September 12, 2014 
Late Breaking News
The University of Michigan has received a third grant award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for copyright determination work in the Copyright Review Management System. A portion of the grant will include exploration of sustainability options with HathiTrust.View the full press release.
Top News
2014 HathiTrust Member Meeting: October 10, 2014, Washington, DC
We look forward to meeting with member representatives at the 2014 HathiTrust Member Meeting, which will be held at the Hotel Palomar in Washington DC on October 10, 2014 from 9am until 3pm. A continental breakfast will be available at 8am. Contact information for the Palomar is found below.
This will be the first all-member meeting since the 2011 Constitutional Convention, and all member representatives, or their designate, are encouraged to attend. Since the 2011 Convention, HathiTrust’s collections has grown by 17% (now 11.4 million volumes) and our membership has nearly doubled. In 2013 we approved bylaws and a new governing structure, and now have in general embarked on the next phase of our partnership’s development.
We ask all official Member Representatives to plan to attend or to designate an attendee who will vote on behalf of their institution. Following the model of the 2011 Constitutional Convention, library directors from consortia that are HathiTrust members may also attend, although only the member representative for the consortia may vote.
A detailed agenda will be sent to registered attendees in advance of the meeting, but our plans include an overview of the partnership’s operations and current initiatives, a presentation of the budget, a discussion of the legal landscape, and dialog on our mission and possible future directions. A highlight of our day will include a talk by Jack Bernard, Associate General Counsel at the University of Michigan, titled “Mammoth Tending: Notes from the Underfoot.”
There is no charge to attend the meeting, but we will ask attendees to RSVP by September 19 using this form: http://bit.ly/1x7iuBE.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
2014 HathiTrust Member Meeting Location
US Government Documents Registry Job Posting
The University of Michigan has reworked and reposted a programmer position to support the HathiTrust Government Documents Registry project. Applications can be submitted through the University of Michigan jobs website.
Ingest
Locally-digitized Content
HathiTrust worked with several institutions on deposit of new content, including Princeton University and Texas A&M University, which submitted sample content for review, the University of Delaware, which is preparing a new batch for deposit, and the University of Maryland, Yale University, Cornell University, University of British Columbia, and University of Iowa, which were in touch about beginning the process.
Internet Archive-digitized Content
Tufts University and Washington University, St. Louis, began conversations about submission of Internet Archive-digitized content, and the University of Massachussets completed documentation in preparation for deposit.
Google-digitized Content
The University of Illinois reached an agreement with Google that will allow deposit of in-copyright materials that Google has until now held in escrow. This will enable deposit of approximately 120,000 new volumes into HathiTrust. The agreement opens a possible path for other institutions of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation to deposit similarly escrowed content amount to more than 1 million volumes in all.
Bibliographic Data Management
The California Digital Library loaded 48,250 new or updated bibliographic records into Zephir.
Note to content contributors: if you anticipate a change in your institution’s integrated library system (ILS), please alert the CDL staff as early as possible to be sure any attendant issues can be addressed (email cdl-zphr-l@ucop.edu). More information about ILS changes can be found in the new Section 6 (page 23) of the Metadata Submission Guide: “Contributor ILS Changes”.
Working Groups and Committees
Program Steering Committee
With several working groups established to carry out initiatives approved at the Constitutional Convention and to address immediate priorities, the Program Steering Committee is turning its attention to developing its agenda for the year ahead. In consultation with Mike Furlough, the committee has identified four main areas of focus: quality of HathiTrust content and its impact on services and programmatic objectives; strategies for metadata management, enhancement, and use; implementation of services for users with print disabilities; and potential expansion to embrace additional content formats (in conjunction with the Collections Committee.) Members of the committee are developing issue briefs on each topic for presentation at the upcoming members meeting, and to help frame action around these program areas. The committee will hold a full day meeting in Washington following the members meeting to review feedback and continue deliberations.
US Federal Government Documents Planning and Advisory Group
Digitizing and archiving U.S. government documents represents an important opportunity for extending public access to those important resources, as well as providing opportunities for Federal Depository Libraries to better manage the print, microfilm and digital resources in their respective collections. Presently, over 525,000 U.S. government documents have been digitized and ingested in the HathiTrust Digital Library. These documents are overwhelmingly in the public domain (pre- and post-1923), and accessible to any reader with a need to view them. Authenticated users at HT member universities have additional opportunities for downloading and printing this content, but basic access to the corpus is being made available as a public good, extending the opportunities currently provided by depository libraries for on-site library access.
Last spring, a Planning and Advisory Group was tasked by the HathiTrust Program Steering Committee to develop a plan for extending the corpus of government information in HathiTrust, and optimizing its discoverability and utility. Toward this end, the working group is developing a set of recommendations to address this opportunity to improve access to U.S. government information. The group is giving attention to five categories of documents; each category requiring somewhat different approaches under existing digitization and archiving programs:
- Cataloged U.S. federal documents in Google partner libraries that can make print copies available to Google for digitization.
- Cataloged U.S. federal documents in non-Google partner schools that can either feed documents to Google, or supply via a different digitization partner (e.g., Internet Archive) for eventual ingest by HathiTrust.
- Bodies of already digitized documents in the hands of libraries, agencies, vendors, or not-for-profit associations that, given appropriate terms, could be deposited in HathiTrust.
- Uncataloged print content in libraries that could be surfaced, cataloged and digitized. Toward this end, the HathiTrust registry initiative should shed light on the extent of these largely invisible resources, as well as providing a somewhat streamlined path for cataloging and digitization.
- Federal government information that is distributed or made accessible outside of the auspices of the GPO depository library program.
The Planning and Advisory Group is assessing strategies—including costs and benefits—for advancing library and HathiTrust efforts on each of the above fronts. In addition, the group also recognizes an opportunity to do more to consolidate the gains already made by publicizing, organizing, reviewing and assessing the existing collection of government documents in HathiTrust. While a set of fuller recommendations will be forthcoming, this seems like a useful opportunity to engage the documents library community, government agency professionals, and the public at large to optimize the utility of the substantial body of already digitized federal government documents.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in August is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information.
|
|
August |
Overall |
||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
135 | 174 | 166,417 | 315,842 |
|
CRMS-World |
3,971 | 7,124 | 72,207 | 139,034 |
|
Total |
4,106 | 7,298 | 238,624 | 454,876 |
Government Documents Registry
Project staff began testing methods for identifying US federal government documents based on bibliographic metadata, and also began testing and modifying a relationship detection algorithm on known government documents records. Work continues on the development of specifications for the normalization and merging of duplicate records.
Development Updates
Development updates and activities by HathiTrust institutions included the following:
Authentication and Authorization
- Creation of an administrative reporting interface to view details about the status of staff members who have special privileges to access restricted materials in HathiTrust.
- Improvements to portions of the registration workflow for these users and revision of relevant documentation.
Collection Builder Application
- Improvements to end user messaging about the status of items in personal collections, providing separate notifications for items that are in the queue to be indexed, versus those that will never be indexed because they have been deleted from the repository.
- Added functionality to allow collection owners to create multiple collections that have the same name.
Full-text Search
- Correction of a problem in navigation of full-text search results. The link to the first page of results would disappear if the user navigated beyond a certain number of pages.
- Investigation of performance issues for HathiTrust full-text search and testing of features under various high load scenarios.
- The supplier of the high-performance storage system for full-text search announced the availability of pre-release software that is expected to resolve performance and stability problems. Staff will obtain and test the software in September.
PageTurner Mobile
- The release of a new interface “skin” for the mobile version of PageTurner. PageTurner mobile now uses the common code base shared across the suite of HathiTrust web applications, and is updated for modern mobile browsers.
Server replacement cycle
- Due to vacation schedules, staff were unable to complete the installation of new full-text search servers in Michigan as planned, but expect to complete the installation in Michigan in mid-September and in Indiana in early October.
Availability
Cumulative 12-month availability: 99.844%
No outages were reported in August.
New Growth
As of September 1:
| August | Overall | |
| Boston College | 0 | 3,210 |
| Columbia University | 0 | 65,166 |
| Cornell University | 4,200 | 498,070 |
| Duke University | 0 | 7,775 |
| Harvard University | 0 | 238,065 |
| Indiana University | 28 | 196,126 |
| Keio University | 0 | 90,080 |
| Knowledge Unlatched | 3 | 27 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 108,883 |
| McGill University | 0 | 893 |
| New York Public Library | 0 | 294,818 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 222 | 56,621 |
| Ohio State University | 8,626 | 50,549 |
| Penn State University | 9 | 91,497 |
| Princeton University | 6 | 252,781 |
| Purdue University | 1 | 46,913 |
| Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute | 0 | 358 |
| Texas A&M University | 0 | 1,201 |
| Universidad Complutense | 96 | 113,378 |
| University of California | 6,317 | 3,574,164 |
| The University of Chicago | 167 | 51,831 |
| University of Connecticut | 0 | 4,629 |
| University of Delaware | 0 | 28 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 9,866 |
| University of Illinois | 24,070 | 177,252 |
| University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 0 | 11,115 |
| University of Michigan | 3,828 | 4,701,602 |
| University of Minnesota | 63 | 138,490 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Virginia | 0 | 51,206 |
| University of Wisconsin | 34 | 558,684 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 47,670 | 11,439,294 |
Public Domain (~35%)
| Total* | 42,989 | 4,011,558 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | August 2014 | July 2014 |
| Content | 154 | 197 |
|
Quality |
145 | 182 |
|
Collections |
9 | 14 |
| Cataloging | 181 | 179 |
| Access and Use | 172 | 178 |
|
Copyright |
115 | 126 |
|
Permissions |
5 | 3 |
|
Takedown |
0 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
1 | 0 |
|
Inter-library loan |
2 | 2 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
18 | 10 |
|
Datasets |
4 | 3 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
1 | 3 |
|
Reuse of content |
5 | 7 |
| Web applications | 30 | 22 |
|
Functionality problems |
12 | 5 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
0 | 4 |
|
General Questions about Login |
0 | 1 |
|
Partners setting up login |
5 | 1 |
|
Usability issues |
0 | 1 |
|
Feature requests |
2 | 2 |
| Partner Ingest | 28 | 9 |
| General | 99 | 122 |
|
Partnership |
8 | 10 |
|
Miscellaneous |
91 | 112 |
| Total | 664 | 707 |
Most Accessed Volumes
September Forecast
- Continue work on new Image Server capabilities for continuous text content.
- Reassess accessibility features of PageTurner with particular attention to supporting new content types.
- Migrate to Solr 4.10 and re-index the collection.