April 11, 2014 
Late Breaking News
HathiTrust released a statement regarding the “Heartbleed bug” reported on April 8.
Top News
Orphan Works Roundtable
Sarah Michalak, chair of the HathiTrust Board, and Mike Furlough, incoming Executive Director of HathiTrust, participated in a Roundtable discussion organized by the U.S. Copyright Office on March 10 and 11 on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. Melissa Levine, Lead Copyright Officer at the University of Michigan Library also participated. HathiTrust will be submitting and posting written comments on the Roundtable issues in April.
HTRC Grant Awards
The HathiTrust Research Center is pleased to announce the recipients of 4 prototyping project awards, granted as part of the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA) project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and directed by J. Stephen Downie (PI), Tim Cole (co-PI), and Beth Plale (co-PI). Each project will receive $40,000 to develop a prototype over a nine-month period beginning in late April. HTRC received 15 proposals in response to an RFP released in November, and eight finalists were invited to present projects at a shortlist meeting in February.
The following prototyping projects have been selected:
- "Workset Creation through Image Analysis of Document Pages", Texas A&M University (PI: Keith Biggers)
- "Semantic Analysis of Documents from the HathiTrust Corpus", Waikato University (PI: Annike Hinze)
- "Distributed Metadata Correction and Annotation", Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland (PI: Trevor Muñoz)
- "ElEPHãT: Early English Print in HathiTrust, a Linked Semantic Workset Prototype", Oxford University (PI: Kevin Page)
These projects represent a range of approaches to developing new tools and techniques designed to assist researchers and scholars in 1) identifying and selecting resources from within the HathiTrust and 2) creating worksets of these resources for scholarly analysis. Approaches range from page image analysis, linked data solutions for developing worksets drawn from multiple sources, semantic analysis to support topical clustering, and application development for metadata correction and annotation. A full press release is forthcoming, and additional project information is available at http://worksets.htrc.illinois.edu/worksets/.
Ingest
General
HathiTrust coordinated with the University of Illinois, Emory University, the University of Washington and the Getty Research Institution on the submission of new content, and prepared to receive content from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library and Knowledge Unlatched.
Zephir
California Digital Library (CDL) loaded 51,669 new or updated bibliographic records into Zephir.
Working Groups and Committees
Program Steering Committee
The Program Steering Committee (PSC) continued to form working groups and committees to carry out its agenda, including action on ballot initiatives from the Constitutional Convention. The Government Documents Initiative Planning and Advisory Group held an initial meeting in Gainesville, Florida on March 17th-18th; the core group is now being expanded with additional members. The former Collections Committee has been reconstituted with a new charge; confirmed members who are continuing on the committee are Ivy Anderson (chair, and PSC liaison), Sharon Farb, Bryan Skib, Claire Stewart, Tom Teper, and Ann Thornton; two additional members are in the process of being appointed. In April the PSC will issue a call through the HathiTrust member representatives for volunteers to serve on two new groups: a Print Monographs Archive Task Force, and a Rights & Access Working Group.
With Mike Furlough's appointment as Executive Director, the Program Steering Committee has an opening for a new member. A call for nominations will be issued shortly.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in March is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World, projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for further information.
|
|
March |
Overall |
||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
2,956 | 3,591 | 163,968 | 312,667 |
|
CRMS-World |
2,766 | 6,620 | 52,164 | 102,366 |
|
Total |
5,722 | 10,211 | 216,132 | 415,033 |
Government Documents Registry
Project staff conducted manual investigations to determine the comprehensiveness of select titles and agencies in the HathiTrust repository, and considered possibilities for identifying related bibliographic records using automated means. Staff also began to explore methods for determining gaps in holdings based on bibliographic metadata.
HathiTrust Research Center
Staff from Indiana and the University of Michigan discussed options for secure transfer of in-copyright materials from the Michigan repository instance to the HTRC. The HTRC-Usergroup continued its monthly meeting series, supplemented by discussion on the HTRC-Usergroup listserv. To subscribe to the list, visit http://bit.ly/1eoe0Zn.
Matthew Wilkins, assistant professor of English at University of Notre Dame was awarded an ACRL (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowship, for a project using works in HathiTrust to study "Literary Geography at Scale".
mPach
University of Michigan staff evaluated MeTypseset for possible integration into the Prepper/Norm workflow. With indexing of JATS content implemented, work began on evaluating the UI implications for search results within an item that contains no page breaks.
Development Updates
Authentication and Authorization
Staff modified Web applications to use an end user’s Shibboleth entityID to establish their institutional affiliation (eduPersonScopedAffliation was used previously). This was done to facilitate proper identification when a user has multiple affiliations.
Staff began to gather requirements for and design an application to administer staff who are granted special access to restricted materials (e.g., staff authorized to review the copyright status or quality of volumes, or access volumes as a proxy for users who have print disabilities).
ImageServer
Staff re-architected the imgsrv application to more efficiently generate derivative formats. The changes impact the generation of derivatives (such as PDF) for items currently in HathiTrust, and will facilitate the creation of derivatives of born-digital articles submitted via mPach. Staff began to make minor improvements to the EPUB download option available from HathiTrust’s mobile interface. The improvements will be tested and then released in April.
Full-text Search
Staff continued to work with storage and network equipment suppliers to troubleshoot and optimize performance issues with new high-performance storage for full-text search.
Staff deployed new features in full-text searching indexing, including support for indexing of JATS XML for born-digital article content, and indexing of volumes into a configurable number of “chunks”. Chunking is being explored as a part of strategies to improve the relevance ranking of full-text search results.
Spelling-suggester
Staff tested a new spelling-suggestion feature using several large extracts from HathiTrust query logs and lists of commonly misspelled words and their corrections. The spelling suggester provided correct suggestions for nearly all queries. Some outliers revealed needs for further development, however, which is being pursued by staff at the University of Michigan and the California Digital Library.
Server Replacement Cycle
Staff completed security wipes and prepared retired equipment for return to the vendor.
Availability
Repository
Cumulative 12-month availability of repository access: 99.827%*
No outages were reported in March.
* 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.
New Growth
As of March 1:
| March | Overall | |
| Boston College | 315 | 3,111 |
| Columbia University | 0 | 65,037 |
| Cornell University | 43 | 444,374 |
| Duke University | 0 | 7,258 |
| Harvard University | 0 | 237,435 |
| Indiana University | 67 | 195,647 |
| Keio University | 2 | 88,956 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 107,929 |
| New York Public Library | 3,268 | 291,640 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 38 | 37,639 |
| Ohio State University | 1,641 | 21,086 |
| Penn State University | 6,599 | 77,928 |
| Princeton University | 0 | 251,710 |
| Purdue University | 0 | 44,698 |
| Texas A&M University | 0 | 1,201 |
| Universidad Complutense | 1 | 112,148 |
| University of California | 14,675 | 3,476,598 |
| The University of Chicago | 79 | 39,156 |
| University of Delaware | 9 | 9 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 9,765 |
| University of Illinois | 7,863 | 134,466 |
| University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 680 | 9,411 |
| University of Michigan | 2,078 | 4,670,559 |
| University of Minnesota | 91 | 119,859 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Virginia | 0 | 50,821 |
| University of Wisconsin | 26 | 555,973 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 37,475 | 11,098,430 |
Public Domain (~33%)
| Total* | 6,887 | 3,682,091 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | March 2014 | February 2014 |
| Content | 181 | 220 |
|
Quality |
168 | 200 |
|
Collections |
13 | 18 |
| Cataloging | 203 | 165 |
| Access and Use | 212 | 130 |
|
Copyright |
144 | 80 |
|
Permissions |
13 | 16 |
|
Takedown |
2 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
0 | 0 |
|
Inter-library loan |
4 | 0 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
20 | 21 |
|
Datasets |
2 | 7 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
1 | 0 |
|
Reuse of content |
4 | 2 |
| Web applications | 18 | 29 |
|
Functionality problems |
7 | 13 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
2 | 0 |
|
General Questions about Login |
2 | 2 |
|
Partners setting up login |
0 | 3 |
|
Usability issues |
0 | 0 |
|
Feature requests |
2 | 2 |
| Partner Ingest | 16 | 2 |
| General | 101 | 112 |
|
Partnership |
5 | 5 |
|
Infrastructure |
0 | 0 |
|
Miscellaneous |
96 | 107 |
| Total | 731 | 658 |
Most Accessed Volumes
April Forecast
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Begin development of a consolidated application to administer staff who are authorized to access restricted items.
-
Develop and test new spelling suggestion features.
-
Build test indexes to experiment with Solr’s grouping and block-join functionality at scale (part of work towards relevance ranking improvements).
Papers & Presentations
- Downie, J. Stephen. 2014. "Two Projects, One Challenge: Common research data issues in MIREX and HTRC." Invited keynote to Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access (MUMIA) Workshop, Research Data Alliance Third Plenary Meeting, Dublin, Ireland, 24 March 2014.