March 8, 2013 
Top News
HathiTrust Bylaws
HathiTrust institutions voted unanimously to accept bylaws put forward by the Board of Governors. The Board will have its first meeting following the acceptance of the bylaws in April.
HathiTrust Research Center Software Release
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is planning a release of its software infrastructure on March 31, 2013. The release is of two separate cyberinfrastructure stacks, the “HTRC sandbox” and “HTRC production stack”, each loaded with the latest and greatest service components and tools. The “HTRC sandbox” is an open test bed for community experimentation. It contains a subset of public domain volumes. The “HTRC production stack” hosts the full HathiTrust public domain corpus. Both the sandbox and production stack offer the suite of services and tools, with bug fixes and other improvements, that debuted during the September 2012 UnCamp. Looking ahead, a June 2013 release of the HTRC production stack will include the HTRC-Sloan-Cloud in early support of “non-consumptive research”. Non-consumptive research is research in which the content of digital works is read or operated on (“consumed”) in an automated way only; no portions of works are displayed or available to be read by researchers themselves during computation or in computational results.
We welcome anyone to join HTRC email lists for general announcements, technical discussion about the HTRC, or announcements specific to the 2012 UnCamp (see http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc for details on each list).
Ingest
Local Digitization
HathiTrust provided support to several institutions on use of the HathiTrust ingest tools and issues related to image conversion and metadata.
Internet Archive Digitization
HathiTrust ingested new content from Columbia University, the Library of Congress, Penn State, the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. HathiTrust also loaded bibliographic records from Boston College in preparation for content deposit.
Working Groups and Committees
Working groups and committees in HathiTrust may have an operational or strategic focus. See http://www.hathitrust.org/working_groups for more information.
Operational
User Experience Advisory Group
The User Experience Advisory Group continued to review elements of HathiTrust Web applications identified through user feedback and other means as being in need of improvement.
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 continued to plan for the transition to Zephir for HathiTrust bibliographic data management. CDL staff began loading records into the Zephir production database.
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in February is given below.
|
|
February | Overall | ||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
3,438 | 7,169 | 125,185 | 231,165 |
|
CRMS-World |
2,067 | 4,048 | 19,087 | 35,756 |
|
Total |
5,505 | 11,217 | 144,272 | 266,921 |
mPach
Staff at the University of Michigan made architectural and procedural decisions related to the creation, storage, and revision of “aboutware” (information about editorial boards, submission policies, etc.) for journals deposited via mPach. Staff finalized journal article ingest procedures, and continued discussions about optimal handling of non-textual content that is embedded in articles or submitted as supplementary material. Staff also reviewed and updated the project timeline.
Development Updates
Full-text Search
HathiTrust received a revised estimated shipping date for high-performance storage that will be used to improve full-text search services. The systems are expected to arrive in March for installation and testing.
Michigan staff made changes to optimize synchronization of the full-text search index from the HathiTrust repository instance in Michigan to its mirror site in Indiana. At the same time, staff performed a full update of the index to be sure that all volumes in the repository were indexed appropriately. Staff developed a process to automatically update the full-text index when print holdings information submitted by partner institutions is updated or added. Staff also continued work to improve relevance ranking of search results.
PageTurner
HathiTrust updated the way URL parameters are sent to Google Analytics in order to improve usage reporting. The change will especially affect full-text searches performed within individual volumes.
Print on Demand
HathiTrust finalized and deployed processes for producing PDFs that are optimized for printing on Expresso Books Machines.
Storage Hardware Replacement Cycle
HathiTrust began processes to replace production web servers at the Indiana data center, and development index and web servers at the Michigan data center. The server upgrades are planned to begin in late March or April.
Website Redesign
Staff developing HathiTrust Web applications continued to implement a unified framework for application code. This work is being done as part of a larger effort to redesign the look and feel of HathiTrust’s Web interfaces. The redesign is scheduled for release in April.
Outages
HathiTrust was unavailable for some users from Tuesday, February 26 at 11:45pm to Monday, February 27 at 5:45am due to a network problem affecting the entire University of Michigan campus.
New Growth
As of March 1:
| February | Overall | |
| Boston College | 0 | 1,842 |
| Columbia University | 643 | 65,033 |
| Cornell University | 305 | 416,962 |
| Duke University | 0 | 4,523 |
| Harvard University | 39 | 236,027 |
| Indiana University | 46 | 195,202 |
| Library of Congress | 1 | 89,723 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 0 | 12,948 |
| New York Public Library | 94 | 259,672 |
| Penn State University | 653 | 45,415 |
| Princeton University | 46 | 251,700 |
| Purdue University | 45 | 44,682 |
| Universidad Complutense | 54 | 111,982 |
| University of California | 1,099 | 3,386,296 |
| The University of Chicago | 7 | 28,540 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 2,068 |
| University of Illinois | 4,201 | 109,306 |
| University of Michigan | 11,126 | 4,629,824 |
| University of Minnesota | 5 | 104,250 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 755 | 16,588 |
| University of Wisconsin | 3,924 | 554,955 |
| University of Virginia | 6 | 50,805 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 23,049 | 10,645,334 |
Public Domain (~31%)
| Total* | 11,723 | 3,308,664 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | February | January |
| Content | 430 | 428 |
|
Quality |
421 | 414 |
|
Non-partner Digital Deposit |
1 | 0 |
|
Collections |
6 | 10 |
| Cataloging | 82 | 99 |
| Access and Use | 96 | 148 |
|
Copyright |
51 | 85 |
|
Permissions |
5 | 17 |
|
Takedown |
1 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
0 | 1 |
|
Inter-library loan |
0 | 0 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
16 | 23 |
|
Datasets |
7 | 10 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
3 | 0 |
|
Reuse of content |
3 | 4 |
| Web applications | 15 | 27 |
|
Functionality problems |
3 | 2 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
0 | 0 |
|
General Questions about Login |
3 | 4 |
|
Partners setting up login |
2 | 4 |
|
Usability issues |
0 | 1 |
|
Feature requests |
4 | 3 |
| Partner Ingest | 1 | 4 |
| General | 74 | 55 |
|
Partnership |
12 | 20 |
|
Infrastructure |
0 | 0 |
|
Miscellaneous |
62 | 35 |
| Total | 698 | 761 |
Most Accessed Volumes
March Forecast
- Continue work to improve relevance ranking for full-text search results.
- Continue to develop deployment process for full-text search spelling suggestion feature.
- Continue work on unified Web application framework and website redesign.
Presentations
- Jeremy York, “Your Library, Now Online! Putting HathiTrust in the Context of New (and Traditional) Library Services”, MCLS Webinar, February 6, 2013.
- Tom Burton-West, “Practical Relevance Ranking for 10 Million books”, Code4Lib, February 12, 2013.
- Jeremy York, “Putting It All Together: HathiTrust Vision, Practice, and Implementation”, SENYLRC Webinar, February 20, 2013