March 13, 2015 
Top News
Anne Kenney Appointed to HathiTrust Board of Governors
Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University, has joined the HathiTrust Board of Governors. Kenney joined Cornell in 1987 and became University Librarian in 2008. She is known for pioneering work in developing standards for digitization and research in digital preservation. She currently serves on the Board of the Council on Library and Information Resources, and is also a fellow and past-president of the Society of American Archivists. Kenney’s term on the Board of Governors will last for the remainder of 2015 to temporarily fill a vacancy left by the resignation of Patricia Steele of the University of Maryland. HathiTrust will hold elections later this year to fill this seat and to replace two other Board members whose terms are expiring. For a complete list of Board members and their terms please visit: http://www.hathitrust.org/board_of_governors.
New Zephir Metadata Analyst
California Digital Library welcomed Dana Jemison as the new Zephir team metadata analyst. She will be taking over these duties from Renata Ewing. Dana comes to CDL from the University of California, Berkeley where she worked in the Library Systems Office, and was formerly of the Research Libraries Group where she worked in Research and Development.
Departure of Long-time University of Michigan Staff Member
Cory Snavely, Manager of Library IT Core Services at the University of Michigan announced his departure to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Core Services is the group that manages the back-end infrastructure for HathiTrust. Under his guidance the University of Michigan established and scaled the underlying systems that support HathiTrust’s Trustworthy Digital Repository. From servers, storage, and system architecture, to ingest and auditing processes, content specifications, security, and so much more, his role in making the HathiTrust repository what it is today cannot be understated. He also played an instrumental role in the establishment of technical infrastructure for the Digital Preservation Network (DPN), and HathiTrust’s configuration as a DPN node. We are grateful for all of the contributions Cory has made, and wish him well in his new position.
HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp
Please join us for the third annual HTRC UnCamp at the University of Michigan, March 30-31. The agenda, list of participants, and registration information are available on the UnCamp event page.
Calendar for Print Holdings Data and Content Estimates
We will be issuing a call for member print holdings information and estimates of content to be deposited at the beginning of April this year, with the information due by June 30. We are moving the schedule of receiving this information forward in order to have the 2016 budget and fees prepared for member voting earlier in the fall.
Board of Governors
The HathiTrust Board of Governors met by phone on February 23, 2015 and addressed the following topics.
Board Membership
To fill a vacancy left by Patricia Steele’s resignation, the Board appointed Anne Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, Cornell University, to serve through the end of 2015. An elected replacement to fill the remaining year of Steele’s term will be elected during the next regular Board elections.
Government Documents Initiative
The Board reviewed the report of the Government Documents Initiative Advisory and Working Group, and the recommendations of the Program Steering Committee for further action on the Government Documents Initiatives. Executive Director Mike Furlough also reported on progress on the Government Documents Registry and discussions with the Government Publications Office. Discussion focused on the need for continued investment in the Initiative, including potentially new staffing and digitization. Furlough will draw upon the report and the PSC recommendations to draft a preliminary implementation plan, including staffing, for consideration at the next Board of Governors Meeting. The Advisory and Working Group report will be made public soon.
Bylaws Revisions
The Board reviewed proposed changes for the Bylaws and the schedule for member voting.
2015 Planning Calendar
The Board reviewed a schedule for major actions to be taken in 2015. These include:
- Appointment of the 2015 Nominations Committee (spring)
- Review of the recommendations of the Shared Print Planning Task Force (spring)
- Acting on recommendations of the Government Documents Initiative Advisory and Working Group (spring)
- Appointment of new Program Steering Committee members (spring)
- Completion of an MOU with Michigan for the operation of the repository infrastructure and hosting HathiTrust administrative functions (summer/fall)
- Financial and strategic planning (summer/fall)
- Election of new Board of Governors members (fall)
- 2nd Annual Member Meeting (fall)
Michigan/HathiTrust MOU
During 2015 The Board of Governors and the University of Michigan will develop a Memorandum of Understanding to document Michigan’s roles in hosting the administrative, financial, and technical operations of HathiTrust. The Board reviewed the current status of this effort.
Financial and Strategic Planning
The Board will oversee the development of a long-term budget plan for HathiTrust in the coming year. Mike Furlough led a discussion of major factors to consider in developing this plan, and methods of gathering data for it.
Improvements to PageTurner (Late Breaking)
HathiTrust released a number of changes to the PageTurner interface, reducing complexity and improving presentation of items while simplifying the underlying code to facilitate future development. The cache on some browsers may need to be cleared to view the improvements. The full list of changes includes the following:
- Toolbars are fixed at the upper right of the page and never scroll out of view
- The global search and login options have been moved to the navigation bar and are always available
- Accuracy of scrolling in the thumbnail view is improved
- Reader views now update the page “size” parameter, allowing users to retain the same size of page when returning to or refreshing a page
- “Flip” view performance is improved in the Internet Explorer browser version 9
Ingest
Locally-digitized Content
HathiTrust corresponded with Boston College, Northwestern University, University of Maryland, Cornell University, and University of Washington about ingest of locally-digitized materials. The University of Missouri deposited one volume as a precursor to future ingest.
Internet Archive-digitized Content
HathiTrust continued to ingest dissertations from the University of Massachusetts.
Bibliographic Data Management
The California Digital Library (CDL) loaded 78,092 new and 142,327 updated bibliographic records into Zephir.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in February is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information.
| February | Overall | ||
Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | |
CRMS-US | 1,268 | 1,901 | 169,374 | 320,593 |
CRMS-World | 4,477 | 8,121 | 96,734 | 182,633 |
Total | 5,745 | 10,022 | 266,108 | 503,226 |
Government Documents Registry
HathiTrust staff continued to refine the process for detecting relationships between US federal government documents records (including duplicates), and to analyze the overlap between agency authority entries in VIAF and an initial set of Registry records. To date, staff have pre-processed 19 million bibliographic records from this initial set and records submitted in response to HathiTrust’s call for records. Staff also began planning for a public version of the Registry, including decisions about the indexing tool (Solr) and discovery interface (Blacklight) to use and specific fields to index and display. Further information about the specifications will be forthcoming.
HathiTrust Research Center Updates
Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS)
- HTRC held an online kickoff meeting with each of the three inaugural ACS projects, in addition to an already ongoing ACS project with University of Toronto. All the projects have started, and each will deliver a final report.
HTRC Services 3.0 Final Release on Feb 27 2015
- The HTRC team made the final release for 3.0 on Feb 27 2015. This version addresses more than 50 issues reported over the period of the Beta test. Thanks to everyone who reported a problem or made a suggestion.
- The main improvement for the 3.0 release is an updated user account registration process with more intuitive email recognition, and a User Agreement that more clearly spells out user responsibilities for handling HathiTrust data.
- Other features introduced with the 3.0 Beta release include:
- Data Capsule - a secure environment for non-consumptive research
- More welcoming home page and portal
- Enhanced workset builder functionality
- Automatically saving jobs upon completion
- Corrected use of faceted search
- Single sign-on (except for Data Capsule and Workset Builder)
mPach
The mPach project has been put on hold indefinitely as HathiTrust and the University of Michigan reevaluate needs and opportunities in digital publishing that have emerged since Michigan began the mPach project in 2011. mPach was conceived as a suite of tools to enable direct publishing of open access journals into HathiTrust’s preservation and access environment. Michigan remains strongly committed to providing robust long-term preservation and access services for digital publications, and HathiTrust remains strongly committed to supporting a variety of formats of textual publications, including born-digital and newly published materials. Michigan and HathiTrust are reconsidering how best to meet these goals, and have determined that the particular suite of tools and workflows envisioned for mPach do not align with current needs and trajectories. HathiTrust will be providing updates as planning for support of born-digital and other types of textual materials moves forward.
Development Updates
Development updates and activities by HathiTrust institutions included the following:
Access, Authorization, and Authentication:
- Fixed a bug in the Data API key expiration notification process.
- Added support for a new rights attribute to restrict access to materials that are in the public domain but must remain closed due to privacy concerns.
- Added criteria to the information that is used to restrict access to items in HathiTrust based on the location of the user (e.g., for materials that are public domain only when viewed from the United States).
Full-text Search
- Completed re-indexing of the entire repository using Sol4, including making needed adjustments to the indexing process to accommodate differences in Solr4.
- Prepared to deploy enhancements to the use of date information, which will significantly improve the ability to facet and limit searches by date of publication. The enhancements will be put into production in early March.
- Created a plug-in for Solr4 to reduce memory use. Testing of the plug-in will proceed in March.
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Received and installed an early release of a production-quality software fix for the high-performance storage system to address performance and stability problems. Staff are currently working closely with the storage vendor on the final steps of configuring and securing the system.
Completed software upgrades on the 40Gb networking equipment which supplies connectivity to the storage system. Further testing and a gradual production phase-in are expected in late March or early April.
Storage Replacement Cycle
- Completed installation and replacement of storage for the 2015 cycle. Retired storage is currently undergoing security wiping before being taken off-site for disposition.
Papers and Presentations
- Mike Furlough, “HathiTrust: An Update for the University of California,” California Digital Library, Oakland, CA, February 23, 2015.
- Jeremy York, “Preservation With A Purpose: End User Services in HathiTrust Digital Library”, Rutgers University, February 24, 2015.
- Mike Furlough, “HathiTrust, Collective Action, and Local Services,” University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, February 26, 2015.
- Mike Furlough, “The HathiTrust Research Corpus,” University of California, Davis, Innovating Communication in Scholarship (ICIS) Seminar, Davis, CA February 26, 2015.
- Mike Furlough, “HathiTrust, Collective Action, and Local Services,” University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, February 26, 2015.
HathiTrust Research Center
- Beth Namachchivaya, HTRC Update, ALA Midwinter Chief Collection Development Officers Meeting, January 31, 2015.
- Beth Namachchivaya, “HathiTrust Research Center & Support for Text Data Mining Research: Opportunities for Campus Collaboration”, University of Illinois, February 20, 2015.
- Harriett Green, Sayan Bhattacharyya, “The Savvy Researcher - Slides, Workshop-handout, Plan/Outline”, Workshop series on HTRC 3.0 at the University of Illinois Scholarly Commons, February 16. 2015.
- Beth Plale, Dirk Herr-Hoyman, Jiaan Zeng, Zong Peng and Miao Chen, Workshop on HTRC 3.0, Indiana University February 25, 2015.
- J. Stephen Downie, “HathiTrust: Large-Scale Repository in the Humanities -- Unlocking the Secrets of 4.6 Billion Pages” Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, February 27, 2015.
- Megan Senseney “Digital Humanities and the HathiTrust Research Center”, Illinois Digital Humanities Symposium, February 28, 2015.
March Forecast
- Deploy improvements to accessibility features of PageTurner
- Incorporate coordinate OCR into PDFs of HathiTrust content
- Test Solr4 plug-in that reduces memory use in indexing
- Enhance registration process for staff who have special access to materials in HathiTrust
New Growth
As of March 1:
| February | Overall | |
| Boston College | 0 | 3,263 |
| Columbia University | 0 | 73,396 |
| Cornell University | 5,458 | 515,744 |
| Duke University | 0 | 8,206 |
| Emory University | 0 | 52 |
| Getty Research Institute | 568 | 20,130 |
| Harvard University | 7 | 838,122 |
| Indiana University | 165 | 529,766 |
| Keio University | 8 | 90,120 |
| Knowledge Unlatched | 0 | 28 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 108,892 |
| McGill University | 0 | 893 |
| New York Public Library | 9,721 | 304,604 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 37 | 56,992 |
| Ohio State University | 677 | 69,094 |
| Penn State University | 507 | 389,220 |
| Princeton University | 4 | 252,841 |
| Purdue University | 0 | 47,488 |
| Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute | 0 | 358 |
| Texas A&M University | 0 | 2,446 |
| Universidad Complutense | 19 | 117,291 |
| University of Alberta | 0 | 76,106 |
| University of California | 10,143 | 3,625,049 |
| The University of Chicago | 4,264 | 56,402 |
| University of Connecticut | 0 | 4,637 |
| University of Delaware | 0 | 48 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 9,866 |
| University of Illinois | 9,992 | 339,128 |
| University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 3 | 12,007 |
| University of Michigan | 4,934 | 4,721,293 |
| University of Minnesota | 140,539 | 333,663 |
| University of Missouri | 1 | 1 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Virginia | 0 | 51,207 |
| University of Wisconsin | 32 | 561,126 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,832 |
| Total | 187,079 | 13,263,668 |
Public Domain (~37%)
| Total* | 69,308 | 4,967,590 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | February 2015 | January 2014 |
| Content | 227 | 158 |
Quality | 211 | 143 |
Collections | 12 | 15 |
| Cataloging | 164 | 142 |
| Access and Use | 157 | 121 |
Copyright | 105 | 76 |
Permissions | 18 | 8 |
Takedown | 0 | 0 |
Print on Demand | 0 | 0 |
Inter-library loan | 2 | 0 |
Full-PDF or e-copy requests | 12 | 11 |
Datasets | 5 | 2 |
Data Availability and APIs | 3 | 1 |
Reuse of content | 6 | 1 |
| Web applications | 41 | 28 |
Functionality problems | 25 | 12 |
Problems with login specifically | 1 | 0 |
General Questions about Login | 3 | 0 |
Partners setting up login | 0 | 1 |
Usability issues | 0 | 0 |
Feature requests | 1 | 3 |
| Partner Ingest | 7 | 6 |
| General | 134 | 103 |
Partnership | 8 | 9 |
Miscellaneous | 126 | 94 |
| Total | 730 | 558 |
Most Accessed Volumes
Availability
Repository
Cumulative 12-month availability of repository access*: 99.972% (+0.008%). No outages were reported in February.
* Repository access refers to page viewing and full-text search functionality, i.e., user-facing applications. It does not refer to preservation or storage infrastructure, which is under continual operation.