30 categories of records based on individual publishers have been identified for removal.
A more detailed overview of US Federal Government Documents Registry activities from May-October 2015 can be found on the project’s web page.
Development Updates
Development updates and activities by HathiTrust institutions included the following:
Full-text Search
Work continued on a testing framework for relevance ranking. Click logging (i.e., logging what the user clicks on in the browser) using “Balanced Interleaving” which allows comparing different relevance ranking algorithms and settings has been put into production. The framework has been configured for A/A testing (testing without any changes to ranking to make sure that the testing framework works correctly and to estimate the number of clicks needed to have confidence in test results). Initial work on log analysis software has begun.
Core Services Update
Core Services staff have been regularly meeting with the HathiTrust Executive Director to plan the storage replacement and expansion strategy for 2016 and beyond.
To handle load due to increased usage of HathiTrust, Core Services deployed an additional web server for HathiTrust at the Indiana site. An additional web server for the Michigan site is on order.
Development Forecast
- Continue work on a test framework for relevance ranking, including interleaving of search results for the comparison of ranking algorithms.
Work to remove all dependencies on Cosign in favor of complete reliance on Shibboleth.
Research ways to support alternative text formats.
Papers and Presentations
Workshops
Bhattacharyya, Sayan and Eleanor Dickson. “Text Analysis with the HathiTrust Research Center: Tools and Datasets for Research and Teaching.” University of Chicago Digital Humanities Forum. Chicago. October 2, 2015. Abstract; Slides, (.pptx version) ; Slides, (.pdf version)
Bhattacharyya, Sayan and Eleanor Dickson. “Getting Started with the HathiTrust Research Center’s Tools for Text Analysis.” Digital Libraries Federation Forum (DLF Forum), Vancouver, October 26-28, 2015.
Presentations
Jett, Jacob. “HTRC Workset Ontology.” GSLIS CIRSS E-Research Round Table, 21 October 2015. Slides: http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/Events/eventDetails.php?id=259
Underwood, Ted. “The Rhythms of Genre.” 2nd NovelTM Workshop, Montréal, Quebec, Canada, October 23.
Miao Chen and Eleanor Dickson. “HathiTrust Research Center Tools and Services.” (Webinar). Georgetown Universitiy Library, November 2, 2015.
Muhammad Saad Shamim and Sayan Bhattacharyya. “Culturomics: New Develoopments in Analyzing Digitized Texts.” Rice University Digital Humanities Group, November 9, 2015.
Sayan Bhattacharyya. “Big Textual Data in Undergraduate Student Writing for Literature Courses: Affordances of the HathiTrust Research Center’s Extracted Features Dataset”. Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science (DHCS 2015). Universitiy of Chicago, November 13-15, 2015.
Eleanor Dickson and Sayan Bhattacharyya. “Using the HathiTrust Research Center’s Tools for Text Analysis.” Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science (DHCS 2015), November 15, 2015.
Beth Plale, Robert McDonald. “Visualizing the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) data”. Supercomputing 2015. Austin, Texas, November 16-19, 2015.
Robert McDonald. “The HathiTrust Research Center: Enabling New Knowledge Through Shared Infrastructure” in NISO Webinar: Text Mining: Digging Deep for Knowledge, November 18, 2015.
New Growth
Up-to-date Ingest numbers can be found here:
https://www. hathitrust.org/visualizations_ deposited_volumes_current
|
| Issue Type | Sept-Oct 2015 | July-Aug 2015 |
| Content | 281 | 286 |
Quality | 248 | 264 |
Collections | 27 | 21 |
| Cataloging | 233 | 265 |
| Access and Use | 231 | 206 |
Copyright | 89 | 90 |
Permissions | 14 | 17 |
Takedown | 7 | 0 |
Print on Demand | 1 | 2 |
Inter-library loan | 6 | 2 |
Full-PDF or e-copy requests | 65 | 54 |
Datasets | 2 | 3 |
Data Availability and APIs | 3 | 0 |
Reuse of content | 9 | 8 |
| Web applications | 41 | 74 |
Functionality problems | 11 | 27 |
Problems with login specifically | 4 | 11 |
General Questions about Login | 2 | 3 |
Partners setting up login | 0 | 1 |
Usability issues | 1 | 1 |
Feature requests | 4 | 5 |
| Partner Ingest | 35 | 21 |
| General | 218 | 193 |
Partnership | 16 | 16 |
Miscellaneous | 202 | 177 |
| Total | 1039 | 1045 |
*See User Support Working Group Issue Types for a description of the types of issues included in each category.
Most Accessed Volumes
Availability
Repository
Cumulative 12-month availability of repository access: 99.975% (-0.006%).
From Tuesday, August 18 at 07:00 through Wednesday, August 19 at 15:55 EDT, approximately 1 in 4 HathiTrust users were unable to authenticate if they attempted to log in, due to a failure in underlying authentication services on a web server.
On Wednesday, August 19, from 17:00-17:17 EDT the HathiTrust Collection Builder application was unavailable while the database was optimized to improve response times when viewing large collections.
On Wednesday, September 9, from 16:15-16:45 EDT HathiTrust users were unable to access resources via their handle.net persistent URL due to a software failure following an operating system upgrade.