June 14, 2013 
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Note from John
John Wilkin, Executive Director, HathiTrust
Some five years ago, I was appointed as the founding Executive Director for HathiTrust, and the intervening years have been tremendous. We have a long list of utterly extraordinary accomplishments, made possible by the partnership, by our governance, and by a very talented group of staff. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we’ve changed the world. We’ve helped libraries see what’s possible through deep collaboration, and ours is sure to be a model for other transformative efforts. I feel deeply honored to have played a role in all of this.
Consequently, it is with mixed feelings that I share that I will be stepping down as Executive Director on August 16th as I begin my very exciting new responsibilities as the next Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois. I follow in the footsteps of one of the most outstanding library deans in the country (and one of HathiTrust’s first executive committee members), Paula Kaufman.
My friends and collaborators on the HathiTrust Board of Governors are poised to facilitate a smooth transition. A search will take place very soon, and I will continue to work with HathiTrust both to help bridge the gap and in my new capacity at Illinois. The strength of our collective individual commitments and the robustness of the organization we have put in place will ensure a bright future for HathiTrust. I want to thank everyone in the organization and at the partner institutions for all you’ve done to make HathiTrust great, and for the support you’ve given me over these years!
Late Breaking News
HathiTrust is pleased to welcome Brown University to the partnership! View the full announcement.
Top News
HathiTrust Program Steering Committee Membership Finalized
HathiTrust is pleased to announce the membership of the inaugural Program Steering Committee (PSC). The members, whose terms begin immediately, include:
- Ivy Anderson (California Digital Library)
- John Butler (University of Minnesota)
- Todd Grappone (University of California, Los Angeles)
- Mike Furlough (Penn State)
- Martha Hruska (University of California, San Diego)
- Martin Kurth (New York University)
- Erika Linke (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Matthew Sheehy (Harvard University)
- Elaine Westbrooks (University of Michigan)
- Bob Wolven, Chair (Columbia University)
The Program Steering Committee serves at the direction of the Board of Governors in the following manner:
- Reviews HathiTrust’s development agenda, shaping initiatives and strategies for Board discussion and decision-making, and considering the implications of those initiatives for the future. Working Groups can be appointed and charged by the Chair of the Program Steering Committee to assist with its work.
- Reports to the Board of Governors recommended alterations in the development agenda based on such reviews.
- Based on its reviews, develops position papers for the member community to encourage debate or mobilize discussion with regard to particular issues.
- Works with the Board of Governors to develop policies for HathiTrust and its members.
More information about the Program Steering Committee is available in the HathiTrust Bylaws.
Update on Constitutional Convention Ballot Initiatives
With our final governance-related steps in place, the HathiTrust Board of Governors felt it would be useful to provide a brief update on the October 2011 Constitutional Convention ballot initiatives. The ballot initiatives are available online.
Distributed Monographs Archive
HathiTrust has not yet undertaken work toward the establishment of a distributed network of print monograph archives. With the appointment of the PSC, we will develop a plan and will be in communication with member institutions in coming months.
Approval Process for development initiatives
HathiTrust has not yet undertaken work on an approval process for development initiatives. In light of the governance changes that have occurred since the proposal was made, the Board has determined that it will approve future development initiatives. The Board will develop appropriate procedures for review, communication, and prioritization of proposals related to HathiTrust initiatives and development.
Governance
With the establishment of the Program Steering Committee, this work is complete. The Board of Governors was established in April 2012. Bylaws were accepted by the member institutions in February 2013, establishing 3-year terms for members of the Board. (The current elected Board members have 3, 4 or 5 year terms to stagger appointments.) The Board formed an Executive Committee and elected officers (announced Oct. 2012). The terms of the officers are enumerated at http://www.hathitrust.org/board_of_governors. Nominations were received for the PSC, and the PSC members have been appointed (see the announcement above and http://www.hathitrust.org/psc).
Government Documents
HathiTrust has done background work on the partner ballot initiative related to digitization of US federal government documents. This work includes gathering information about the status of a variety of existing and planned government documents digitization initiatives (e.g., in the CIC), and assembling lists of reference and general information sources about digitized and non-digitized government documents. In April 2013, HathiTrust hired Valerie Glenn for a 2-year project to build a registry of US federal government documents. The purpose of the registry is to form a database so that we can identify the corpus of US federal documents--both currently digitized and those that could be digitized.
Mission and Goals
HathiTrust has not yet undertaken work to revise HathiTrust’s mission and goals.
Fee for service
HathiTrust has not yet undertaken work toward the establishment of a fee-for-service model of content deposit for non-HathiTrust partners.
Nominations for User Support Working Group
The User Support Working Group is seeking nominations for up to 3 new members. This is a great opportunity to get involved in the day-to-day work of the partnership. Nominations should be submitted by July 1, 2013 via the form at http://tinyurl.com/m9qlyyg and include the name, title, email address, and a short description of current job duties for the nominated staff member. Additional information that might be relevant to participation in the group may be included as well. User Support members are on call at least one day per week and follow up on inquiries throughout the week, requiring between 2-4 hours of work. Staff that participate on the group will:
- Gain knowledge about HathiTrust’s user base, typical problems and questions that are raised, and how these problems and questions are resolved.
- Become aware of new ways HathiTrust is being used, and features and functionality that users desire.
- Gain knowledge of HathiTrust organizational and technical infrastructure, and policies and procedures relating to copyright, access, collection development, deposit of materials, and preservation.
- Contribute to a vital component of partnership operations.
The charge for the working group is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/wg_user-support_charge.
Ingest
Local Digitization
HathiTrust corresponded with contacts from the University of Maryland, Texas A&M University, The University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois about requirements for locally-digitized content.
Working Groups and Committees
User Experience Advisory Group
The User Experience Advisory Group concluded discussions of user interface priorities and will be sharing results soon.
User Support Working Group
A summary of User Support inquiries received in May is included at the end of the update.
Projects
Bibliographic Data Management
Coding work continues on Zephir (the new metadata management system) to reflect recently revised requirements and workflow changes. The California Digital Library (CDL) team is on target to complete loading of a subset of HathiTrust bibliographic records to its development environment in early June. This load will incorporate the removal of rights determination code as well as improved metadata extraction to support core management functions and enhanced analysis. The CDL team is working with staff at the University of Michigan on refining strategies to ensure that Zephir includes the same records as those in the current system. This month has also seen a successful test of a new backup system for Zephir. The timeline for the project is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/htmms.
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in May is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for more information.
|
|
May |
Overall |
||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
3,720 |
7,935 | 134,947 | 251,935 |
|
CRMS-World |
2,794 | 5,439 | 26,606 | 49,492 |
|
Total |
6,514 | 13,374 | 161,553 | 301,427 |
HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC)
The HTRC has kicked off its second phase of development, which includes a substantial focus on community-building. To that end, the HTRC devoted the month of May to user engagement, visiting with user groups at Notre Dame University and gearing up for a series of focus groups and interviews at upcoming conferences, including Digital Humanities 2013 and JCDL 2013, to gather information about researcher projects and requirements. If you are already using HTRC resources, or are interested in starting, please join our user group mailing list to contribute recommendations and participate in technical and development discussions with the HTRC team.
The HTRC is planning its second annual UnCamp for September 8-9, to be held at the iHotel and Conference Center in Champaign, IL. Save the date!
mPach
University of Michigan staff posted mockups on the mPach website of enhancements to be made to the Collections and PageTurner applications to support journal articles published using mPach. Staff updated the project timeline and prepared to travel to Texas A&M University to present on mPach to staff from the library, university press, and the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, and discuss TAMU’s envisioned use of mPach.
Development Updates
HathiTrust institutions performed the following work related to applications and Web interfaces:
Access for Users who have Print Disabilities
Staff expanded the number of simultaneous accesses available to users at HathiTrust partner institutions who have print disabilities per print copy of a volume owned by the user’s institution. The number of simultaneous accesses was previously limited to the number of copies held by the user’s institution. Now there is no limit on the number of simultaneous accesses as long as the institution holds or previously held a print copy.
Staff also added a checkbox, which appears only to authenticated members of partner institutions, to the advanced full-text search page, allowing users to limit a search to items held in print by their institution. This was implemented to aid users who have print disabilities in identifying works from their institution that are avaialble to them. A description of how to use the checkbox, and other information about access for users who have print disabilities, can be found at http://www.hathitrust.org/accessibility.
Full-text Search
Michigan staff discussed issues surrounding the implementation of better relevance-ranking systems for books with attendees at the Lucene Revolution Conference, including several Lucene and Solr committers. Following these discussions, staff began to investigate Lucene and Solr’s grouping and joining capabilities and the potential to do relevance ranking based on the relevance of book chapters or other book parts.
Staff performed work to optimize indexing processes at times when maintenance or large updates that affect full-text indexing are underway, and began to design a process for indexing the full text of JATS XML articles.
Staff at California Digital Library improved the performance of a spelling suggestion feature that is in development, doubling the previous speed. Staff began to refactor code for the feature and implement a web service interface.
PageTurner
Staff tuned heuristics for determining whether to display volumes in the interface from left to right or right to left (depending on the language). Staff also
- corrected a bug that prevented PDFs for volumes that are read from right to left from being searchable;
- added an additional notice to PDFs generated by proxies for users who have print disabilities; and
- continued work to enable the delivery of JATS XML articles as PDFs.
Storage Hardware Replacement Cycle
HathiTrust suspended storage replacement activity in May due to complications with a storage system software upgrade. The software upgrade was completed in May, and storage due for retirement will be taken offline starting in June.
Outages
HathiTrust users may have been unable to perform searches within a book on Wednesday, May 1 from 11:30am - 4:40pm due to a change in system configuration that had an unintentional side effect at one site.
HathiTrust users may have experienced slow page loading or errors in page loading on Wednesday, May 8 from 2:30-4:15pm due to a database performance problem related to a large update to partner print holdings information.
New Growth
As of June 1:
| May | Overall | |
| Boston College | 0 | 2,179 |
| Columbia University | 0 | 65,033 |
| Cornell University | 32 | 419,836 |
| Duke University | 0 | 4,523 |
| Harvard University | 0 | 236,068 |
| Indiana University | 10 | 195,237 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 89,724 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 408 | 33,969 |
| New York Public Library | 1 | 288,343 |
| Penn State University | 591 | 59,187 |
| Princeton University | 2 | 251,704 |
| Purdue University | 0 | 44,692 |
| Universidad Complutense | 0 | 111,982 |
| University of California | 770 | 3,388,795 |
| The University of Chicago | 106 | 30,391 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 2,068 |
| University of Illinois | 4 | 109,318 |
| University of Michigan | 6,380 | 4,643,131 |
| University of Minnesota | 544 | 106,819 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 16,588 |
| University of Wisconsin | 8 | 555,733 |
| University of Virginia | 0 | 50,815 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 8,856 | 10,733,126 |
Public Domain (~31%)
| Total* | 12,504 | 3,386,026 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | May | April |
| Content | 390 | 379 |
|
Quality |
386 | 368 |
|
Non-partner Digital Deposit |
1 | 1 |
|
Collections |
13 | 9 |
| Cataloging | 135 | 140 |
| Access and Use | 144 | 145 |
|
Copyright |
79 | 71 |
|
Permissions |
10 | 13 |
|
Takedown |
1 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
0 | 0 |
|
Inter-library loan |
0 | 4 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
20 | 21 |
|
Datasets |
5 | 4 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
1 | 1 |
|
Reuse of content |
7 | 5 |
| Web applications | 33 | 31 |
|
Functionality problems |
13 | 7 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
3 | 1 |
|
General Questions about Login |
2 | 1 |
|
Partners setting up login |
1 | 0 |
|
Usability issues |
1 | 7 |
|
Feature requests |
1 | 2 |
| Partner Ingest | 10 | 3 |
| General | 57 | 76 |
|
Partnership |
6 | 12 |
|
Infrastructure |
0 | 2 |
|
Miscellaneous |
52 | 62 |
| Total | 769 | 774 |
Most Accessed Volumes
June Forecast
- Continue work on full-text relevance ranking.
- Continue exploration of the Solr experimental block-join functionality.
- Continue to design a process for indexing the full text of JATS XML articles.
- Continue work to enable the delivery of JATS XML articles as PDFs.
Presentations
- John Wilkin and Sigrid Cordell, "HathiTrust: The Collection and Its Uses", Educause Learning Initiative Webinar, May 6, 2013.
- Beth Plale and Yiming Sun, “Digital Humanities At Scale: HathiTrust Research Center”, Notre Dame, May 7, 2013.
- Downie, J. Stephen, “Unlocking the Secrets of 3 Billion Pages: Introducing the HathiTrust Research Center”, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, May 15, 2003 and University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, May 20, 2013.
- Jeremy York, “Institutional Uses of HathiTrust”, Maine Shared Collections Strategy Advisory Meeting, September 23, 2013. Similar presentation given at University of Maine, September 24, 2013.