December 12, 2014 
Top News
HathiTrust Budget
HathiTrust submitted the 2015 budget to members for approval. Fee invoices are expected to be sent to members in January.
New Staff Member
We are pleased to announce the hiring of a new Applications Developer for HathiTrust, Josh Steverman. Josh began work December 1st and will be the primary developer for the HathiTrust Government Documents Registry.
New Full-text Search Blog Post
Tom Burton-West authored the third in a series of blog posts on relevance ranking in HathiTrust, this one on document length normalization.
Ingest
Locally-digitized content
HathiTrust ingested new locally-digitized volumes from the Getty Research Institute and the University of Illinois, and continued working with Texas A&M University and Emory University on new deposit. Utah State University and the University of Missouri are also preparing content for ingest.
Google-digitized content
HathiTrust continued to ingest content from Harvard University and also volumes that had been previously held by Google in escrow, adding a large number of volumes from Penn State in particular.
Internet Archive-digitized content
HathiTrust began working with the University of Pennsylvania on content submission, and began ingesting content from the Getty Research Institute (both Internet Archive- and locally-digitized).
Bibliographic Data Management
The California Digital Library (CDL) loaded 58,128 new or updated bibliographic records into Zephir.
Projects
Copyright Review
A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in November is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information.
|
|
November |
Overall |
||
|
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
Public Domain Determinations |
All Determinations |
|
|
CRMS-US |
327 | 533 | 167,577 | 317,784 |
|
CRMS-World |
3,504 | 6,692 | 86,117 | 163,731 |
|
Total |
3,831 | 7,225 | 253,694 | 481,515 |
Government Documents Registry
Project staff continued to test an initial algorithm to detect relationships between government documents, including when documents are duplicates, and experimented with ways to automate the addition of SuDoc stems to records that lack them based on agency author. Project staff also contacted HathiTrust members to investigate making corrections to records of more than 6,000 government documents volumes in HathiTrust that are believed to be improperly cataloged.
HathiTrust Research Center
A paper by Sayan Bhattacharyya, Peter Organisciak and J. Stephen Downie, was accepted for publication in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, covering “The Future of Reading”. The paper focuses on feature extraction from a digital humanities/digital culture standpoint and was supported by the HTRC.
On November 17th, Sayan Bhattacharyya and Harriett Green conducted a workshop on the HTRC Portal at the Scholarly Commons at the University of Illinois Library. The workshop covered how to create and modify worksets, how to run algorithms on worksheets, and how to interpret the results obtained when running selected algorithms (see the event description for further details).
Beth Plale and Robert McDonald represented HTRC at the recent Supercomputing 14 conference, November 17 to 20th. Their exhibit of HTRC featured a sphere visualization, i.e. viewing HTRC-related data on a globe. The visualization included texts published per country, HTRC UnCamp 2013 participants' geolocations, and HathiTrust Google analytics. Follow this link to view the slides from the presentation.
Development Updates
Development updates and activities by HathiTrust institutions included the following:
Analytics
- Modified the configuration for Google Analytics to track uses of volumes (and searches within books) at the volume-level only rather than the page- and volume-level. This better reflects the way the Google Analytics data is being used, and aligns with Analytics’ normal processing of heavily parameterized URLs.
Full-text Search
- A software release for full-text search high-performance storage that addresses performance and stability problems and is suitable for production deployment is expected to be received from the storage vendor for testing in December.
Storage Replacement Cycle
- Obtained pricing and submitted orders for storage hardware as part of HathiTrust's regular storage purchase and replacement cycle. This purchase follows a smaller, out-of-cycle purchase and installation of storage earlier in the fall, which was done to accommodate substantial repository growth that exceeded earlier projections. Installation is planned to start in January.
Papers & Presentations
- Mike Furlough and Jeremy York, “Collective Stewardship Through HathiTrust Digital Library”, Workshop on African Studies in the Digital Age, University of Michigan, November 4, 2014.
- Sarah Michalak, "HathiTrust: An Above Campus Solution", Research Libraries UK 2014 Conference, Birmingham, England, November 14, 2014.
- Harriett Green and Sayan Bhattacharyaa, “Introduction to the Hathi Trust Research Center Portal for Text Mining Research”, Workshop presented at the University of Illinois Library, November 17, 2014.
- Beth Plale and Robert McDonald, “The HathiTrust Research Center: Big Data Analytics in a Secure Data Framework”, Supercomputing 2014, New Orleans, LA, November 17, 18, 19, 2014.
- Mike Furlough, "Sharing Collections through Shared Stewardship," Association of Southeastern Research Libraries Fall 2014 Membership Meeting, Atlanta, GA, November 19, 2014.
HathiTrust on the Road
HathiTrust administrative staff will be attending the following meetings in January 2015. Please get in touch if you would like to meet with us there.
- Jeremy York, Assistant Director, HathiTrust: Modern Language Association 2015 Convention, Vancouver, BC. January 8-11.
- Mike Furlough, Executive Director, HathiTrust: ALA Midwinter 2015, Chicago, IL. January 29-February 2.
December Forecast
- Reassess accessibility features of PageTurner with particular attention to supporting new content types.
- Continue working on migration to Solr 4.10 and re-index the collection
New Growth
As of December 1:
| November | Overall | |
| Boston College | 53 | 3,263 |
| Columbia University | 8,227 | 73,393 |
| Cornell University | 1,573 | 505,647 |
| Duke University | 26 | 7,801 |
| Getty Research Institute | 2,141 | 18,263 |
| Harvard University | 66,760 | 838,100 |
| Indiana University | 3,466 | 528,644 |
| Keio University | 0 | 90,094 |
| Knowledge Unlatched | 0 | 28 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 108,892 |
| McGill University | 0 | 893 |
| New York Public Library | 1 | 294,825 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 4 | 56,663 |
| Ohio State University | 1,821 | 54,299 |
| Penn State University | 237,986 | 386,578 |
| Princeton University | 5 | 252,807 |
| Purdue University | 0 | 47,488 |
| Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute | 0 | 358 |
| Texas A&M University | 12 | 1,213 |
| Universidad Complutense | 1,784 | 117,229 |
| University of Alberta | 3 | 76,106 |
| University of California | 12,995 | 3,602,849 |
| The University of Chicago | 7 | 51,966 |
| University of Connecticut | 8 | 4,637 |
| University of Delaware | 0 | 38 |
| University of Florida | 0 | 9,866 |
| University of Illinois | 9,850 | 316,633 |
| University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 13 | 11,128 |
| University of Michigan | 2,087 | 4,708,881 |
| University of Minnesota | 10 | 138,607 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Virginia | 1 | 51,207 |
| University of Wisconsin | 52 | 560,672 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 348,885 | 12,963,084 |
Public Domain (~37%)
| Total* | 128,174 | 4,843,992 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | November 2014 | October 2014 |
| Content | 129 | 153 |
|
Quality |
118 | 142 |
|
Collections |
11 | 10 |
| Cataloging | 151 | 198 |
| Access and Use | 120 | 229 |
|
Copyright |
55 | 156 |
|
Permissions |
6 | 9 |
|
Takedown |
1 | 0 |
|
Print on Demand |
0 | 0 |
|
Inter-library loan |
6 | 2 |
|
Full-PDF or e-copy requests |
14 | 19 |
|
Datasets |
1 | 2 |
|
Data Availability and APIs |
1 | 0 |
|
Reuse of content |
1 | 3 |
| Web applications | 24 | 24 |
|
Functionality problems |
13 | 6 |
|
Problems with login specifically |
0 | 2 |
|
General Questions about Login |
2 | 1 |
|
Partners setting up login |
0 | 0 |
|
Usability issues |
0 | 0 |
|
Feature requests |
1 | 1 |
| Partner Ingest | 23 | 13 |
| General | 92 | 128 |
|
Partnership |
7 | 4 |
|
Miscellaneous |
85 | 124 |
| Total | 539 | 745 |
Most Accessed Volumes
Availability
Repository
Cumulative 12-month availability of repository access*: 99.949% (+0.000%)
No outages were reported in November.
Zephir
Bibliographic metadata exports from Zephir were unavailable on November 4th due to a database network connection outage.
* 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.