July 7, 2014 
The first half of 2014 included several significant milestones for HathiTrust. In February, the HathiTrust Board selected Mike Furlough to be the new Executive Director of HathiTrust, marking a major transition and beginning of a new phase for the partnership. In February also, partners surpassed 11 million volumes in the digital repository collection. In June, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court released its ruling on the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and others against HathiTrust. The ruling re-affirmed the lawful work HathiTrust has undertaken to expand access to library collections. Throughout the year, partners have been increasing their involvement through working groups and committees tasked with moving forward our broad initiatives in collections, shared print monograph archiving, U.S. federal government documents, and rights and access. We enter the summer and fall with great momentum and an ever-increasing knowledge and appreciation for the tremendous amount we can accomplish, for our institutions and the world, when working together.
Highlighted Achievements and Activities
Details on each item can be found in the monthly updates from 2014, available at http://www.hathitrust.org/updates.
New Executive Director
HathiTrust announced the appointment of Mike Furlough as the Executive Director of HathiTrust. Mike began on May 19.
New Partners
4 new partners joined HathiTrust in the first half of 2014:
- Montana State University
- Mount Holyoke College
- University of Maine
- University of Texas System
New Content
HathiTrust partners contributed 266,990 volumes to the repository. 214,251 of these are in the public domain. In addition to content from partners, HathiTrust ingested more than 80,000 volumes from Keio University, 326 volumes from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library, and a set of 19 open access volumes made available through Knowledge Unlatched. Contributions of new content are shown in the table at the end of the update.
HathiTrust released a full-volume validation and packaging service for locally-digitized materials (see http://www.hathitrust.org/ingest_tools). If you are interested in receiving updates related to these tools, please subscribe to the HathiTrust Ingest Google Group.
Ruling in Authors Guild Lawsuit Appeal
The U.S. Second Circuit Court released its decision in the appeal of the Authors Guild lawsuit against HathiTrust. View HathiTrust’s statement on the ruling.
“Heartbleed bug”
HathiTrust released a statement describing the scope of the impact of the “Heartbleed bug” on HathiTrust infrastructure and services.
CRMS Milestone
Staff from several partner institutions completed the review of in-copyright works in HathiTrust published in the United States from 1923 to 1963. This marked a major milestone in the work the Copyright Review Management System was established to carry out. Review of works in the CRMS-World project (reviewing works published outside the US) is ongoing. CRMS-US and CRMS-World are projects generously funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
11 Million Volumes
HathiTrust surpassed 11 million volumes in the digital repository. A history of HathiTrust’s road to the first 10 million volumes is available on the HathiTrust blog.
Orphan Works Roundtable
Executive Committee chair Sarah Michalak and Mike Furlough 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. View HathiTrust’s written comments on the Roundtable.
Government Documents Call for Records
More than 40 institutions, including HathiTrust partners and non-partners, submitted records in response to HathiTrust’s call for US federal government document records, issued in November 2013. The records were requested for analysis purposes as part of HathiTrust’s US government documents initiative.
Governance and Working Groups
Board of Governors
The HathiTrust Board of Governors met on May 9, 2014 in Columbus, OH for one of two in-person meetings held each year (two additional meetings are held by phone each year). A summary of the meeting and outcomes can be found at http://www.hathitrust.org/updates_may2014#Board.
The Board appointed 2 new members to the Program Steering Committee to serve 2-year terms, beginning in June. The new members are Robert McDonald, Associate Dean, Library Technologies, Indiana University, and Chris Freeland, Associate University Librarian, Washington University in St. Louis.
Program Steering Committee
The Program Steering Committee finalized the charges and membership of 4 new groups to carry forward HathiTrust activities (see http://www.hathitrust.org/working_groups). The groups are:
- Collections Committee
- Government Documents Planning and Advisory Group
- Print Monographs Archive Planning Task Force
- Rights and Access Working Group
Updates on the activities of these groups will be reported in future newsletters.
The PSC also began to review HathiTrust’s use of automated quality metrics provided by Google to reduce the number of poorer quality volumes that are ingested. The PSC will be appointing a task force to assess the issues and make recommendations.
User Support Working Group
A summary of the issues received by the User Support Working Group is shown in a table at the end of the review.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities from the first half of 2014 is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information.
| Jan-Jun 2014 | Overall | ||
Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | Public Domain Determinations | All Determinations | |
CRMS-US | 7,564 | 9,361 | 165,725 | 314,873 |
CRMS-World | 19,759 | 39,476 | 63,987 | 124,513 |
Total | 27,323 | 48,837 | 229,712 | 439,386 |
Government Documents Registry
Work of the Government Documents Registry project team focused on the development of functional objectives for the Registry, and the development of strategies and processes to 1) identify duplicate records and understand relationships between different record sets and 2) identify gaps in government documents holdings, with an eye toward being able to determine the comprehensiveness of certain sets of materials in the HathiTrust repository.
HathiTrust is seeking an applications developer to design, implement, and populate a Registry. See the University of Michigan Jobs site for the full description and application details.
HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC)
Activities of the HTRC included the following:
- Release of a new dataset of features extracted from a subset of HathiTrust volumes.
- Continuation of monthly HTRC user group meetings. Notes from the meetings are posted on the HTRC Wiki.
- The awarding of mini-grants to 4 projects as part of the Workset Creation For Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
- Preparations to include in-copyright material from the HathiTrust corpus.
Numerous presentations and workshops (see http://www.hathitrust.org/papers).
mPach
Michigan staff continued to develop and make improvements to mPach workflow modules designed to normalize and prepare born-digital publications for ingest into HathiTrust. Staff also focused on user interface issues, with specific attention to accessibility. A revised timeline for mPach implementation is posted at http://www.hathitrust.org/mpach.
Repository Updates
Activities in the first half of 2014 included the following:
Bibliographic Data Management
Loading of more than 650,000 new or updated bibliographic records for volumes from 27 sources into Zephir, HathiTrust’s bibliographic metadata management system.
New Functionality / Application Changes
Authentication and Authorization
- Development of a new application to improve management of staff who have special access to restricted materials (e.g., for copyright review or as a proxy for users who have print disabilities). Deployment is expected to occur in June.
Full-text search
- Extensive work to improve relevance ranking of search results, including in-depth testing of new indexing strategies (see blog posts from May and June).
- Integration and testing of a spelling suggestion feature developed by the California Digital Library.
- Work to install new high-performance storage for full-text search, which has been delayed due to issues encountered with hardware from the supplier.
Google Analytics
- Configuration of HathiTrust’s Google Analytics to track the usage of HathiTrust Collections in addition to individual items.
ImageServer
- Release of a new version of HathiTrust’s imgsrv application. The new version more effectively supports the generation of derivative versions of HathiTrust content for delivery to users and other HathiTrust applications.
- Release of an update to generate EPUB versions of content, delivered only through the mobile interface, using HTML coordinate OCR when HTML OCR is available.
PageTurner
- Addition of an “Embed this Book” feature and improvements and bug fixes to the “search in this text” functionality.
Repository and Infrastructure Changes
Server Replacement
- Completion of the replacement cycle for production web servers at the Michigan and Indiana repository instances.
- Ordering of replacement servers for HathiTrust full-text search infrastructure.
Storage Replacement
- Completion of installation of new and replacement storage for 2014.
Updated Volume Identifiers
- HathiTrust made a one-time, batch change to a set of approximately 320,000 volume identifiers. A full list of the updated identifiers is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles. Any institutions or individuals that save links to HathiTrust volumes locally should update these identifiers to ensure working links.
Availability
- Cumulative 12-month availability of repository access (as of June 1, 2014): 99.867%.
Papers and Presentations
All papers and presentations are listed at http://www.hathitrust.org/papers.
New Growth
Deposits from all institutions are shown in the table below.
| Volumes Added | Jan-June | Total Volumes |
| Boston College | 834 | 3,197 |
| Columbia University | 129 | 65,165 |
| Cornell University | 50,271 | 487,762 |
| Duke University | 3,249 | 7,774 |
| Harvard University | 630 | 238,065 |
| Indiana University | 502 | 196,082 |
| Keio University | 90,080 | 90,080 |
| Knowledge Unlatched | 24 | 24 |
| Library of Congress | 19,159 | 108,883 |
| McGill University | 893 | 893 |
| New York Public Library | 3,424 | 291,794 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 18,896 | 56,398 |
| Ohio State University | 26,859 | 26,859 |
| Penn State | 13,288 | 81,492 |
| Princeton University | 215 | 251,925 |
| Purdue University | 3 | 44,698 |
| Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute | 358 | 358 |
| Texas A&M University | 0 | 1,201 |
| Universidad Complutense | 139 | 112,153 |
| University of California | 72,464 | 3,520,634 |
| University of Chicago | 12,995 | 51,630 |
| University of Delaware | 28 | 28 |
| University of Florida | 103 | 9,866 |
| University of Illinois | 29,924 | 142,899 |
| University of Massachusetts | 11,115 | 11,115 |
| University of Michigan | 23,040 | 4,689,072 |
| University of Minnesota | 4,245 | 120,180 |
| University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Virginia | 381 | 51,202 |
| University of Wisconsin | 1,328 | 557,252 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 384,576 | 11,262,697 |
Public Domain (~34%)
| Total* | 306,317 | 3,848,472 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | Jan-June 2014 | Jan-June 2012 |
| Content | 1,057 | 975 |
| Quality | 997 | 979 |
| Non-partner Digital Deposit | 2 | 5 |
| Collections | 60 | 30 |
| Cataloging | 605 | 220 |
| Access and Use | 822 | 771 |
| Copyright | 463 | 451 |
| Permissions | 68 | 95 |
| Takedown | 2 | 7 |
| Print on Demand | 2 | 2 |
| Inter-library loan | 10 | 2 |
| Full-PDF or e-copy requests | 119 | 109 |
| Datasets | 34 | 13 |
| Data Availability and APIs | 7 | 7 |
| Reuse of content | 23 | 12 |
| Web applications | 137 | 109 |
| Functionality problems | 41 | 29 |
| Problems with login specifically | 6 | 6 |
| General questions about login | 12 | 15 |
| Partners setting up login | 10 | 14 |
| Usability issues | 13 | 6 |
| Feature requests | 11 | 12 |
| Partner Ingest | 35 | 18 |
| General | 380 | 604 |
| Partnership | 65 | 55 |
| Infrastructure | 2 | 4 |
| Miscellaneous | 313 | 545 |
| Total | 2,976 | 2,697 |
Most Accessed Volumes (Jan-June)
About HathiTrust
HathiTrust is an international partnership of academic and research institutions dedicated to ensuring the preservation and accessibility of the vast record of human knowledge. The partnership owns and operates a digital repository containing millions of public domain and in-copyright volumes, digitized from partnering institution libraries and other sources. The preserved volumes are made available in accordance with copyright law as a shared scholarly resource for students, faculty, and researchers at the partnering institutions and as a public good to the world community. For more information, visit HathiTrust.org.