May 10, 2013 
You can follow HathiTrust on Twitter or Facebook, or subscribe to receive email updates (via Google Groups).
Top News
Print Disabilities Access
HathiTrust released a new service that allows designated proxies at partner institutions to provide access to in-copyright works in HathiTrust to users at their institutions who are certified as having a print disability. See http://www.hathitrust.org/accessibility for more information.
Website Redesign
The HathiTrust website, including all web applications, was updated with a unified design and feature set, improving the overall look and functionality of the site. Details are available at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathitrust_new_look.
Board of Governors
The Board of Governors held an in-person meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on April 28. The Board had a very full agenda, including a review of the Constitutional Convention ballot initiatives and work related to the Program Steering Committee (including the appointment of members).
Ingest
Local Digitization
The survey released last month to institutions that are depositing locally-digitized content will close May 15. The purpose of the survey is to gauge the readiness of institutions to deposit locally-digitized content, and help set a timeline for the development of a next installment of tools to assist in validating and packaging content prior to deposit. HathiTrust continued to provide support for the existing ingest tools and ingest procedures.
Working Groups and Committees
User Experience Advisory Group
The User Experience group continued to review elements of HathiTrust Web applications identified through user feedback and other means as being in need of improvement. The group also helped troubleshoot and make decisions in support of the new interface redesign.
User Support Working Group
A summary of issues received by the User Support Working Group is given in the table at the end of the update.
Projects
Bibliographic Data Management
Staff from the California Digital Library (CDL) and the University of Michigan agreed on revised requirements and workflow changes to accommodate bibliographic rights determinations being made at the University of Michigan rather than in Zephir (the new system). CDL staff began development reflecting the revised requirements. Staff also updated the project timeline. A parallel phase, to be completed prior to moving to Zephir, is now anticipated to run at the end of the summer.
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in April is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for more information.
|
|
April |
Overall |
||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
3,565 |
7,576 | 131,880 | 245,305 |
|
CRMS-World |
2,691 | 5,179 | 24,154 | 44,746 |
|
Total |
6,256 | 12,755 | 156,034 | 290,051 |
HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC)
HathiTrust Research Center project members assembled in Urbana, Illinois to launch Phase II of HTRC’s efforts. Following the successful release of HTRC software and services on March 30, 2013 (marking the completion of Phase I), HTRC is focusing its limited resources in Phase II along two lines: 1) community engagement and community-driven enhancements to HTRC software and services; and 2) the HTRC Sloan Cloud for non-consumptive research. To the former, the HTRC is pleased to welcome Miao Chen as Assistant Director of Education and Outreach. Miao recently received her PhD in information sciences from Syracuse University. She will be helping to organize the outreach efforts. A significant upcoming event is the 2nd HTRC UnCamp, scheduled for early September. The event will be held at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Details will follow. The HTRC Sloan Cloud, a project in development that is funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation, is the technical infrastructure for carrying out text analysis using general university compute resources securely in way that does not violate terms of copyright.
mPach
University of Michigan staff determined functional requirements for relating journal-level MARC records to article-level MARC records, and journal-level “aboutware”.
Development Updates
HathiTrust institutions performed the following work related to applications and Web interfaces:
Collection Builder
Staff investigated ways of improving the sorting of serial publications.
Data API
Staff implemented a mechanism for automatically deleting registered Data API keys that have not been activated.
Full-text Search
Staff explored ways to improve relevance ranking in full-text search results and fixed two bugs in searching materials with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters: searches did not always work when quotes were used around characters, and there was a problem in recognizing the Boolean “AND” operator.
PageTurner
Staff implemented a new code-debugging scheme for testing access by rights attribute.
Storage Hardware Replacement Cycle
HathiTrust installed new storage at the Indiana and Michigan sites that will both accommodate 2013 volume projections and replace storage scheduled for retirement. Storage due for retirement will be taken offline starting in late May or June.
Outages
Pages did not display in HathiTrust on Thursday, April 4 from 3:30 - 4:15pm due to a software problem that was identified and corrected.
Daily full-text indexing was suspended from Wednesday, April 24 to Tuesday, April 30 due to a complication with a storage system software upgrade. The problem was resolved and normal indexing processes resumed.
New Growth
As of May 1:
| April | Overall | |
| Boston College | 0 | 2,179 |
| Columbia University | 0 | 65,033 |
| Cornell University | 1,279 | 419,804 |
| Duke University | 0 | 4,523 |
| Harvard University | 27 | 236,068 |
| Indiana University | 15 | 195,227 |
| Library of Congress | 1 | 89,724 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 18,167 | 33,561 |
| New York Public Library | 28,662 | 288,342 |
| Penn State University | 13,171 | 58,596 |
| Princeton University | 1 | 251,702 |
| Purdue University | 0 | 44,692 |
| Universidad Complutense | 0 | 111,982 |
| University of California | 577 | 3,388,025 |
| The University of Chicago | 1,377 | 30,285 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 2,068 |
| University of Illinois | 3 | 109,314 |
| University of Michigan | 1,793 | 4,636,751 |
| University of Minnesota | 1,590 | 106,275 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 16,588 |
| University of Wisconsin | 18 | 555,725 |
| University of Virginia | 0 | 50,815 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 66,681 | 10,724,270 |
Public Domain (~31%)
| Total* | 51,815 | 3,373,522 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | April | March |
| Content | 379 | 382 |
|
Quality |
368 | 373 |
|
Non-partner Digital Deposit |
1 | 1 |
|
Collections |
9 | 8 |
| Cataloging | 140 | 87 |
| Access and Use | 145 | 149 |
|
Copyright |
71 | 77 |
|
Permissions |
13 | 16 |
|
Takedown |
0 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
0 | 1 |
|
Inter-library loan |
4 | 4 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
21 | 32 |
|
Datasets |
4 | 5 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
1 | 2 |
|
Reuse of content |
5 | 3 |
| Web applications | 31 | 11 |
|
Functionality problems |
7 | 4 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
1 | 1 |
|
General Questions about Login |
1 | 2 |
|
Partners setting up login |
0 | 2 |
|
Usability issues |
7 | 1 |
|
Feature requests |
2 | 0 |
| Partner Ingest | 3 | 13 |
| General | 76 | 87 |
|
Partnership |
12 | 9 |
|
Infrastructure |
2 | 0 |
|
Miscellaneous |
62 | 78 |
| Total | 774 | 729 |
Most Accessed Volumes
May Forecast
- Continue to explore ways of improving relevance ranking of full-text search results
- Begin automatic data migration from old to new storage at Indiana site
Presentations
-
Jeremy York, “HathiTrust as a Model for Preservation and Access”, Media Preservation Conference, Indiana University, April 17, 2013.
-
Jeremy York, “HathiTrust: A Second Life for Library Collections”, Exploring Humanities Cyberinfrastructure, University of Michigan, April 30, 2013.