Past working groups and committees are recorded below.
Established by Executive Director
Zephir Advisory Group: The Zephir Advisory Group was charged with recommending policies and procedures relevant to metadata management and recommending the implementation of new features and service enhancements.
Established by Program Steering Committee (2013-present)
- Government Documents Initiative Planning and Advisory Group: Studied proposals for a US government documents initiative from the Constitutional Convention and recommended elements for its implementation.
- Metadata Policy, Strategy, Use and Sharing Advisory Group: Reviewed managed metadata, formulating relevant policy and strategic directions to benefit the members.
- Print Monographs Archive Planning Task Force: Studied proposals for a shared print monographs initiative from the Constitutional Convention and recommended elements for its implementation.
- Quality Assurance and Standards Working Group: Recommended strategies, processes and techniques detailing how members, end users, and/or HathiTrust Operations can contribute to the quality of the corpus through making scalable improvements of digital surrogate fidelity at the item/object level.
- Rights and Access Working Group: Promoted HathiTrust's ability to provide the widest possible access to its collections within the law by establishing priorities for rights determinations and strategies for engagement with rights holders.
Established by Executive Director/Executive Committee (2009-2011)
The Executive Director, in coordination with the Executive Committee, appointed committees and working groups with an operational focus
- Collaborative Development Environment Working Group (June 2009 - November 2010): The Collaborative Development Environment working group was assembled to support distributed development of tools and applications in HathiTrust, both to serve the particular needs of local campuses and to improve centralized repository functionality and reporting capabilities.
- Storage Working Group (July 2009 - January 2010): This short-term working group was charged with exploring the value of adding a third instance of storage to HathiTrust’s infrastructure. The group weighed benefits against costs and provided a final report (linked below) to the HathiTrust Executive Committee.
Members of the group included Stephen Abrams, California Digital Library (co-chair), John Kunze, California Digital Library (co-chair), Luc Declerck, University of California San Diego, Rob Lowden, Indiana University, David Minor, University of California San Diego, and Cory Snavely, University of Michigan.
- Research Center Working Group (July - November 2009): This working group was assembled to explore the needs and requirements of establishing a Research Center for HathiTrust, allowing users to perform computational analysis on materials in the digital library. As a result of the group's work, an RFP for building and sustaining a HathiTrust Research Center went out in January 2010.
Members of the group included Steven Abney (University of Michigan), Jack Bernard (University of Michigan), Geoffrey Fox (Indiana University), David Goldberg (University of California Irvine), Robert McDonald (Indiana University), Qiaozhu Mei (University of Michigan), John Ober (California Digital Library), Beth Plale (Indiana University), Scott Poole (University of Illinois), Sarah Shreeves (University of Illinois), and John Unsworth (University of Illinois). The group was coordinated by Kat Hagedorn, with project support provided by Jeremy York from HathiTrust.
Established by Strategic Advisory Board (2009-2011)
The Strategic Advisory Board, which appointed committees and working groups with a planning or exploratory focus, was succeeded in June 2013 by the Program Steering Committee (PSC). The PSC appoints groups with a broader focus (potentially with both strategic and operational components).
- Collections Committee (July 2010): This standing committee is charged with responsibility for establishing strategic directions related to the collection, including collection building and management of the collection. View the full charge and membership. In March 2012, the Collections Committee released a discussion document: Recommendations for Handling Duplicates in HathiTrust.
- Surrogates Working Group (April 2010): The SAB formed this group to make recommendations related to the complex issue of substitute or surrogate volumes offered by Google to partner libraries. A full charge and explanation of the problem are available.
- Quality, Ingest, and Error Rate Working Group (July 2009): The Quality Working Group has been given a finite charge to make recommendations surrounding the quality threshold HathiTrust uses to limit ingest of Google-digitized materials that are of poor quality. The key components of the charge are to a) develop a set of quality principles for HathiTrust, b) monitor quality control as related to user experience, c) track developments in a separate quality working group established by Google and Google library partners following the Google partner summit in October, and d) evaluate HathiTrust practices with regard to thresholding or limiting ingested content.
Members of the group included Paul Fogel (California Digital Library, Paul Soderdahl (University of Iowa), and Bryan Skib (University of Michigan).
- Full-text Search Subgroup (October 2010): The full-text search subgroup was introduced to shape and make recommendations on the future development of HathiTrust's full-text search. In March 2011 the subgroup complete an in-depth analysis of potential features for full-text search. View membership and charge.
- Discovery Interface Working Group (April 2009-June 2011): This group was first formed to shape the implementation of a HathiTrust catalog to be created in partnership with OCLC. Subsequent work involved shaping a next stage for HathiTrust’s large-scale full-text search.
Members of the working group included John Butler (University of Minnesota), Bill Carney (OCLC), Suzanne Chapman (University of Michigan), Kevin Clair (Pennsylvania State University), Lee Conrad (University of Wisconsin), Lisa German (Pennsylvania State University), Julia Lovett (University of Michigan), Patti Martin (California Digital Library), Jon Rothman (University of Michigan), Christopher Walker (Pennsylvania State University), and John Wilkin (University of Michigan).
The working group produced a draft vision for HathiTrust discovery beyond the phase one catalog implementation work.