August 8, 2014 
Top News
HathiTrust Research Center Award and Job Announcement
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) was awarded a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities for its project, “Exploring the Billions and Billions of Words in the HathiTrust Corpus: HathiTrust+Bookworm”. View the full announcement.
The HTRC is also seeking a Manager of Operations and Lead R&D Architect. Please see the job posting for more information. Applications are being accepted until August 14, 2014, or until the position is filled.
HathiTrust Member Meeting
As announced in the Update on June Activities, HathiTrust’s first Annual Meeting will be held in Washington, D.C. on Friday, October 10, 2014. We ask all official Member Representatives to plan to attend. Following the model of the 2011 Constitutional Convention, library directors from consortia that are HathiTrust members may also attend. Details on the location, schedule and agenda will be distributed soon.
Ingest
Locally-digitized content
HathiTrust corresponded with the University of Washington, University of Iowa and Princeton University about ingest of locally-digitized content.
Internet Archive-digitized content
HathiTrust began ingest of content from the University of Connecticut and corresponded with Washington University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Columbia University about ingest of new content.
Bibliographic Data Management
The California Digital Library loaded 98,850 new or updated bibliographic records into Zephir.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in July is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information.
|
|
July |
Overall |
||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
215 | 315 | 165,340 | 314,270 |
|
CRMS-World |
3,996 | 7,268 | 59,652 | 117,369 |
|
Total |
4,211 | 7,583 | 224,992 | 431,639 |
Government Documents Registry
HathiTrust is seeking a developer to Project staff documented possible methods for identifying items as U.S. federal government documents based on their bibliographic metadata, and continued work on an algorithm to detect relationships between items. These methods will be tested and refined in the coming weeks.
HathiTrust Research Center
Tim Cole and Peter Organisciak recently presented HTRC posters on HathiTrust metadata evaluation and large-scale text analysis at Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne Switzerland, July 7-12, 2014. The following week, J. Stephen Downie and Megan Senseney conducted instructional sessions about HTRC tools and services across multiple workshops at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School, July 14-18, 2014.
Development Updates
Development activities by HathiTrust institutions included the following:
Authentication and Authorization
- Enhancements to the workflow for updating access privileges for staff who have special access to restricted materials.
Collection Builder Application
- Staff improved the application’s performance when sorting lists of items in large personal collections, and improved the accuracy of sorting multi-part monograph and serial volumes when date information is available.
Full-text Search
- A determination that the INEX 2007-2010 Book Track test collections would not be suitable for use in testing HathiTrust full-text search relevance ranking algorithms due to several issues, including missing relevance judgments and underspecified queries. Staff are in the process of analyzing the issues to design criteria for creating a suitable test collection.
- Continued communication with the supplier of the high-performance storage system for full-text search and await a software update that is expected to resolve performance and stability problems.
PageTurner
- The release of a new user interface “skin” for the Copyright Review Management System. This update brings the CRMS interface into closer alignment with the public-facing PageTurner interface, and will address presentation bugs and facilitate future changes.
Server replacement cycle
- Staff continued installation of new full-text search servers, with revised plans to put them into service in August at the Michigan site and in September at the Indiana site.
Availability
Cumulative 12-month availability: 99.844%
Service was unavailable on Friday, July 25 from 6:30-8:30am EDT and full-text search was additionally unavailable until 9:15am EDT, when blocking measures were implemented against abnormally heavy search activity and all services were restored.
Personal collections were unavailable on Monday, July 28 from 5:00-5:10pm EDT for a database optimization designed to increase performance.
New Growth
As of August 1:
| July | Overall | |
| Boston College | 13 | 3,210 |
| Columbia University | 1 | 65,166 |
| Cornell University | 6,108 | 493,870 |
| Duke University | 1 | 7,775 |
| Harvard University | 0 | 238,065 |
| Indiana University | 16 | 196,098 |
| Keio University | 0 | 90,080 |
| Knowledge Unlatched | 0 | 24 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 108,883 |
| McGill University | 0 | 893 |
| New York Public Library | 3,024 | 294,818 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 1 | 56,399 |
| Ohio State University | 15,064 | 41,923 |
| Penn State University | 9,996 | 91,488 |
| Princeton University | 850 | 252,775 |
| Purdue University | 2,214 | 46,912 |
| Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute | 0 | 358 |
| Texas A&M University | 0 | 1,201 |
| Universidad Complutense | 1,129 | 113,282 |
| University of California | 47,213 | 3,567,847 |
| The University of Chicago | 34 | 51,664 |
| University of Connecticut | 4,629 | 4,629 |
| University of Delaware | 0 | 28 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 9,866 |
| University of Illinois | 10,283 | 153,182 |
| University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 0 | 11,115 |
| University of Michigan | 8,702 | 4,697,774 |
| University of Minnesota | 18,247 | 138,427 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Virginia | 4 | 51,206 |
| University of Wisconsin | 1,398 | 558,650 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 128,927 | 11,391,624 |
Public Domain (~34%)
| Total* | 120,097 | 3,968,569 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | July 2014 | June 2014 |
| Content | 197 | 168 |
|
Quality |
182 | 157 |
|
Collections |
14 | 10 |
| Cataloging | 179 | 163 |
| Access and Use | 178 | 188 |
|
Copyright |
126 | 125 |
|
Permissions |
3 | 6 |
|
Takedown |
0 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
0 | 0 |
|
Inter-library loan |
2 | 2 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
10 | 2 |
|
Datasets |
3 | 0 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
3 | 3 |
|
Reuse of content |
7 | 3 |
| Web applications | 22 | 18 |
|
Functionality problems |
5 | 7 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
4 | 2 |
|
General Questions about Login |
1 | 1 |
|
Partners setting up login |
1 | 1 |
|
Usability issues |
1 | 0 |
|
Feature requests |
2 | 2 |
| Partner Ingest | 9 | 4 |
| General | 122 | 86 |
|
Partnership |
10 | 7 |
|
Miscellaneous |
112 | 79 |
| Total | 707 | 627 |
Most Accessed Volumes
August Forecast
- Make improvements to the interface for navigating full-text search results.
- 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 Solr4.9 and reindex the collection.
Papers & Presentations
- Mike Furlough, “HathiTrust: Sharing, Access, and Stewardship” in the workshop, “Making Digitised Collections Available at Trans-National Level.” Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) 2014 Annual Conference, Riga, Latvia, July 2, 2014.
- Katrina Fenlon, Timothy Cole, Myung-Ja Han, Craig Willis, Colleen Fallaw, "Rethinking HathiTrust Metadata to Support Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis." Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 10, 2014.
- Peter Organisciak, Sayan Battacharyya, Loretta Auvil, Beth Plale, J. Stephen Downie, "Large-scale Text Analysis Through the HathiTrust Research Center." Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 10, 2014.
- Meghan Senseney, J. Stephen Downie, Instructional sessions presented at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2014, July 14-18, 2014.
- Mike Furlough, “Sharing Collections through Shared Stewardship: A HathiTrust Progress Report.” Triangle Research Libraries Network 2014 Annual Meeting, Chapel Hill, NC, July 23, 2014.