HathiTrust Updates

December 11, 2009 [Download PDF]

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Release of Large-scale Search Application – On November 19, HathiTrust launched a new service enabling full-text search of all volumes in the repository. Indexing of newly ingested volumes is ongoing, but the release of the first production index (containing approximately 4.6 million volumes) is the culmination of more than a year of research and benchmark testing conducted by staff at the University of Michigan. This new service dramatically changes the way researchers are able to use our collections and, along with the release of the bibliographic catalog in May, demonstrates HathiTrust’s commitment to providing sophisticated ways of accessing and using collections preserved in the digital repository. The official news release is available at http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=7426. More can be read about large-scale search in the Development Updates section below.

Development Opportunities – This month we provide the second in a series of ‘columns’ about development opportunities in HathiTrust. These are opportunities that have been identified by HathiTrust partners, and are available to HathiTrust partners, to create key systems or services that will benefit the partnership as a whole. Each month we will provide a brief description of one of these opportunities, give a sense of the level of priority that it has, and provide additional information about what might be involved in developing and supporting it. The opportunities are also listed on the HathiTrust website at http://www.hathitrust.org/projects. The opportunity described this month is usage reporting.

Usage reporting

Description: A clearer sense of the level of use of library materials in HathiTrust will help shape extended activities such as collection management and further digitization. Volumes in HathiTrust may, in some cases, be read in their entirety, while in other cases they may only be searched. To what extent are search-only materials viewed?  Which works that are fully viewable are displayed? Where does that access originate? As HathiTrust introduces authentication, to what extent do users authenticate to get access to a fuller array of services? How frequently is the HathiTrust catalog searched, and how does that use compare to the use of full text indexes? These are some of the questions that an improved service for usage reporting will  help to answer.

Resources available: HathiTrust retains raw log data and registers some uses through Google analytics.

Priority: moderate

Additional details: An institution that undertakes this work must:

• clearly outline a commitment to undertake appropriate measures with regard to user privacy (e.g., with regard to IP addresses and, at such time that HathiTrust implements Shibboleth, user authentication information). Such efforts should include secure storage of sensitive data, appropriate aggregation of data so as to anonymize use by specific individuals, and a commitment to not transfer private user data to a third  party;
• outline a process for design and specifications with a group of interested partner libraries;
• give consideration to producing reports consistent with appropriate library community standards (e.g., COUNTER and SUSHI).

Working Group on Computational Research Center – Working group members provided final feedback on the Call for Proposals for a HathiTrust Research Center that will be distributed to HathiTrust institutions in December. The Research Center will make textual and image data in HathiTrust available for a wide variety of computational research and analysis purposes, including research in areas of digital humanities, linguistics, automated translation, and searching and indexing techniques.

Working Group on  Collaborative Development Environment –  Additional effort devoted to the release of Large-scale Search in November delayed further progress on the development environment, but it is now a prime area of focus. The first milestone, a preliminary proof-of-concept environment that supports current development efforts will be ready for developers at the University of Michigan and the University of California to begin testing in the first half of December. Once this milestone is reached, the working group will be re-engaged to discuss the current provisions of the development environment and explore next steps.

New Programmer For Non-Google Ingest –  Staff at the University of Michigan received and reviewed applications for a position to aid in the transformation and modification of non-Google content for ingest into HathiTrust. Five candidates were interviewed by phone in November and three were invited for in-person interviews. After a period of review, the search committee decided to continue the search and repost the position. An additional avenue, involving hiring one or more part time student employees operating with close supervision, is also being considered.

Internet Archive Ingest – Much progress was made toward the ingest of content digitized by the Internet Archive in November. The University of California shared specifications for a preferred set of files to be downloaded into HathiTrust with the broader community of Internet Archive digitization partners, and received constructive feedback from the group. In continued weekly calls, staff at UC and UM discussed procedures and conventions for content transformation, file-identification, and preservation and technical metadata, as well as error logging, exception handling, and policy issues surrounding the deposit of digital objects. The ingest team is working to have practices surrounding many of these issues finalized by mid-December, when UC will deliver bibliographic metadata for an initial set of IA-digitized volumes to UM. Once the transformation and validation processes for ingest have been finalized and coded, UM will conduct a pilot test, downloading and ingesting this initial set of volumes. It is hoped that the full pilot, including quality review of ingested volumes,   will be completed by mid-January.

Changes to Tab-delimited HathiTrust Metadata Files –  As of December 1, rights determination reason codes are included in the metadata files available for download at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles. Please see the file specification at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles_metadata for updated information.

Development Updates

Large-scale Search – The launch of HathiTrust’s large-scale search application was postponed in October in order to acquire additional hardware to accommodate new index growth. Due to a variety of factors including a delay in hardware delivery, staff at the University of Michigan altered their index storage strategy and reconfigured the Solr index servers at Michigan to use the Isilon storage system as a back-end. In addition to solving issues related to the size of the index, moving from existing direct-attached storage to the Isilon network-attached storage more readily accommodates the significant index growth that occurs during routine index optimization. The move to Islion is a temporary  strategy, however, and staff at UM will be investigating alternative options for storing the large-scale search index over the long-term. 

After the storage reorganization, a small backlog of indexing was completed and a new automatic daily indexing process was developed. The University of Michigan launched the full-text service in mid-November and it is performing well.

With an eye toward achieving full redundancy of the search service, staff at UM implemented a nightly synchronization of the index to the Indiana site. Work toward redundancy is ongoing, however, and will involve further research to determine the optimal size of index shards. The size of index shards will help to determine the optimal number of index servers to deploy to guarantee adequate search performance, as well as the additional server deployments and workflows needed to support continuing testing of the search system, routine indexing, and volume re-indexing. Once complete, additional equipment will be purchased and installed at both the Michigan and Indiana sites as appropriate to establish full redundancy.

In additional ongoing work, staff at UM performed analysis of post-release query logs to improve performance testing and cache warming.

HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog – On November 20th in Chicago, the HathiTrust Discovery Interface team met with the corresponding OCLC-WorldCat Local implementation project team for a productive visioning session of the HathiTrust catalog beyond version 1 due in April 2010. Each group shared its long-term vision for the project, and together began to identify areas of common interest and commitment for the year of work following the release of version 1. The HathiTrust team’s draft vision document is available for review and comment at http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/hathitrust-discovery-vision.pdf.

Ingest – The University of California sent shipments of bibliographic data from its Santa Cruz and San Diego campuses to the University of Michigan for ingest in November, totaling approximately 400,000 volumes. Ingest of these volumes, in addition to 200,000 more that are expected from UC’s North Regional Library Facility, will bring HathiTrust to more than 5 million volumes by the end of the year. UM received an initial shipment of bibliographic metadata from the University of Minnesota in November as well. As these and subsequent records from Minnesota are loaded in HathiTrust, ingest of the digital volumes will begin.

A lower number of new volumes were ingested into HathiTrust in November than expected because of a large number of volumes that were re-processed and made available by Google. Google continually re-processes images and OCR of volumes to make improvements and corrections, and these volumes enter a single queue with newly processed volumes for ingest.

Collection Builder –  Following the meeting with OCLC staff in Chicago, the focus of Collection Builder integration in the temporary catalog has shifted to integration in the full-text search application. This move sidesteps cross-site linking issues that were encountered, and will provide useful experience on which to build Collection Builder inclusion in the HathiTrust Catalog at a later time.

Outages – There were no outages in November. 

New Growth

Number of volumes added:

	November	Total
Indiana University	32,427	116,559
Penn State University	108	4,783
University of California	105,864	892,278
University of Michigan	11,729	3,428,993
University of Wisconsin	12,511	255,216
Total	115,890	4,697,829

• 15,980 public domain volumes were added in November, bringing the total number of public domain volumes to 717,941 (approximately 15% of total content).

December Forecast

• Refine indexing methods, including frequency of complete index optimization and best index shard size
• Develop processes for rebuilding the entire index
• Finalize specifications for content digitized by the Internet Archive and prepare for ingest pilot
• Add Collection Builder functionality to the HathiTrust full-text search interface

November 13, 2009 [Download PDF]

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Development Opportunities – This is the first in a regular ‘column’ of development opportunities for HathiTrust. System and software development in HathiTrust is performed by contributions by HathiTrust partners. Although many HathiTrust systems and services must sit on central servers, our initiative relies on open systems and modularity, making it possible for partner institutions to develop key pieces of functionality. In this new column, each month we will provide a brief description of a system or service that has been proposed by HathiTrust partners, attempt to give a sense of the level of priority for that system or service, and provide additional information about what might be involved in developing and supporting it. These services will also be listed on the HathiTrust website at http://www.hathitrust.org/projects. This month we focus on an opportunity that has arisen directly from the expansion of HathiTrust day-to-day operations and the needs of new partners:

Ingest reporting

Description: The deposit of digital volumes and associated metadata into HathiTrust, referred to as “ingest,” involves a significant number of updates to administrative systems — bibliographic records added, digital volumes ingested, and access rights established. Many data elements will be of interest to the contributing institution, and each institution may drive local processes based on the current status of content in the repository (e.g., the percentage of in-copyright works may highlight the value of performing copyright determination work, or a low number of items available in the Google Return Interface may stimulate exploratory discussions with Google). A system that combines all of the available streams of administrative data into a simple web-based reporting system may have considerable value not only for transparency but also for local decision-making.

Resources available: Staff at the University of Michigan and the University of California have assembled a table of relevant data feeds with a brief description of each in the following document: http://bit.ly/2Jk5mm.

Priority: moderate

Additional details: An institution that undertakes this work must:
outline a process for design and specifications with a group of interested HathiTrust partner libraries.
in consultation with partner libraries, give consideration to authentication and authorization needs for this system.

Upcoming Opportunities

• Usage reporting
• Print holdings database
• Ingest transformation

HathiTrust participates in grant from Mellon Foundation – With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Associate Professor Paul Conway of the University of Michigan is leading a one-year research and planning project to find and test new procedures for validating the quality and usefulness of digital objects in HathiTrust. The short-term goal of the project is to prepare and submit a funding proposal to a federal granting agency to explore possibilities for validating these characteristics through manual and automated methods. The long-term goal is to develop criteria and methods to brand the trustworthiness of volumes in HathiTrust and other digital repositories for fulfilling specific purposes (e.g., reading, printing volumes on demand, and performing computational research). Such a branding or certification process would give assurance that content within a repository is worthy of preservation, and increase the value of that content in broader discussions about storage and management solutions for both digital and print collections.  

Google Summit – At a periodic meeting between Google and partner libraries, HathiTrust members worked with Google on issues related to the ingest of materials digitized by Google. Some topics discussed included strategies for improved metrics with regard to the quality of materials, and volumes rejected as duplicates from Google’s scanning workflow. The metrics discussed around quality could potentially be used to characterize or filter content that enters the repository (e.g., in the case of poor quality, to prevent ingest). The duplicate analysis conducted by HathiTrust partners is now being factored into Google’s continuing development of duplicate detection and return. Evaluators at the University of Michigan will continue to examine volumes returned as duplicates throughout the semester.

Working Group on Computational Research Center – The working group submitted its final report to the HathiTrust Executive Committee in October, containing specifications for a HathiTrust Research Center and a request for proposals from interested HathiTrust institutions to build and host the Research Center. The Executive Committee has reviewed the document and pending final edits from the working group, will distribute the RFP to the partner institutions in November.    

Working Group on  Collaborative Development Environment –Michigan staff observed a problem with a hard drive in one of the nodes in the development environment cluster and spent time in October troubleshooting the problem and investigating other potential options for hard drive configuration on the nodes. As a result of this investigation, the system BIOS on all nodes will be upgraded and one of the nodes will need to be rebuilt. Work continues on setting up a preliminary development environment on the first node.

New Programmer For Non-Google Ingest – Applications for a programmer position at the University of Michigan to aid in the transformation and normalization of content to be ingested from a variety of digitization sources have been received and reviewed.
UM has started the interview process and hopes to have the new programmer in place as soon as possible. The partners made the decision to centralize this ingest functionality initially in order to expedite the inclusion of non-Google content in the repository. Over time it is expected that individual partners will take a greater role in validating and preparing their content for ingest, leveraging tools and processes that result from this initial investment.

Internet Archive Ingest –  Weekly conversations centered on the ingest of content digitized by the Internet Archive continued in October between staff at the University of Michigan and University of California. Particular focus was placed on determining the standard identifier scheme that should be use for the content when it is ingested into HathiTrust. The University of California’s ARK identifiers, which exist for nearly all of its Internet Archive volumes, appear to be the most promising. Staff at UM have begun to test these identifiers in repository processes to detect any issues that may arise.

The University of California revised its set of preferred files to be downloaded from the Internet Archive for inclusion in the HathiTrust ingest package. The spec will be distributed to other IA partners in the near future for comments. UC also engaged in analysis of bibliographic data of IA-digitized files from its different campuses and continued development of an approach to authoritatively identify an institution’s volumes in the Internet Archive.

Upcoming Changes to Tab-delimited HathiTrust Metadata Files – As reported in last month’s update, beginning with the full metadata file produced on December 1, 2009, additional fields will be added to the tab-delimited HathiTrust metadata files that are provided at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles (a description of the files is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles_metadata).
Fields to be added include the copyright determination reason code and the date the database entry was last updated. With this data included, the tab-delimited files will become an ongoing accessible source for information on how and when rights determinations are made. The new tab-delimited fields will be added to the end of the current record structure in order to minimize any potential disruption for existing users of these files.

Development Updates

Large-scale Search – Staff at the University of Michigan successfully indexed all volumes in HathiTrust using the newly acquired hardware. However, the official launch of the large-scale search application was postponed in order to acquire additional hardware to accommodate new index growth. The original estimate of storage requirements turned out to be low once common-grams technology was introduced. Common-grams offer significantly better search performance but result in an increased index size. The very large number of volumes ingested into the repository in October contributed to the immediate need for more indexing space as well. Optimization of the index, a process occurring at regular intervals, requires as much as 3 times the size of the index shard being optimized.

Faceting of search results, a feature supported by Solr, was further explored in October. Faceting requires the addition of bibliographic data to the full-text index. A faceted index was built across two shards to look for potential problems in scaling. Early indications are that performance is only affected slightly with the facets employed.

HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog – After finalizing metadata requirements for the version 1 catalog in September, the HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog team turned its attention in October to interface requirements. The team is currently finalizing interface requirements for version 1 of the catalog and has agreed to engage in collaborative usability testing during the first quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, OCLC’s e-content synchronization work for HathiTrust remains on schedule, and is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year.

Ingest – HathiTrust ingested a record 553,963 volumes in October. These included nearly 5,000 volumes from Penn State and initial loads of volumes from the University of California’s Santa Cruz and San Diego campuses. Ingest of volumes from Penn State will continue in November. Subsequent shipments of metadata for up to 600,000 additional volumes from UC campuses are expected in November. Ingest of these volumes will begin shortly thereafter.
Prototype for New HathiTrust PageTurner –  Enhancements to the HathiTrust PageTurner application and integration with the open source GnuBook were on hold in October as development efforts at Michigan focused on large-scale search and initial configuration of the collaborative development environment. The collaborative environment will enable staff at the University of California to fully test and troubleshoot GnuBook functionality in production conditions. Development of an “image API” is still needed to deliver page images from the repository for display in GnuBook.

Collection Builder – Michigan further explored integration of Collection Builder functionality into the temporary catalog search interface. Some difficulty was encountered due to cross-site linking restrictions, but options will continue to be explored.

Outages – There were no outages in October. 

New Growth

Number of volumes added:

	October	Total
Indiana University	64,614	84,132
Penn State University	4,675	4,675
University of California	264,710	786,414
University of Michigan	206,283	3,417,264
University of Wisconsin	20,430	242,705
Total	553,963	4,535,190

• 60,791 public domain volumes were added in October, bringing the total number of public domain volumes to 701,961 (approximately 15% of total content).

November Forecast

• Fully deploy comprehensive full-text search
• Continue to explore facets in full-text search
• Continue to research solutions for adding Collection Builder functionality to the HathiTrust catalog search interface
• Begin to develop HathiTrust METS specifications for content digitized by the Internet Archive
• Begin preparations to conduct usability testing on the HathiTrust/OCLC catalog interface

September 11, 2009 [Download PDF]

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Working Group On Computational Research Center – The Research Center proposal planning group has made great progress in the last month. The group has continued discussions on the types of research that could utilize the centers, how results might be shared, and what environments/datasets are best suited to which types of research. In bi-weekly calls, subgroup meetings, and individual interviews, the team has been working through difficult issues such as defining non-consumptive research and recognizing hurdles related to the management and publication of research results. Next steps include developing a draft plan for the infrastructure of the centers and marrying legal and security restrictions with that infrastructure. The group aims to have a draft proposal prepared in early October and a full proposal completed later that month.

Working Group on Development 'sandbox' – Based on a general conversation with the working group and a useful discussion of potential use cases with UC staff during their Ann Arbor visit, staff at the University of Michigan have gathered enough information to start building the development environment. The initial goal is to support all of the current development projects in a single place, and provide a large subset of content with which to work. The new environment will be a substantial improvement over current conditions, and should be a building block for additional capabilities later on, including significant partner development. Michigan has racked, cabled, and started operating system installs on the equipment set aside for the project. When further progress has been made on the base installations the full working group will assemble to discuss the provisions of the environment.

University of Michigan Press Backfile and Reprint Purchase Links in HathiTrust – HathiTrust is collaborating with the University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office and the University of Michigan Press to open access to the majority of the published backfile of the UM Press in HathiTrust. The volumes, which are being digitized by the Press, will be available in HathiTrust with an option to purchase a print-on-demand copy in mid to late October.

HathiTrust Disaster Preparedness – Over the summer, an IMLS grant-funded intern in digital preservation performed an in-depth evaluation of disaster preparedness in HathiTrust. The report provides detailed information about the strengths of HathiTrust’s current disaster recovery planning, as well as recommendations for improvements in the short-, intermediate-, and long-term. It is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/technical_reports/HathiTrust_DisasterRecovery.pdf.

Prototype for New HathiTrust PageTurner — Staff from the University of California and University of Michigan held two teleconferences in August to discuss deeper integration of the UC prototype PageTurner into the existing application. Team members discussed strategies for offering full development capabilities on a limited amount of HathiTrust content in advance of the development ‘sandbox’ environment. A working strategy has been reached and a development space should be available in October. UC has continued in the meantime to improve GnuBook functionality with thumbnail views of page images and the ability to display full-text OCR. Staff at UM are investigating ways to alter current processes that make access-quality images available to the PageTurner, to produce images that can be used by the GnuBook.

METS Profile Available — Staff at the University of Michigan have created a version 1.0 METS profile for HathiTrust content, which can be downloaded at http://www.hathitrust.org/preservation. The profile currently applies only to Google content in HathiTrust, but will be updated to reflect requirements for locally-scanned content and volumes digitized by the Internet Archive.

Returned Duplicates — For several years, Google has been working on ways to reduce duplication in its digitization workflow. In August, it implemented processes that use metadata to detect volumes that have been scanned previously at other institutions so identical volumes will not be scanned again. The number of volumes rejected in this de-duplication effort has raised concerns among HathiTrust institutions about the accuracy of Google’s detection processes. The University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan have undertaken a review of volumes returned as duplicates to better understand how duplicate determination takes place. The four universities have identified a target set of materials to review and are finalizing methodology to perform a manual evaluation. It is hoped that the results will be available for the Google library partner summit later this month.

Mobile Interface — Michigan made significant progress on the development of a mobile interface to the HathiTrust Catalog in August. The work continues, and staff will next turn their attention to the PageTurner application. Initial development will be followed by user testing for both applications.

Development Updates

Large-scale Search – After additional search performance testing in August, an improved index configuration was established by staff at the University of Michigan using a punctuation filter and a list of 400 common words (see blog post for details: http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/large-scale-search/tuning-search-perform...). This index configuration will be put into production on the new dedicated server hardware, which was installed in August. Michigan also completed additions to the indexing control software (SLIP) to support distribution of indexing across several servers, each with multiple Solr index shards. A continuous indexing strategy for this distributed system and corresponding requirements for storage configuration and scripting has been implemented, and the first indexing tests will have begun by the time this report is published.

Ingest – The number of volumes ingested dropped significantly in August as ingest rates caught up with the rate at which partner content was made available from Google.

Data API – Ed Summers provided insightful and constructive feedback on the HathiTrust Data API in a blog posting in mid-August (http://inkdroid.org/journal/2009/08/13/open-to-view/). The comments are being reviewed by University of Michigan staff.

Collection Builder – Two new APIs for Collection Builder are being tested by staff at Michigan. The first returns the list of collections owned by a user. The second adds multiple items to a collection. These APIs will support future integration of Collection Builder functionality into other applications, such as the HathiTrust temporary catalog.

Outages – On Wednesday August 5 from 8:15pm to 9:30pm EDT, service was degraded (service may have been unavailable to some users) due to a storage system problem at the Indiana site. On Sunday August 23 at 6:30pm EDT to Monday August 24 at 8:00am EDT, Wednesday August 26 from 5:00pm to 6:00pm EDT, and Friday August 28 from 7:25pm to 8:35pm EDT, service was degraded due to network connectivity problems to database servers.

Software and firmware upgrades were performed during the weeks of August 10 and 17 at both sites without incident or interruptions in service. The upgrades conducted during the week of August 17 were preventative in nature, and addressed a hardware problem discovered by the storage system provider, and which was the underlying cause of the service disruption on August 5.

The cause of the other outages has been thoroughly researched but is still not known; workarounds that eliminate any service impact have been put into place, systems are being monitored, and investigation into the problem continues.

New Growth

Number of volumes added:

	August	Total
Indiana University	--	18,482
University of California	148,810	457,494
University of Michigan	58,878	3,129,152
University of Wisconsin	--	215,045
Total	207,688	3,820,173

• 23,434 public domain volumes were added in July, bringing the total number of public domain volumes to 604,770 (16% of the total content).

September Forecast

• Test large scale search performance on new dedicated server hardware.
• Begin working with facets in large-scale search and continue testing performance variables including common-grams and punctuation.
• Add reprint purchase links to the HathiTrust interface for UM Press items.
• Continue development of mobile interfaces for the temporary catalog and PageTurner
• Establish a collaborative development environment for the HathiTrust Page Turner.

July 10, 2009 [Download PDF]

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New Working Group on Computational Research Center – June was an exciting month for HathiTrust, both in terms of repository development and in terms of deepening collaboration among the HathiTrust Partners. Calls sent out in May for participation in two HathiTrust working groups were answered, and membership in both the Research Center and Development ‘sandbox’ groups was finalized. Members of the Research Center working group, which will develop a proposal for a Research Center to be created under the terms of the Google Settlement, include 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 will be coordinated by Kat Hagedorn, with project support to be provided by Jeremy York from HathiTrust.

Working Group on Development 'sandbox' – The Development ‘sandbox’ working group, which will work to create a development environment for partners to build and test repository applications and services, includes Stephen Abrams (California Digital Library), Albert Bertram (University of Michigan), Lynne Cameron (California Digital Library), Kaylea Champion (University of Chicago), Stephanie Collett (California Digital Library), Steve DiDomenico (Northwestern University), Bill Dueber (University of Michigan), Mike Durbin (Indiana University), Phil Farber (University of Michigan), Paul Fogel (California Digital Library), Eric Hetzner (California Digital Library), Sebastien Korner (University of Michigan), John Kunze (California Digital Library), David Loy (California Digital Library), Andy Mardesich (California Digital Library), Mairéad Martin (Pennsylvania State University), Jon Miller (University of Chicago), David Minor (San Diego Supercomputer Center), Bill Parod (Northwestern University), and Cory Snavely (University of Michigan).

Prototype for New HathiTrust PageTurner — As plans for the Development environment moved forward, the University of Michigan and California Digital Library (CDL) continued to explore possibilities for integrating the GnuBook reader into the current HathiTrust PageTurner to expand PageTurner’s features and capabilities. The California Digital Library created a prototype GnuBook-integrated page turner application with repository code and a sample volume made available by the University of Michigan. Staff at the University of Michigan are currently testing the functionality of the prototype and will work with CDL in July to determine the next steps for development. This collaboration is exciting not only because of the enhancements it will bring to the existing PageTurner application, but because it demonstrates the way that shared development will enhance the services and capabilities HathiTrust is able to offer.

CDL staff to visit Ann Arbor — Collaborating to enhance services and capabilities is the major theme of a visit that HathiTrust team members from the California Digital Library will make to the University of Michigan in July. Staff from both institutions will discuss a range of topics including the ingest of Internet Archive and other non-Google content, development of the HathiTrust PageTurner, communication about HathiTrust, and future development directions in a series of focused meetings from July 20th to 21st.

HathiTrust-OCLC Catalog Project — June was an important month for discussions about the HathiTrust-OCLC catalog, particularly regarding metadata and holdings information functions and display. At each juncture, the project team has prioritized meeting the unique needs of HathiTrust’s all-digital catalog while maintaining consistency across the entire WorldCat database. For example, the team recently discussed how to accommodate viewability levels (e.g., search only, full-text, or a mix of the two in multi-volume sets) that do not occur in any other WorldCat records. The team has also focused on strategies for displaying and faceting on HathiTrust’s many contributing institutions, in a way that would differentiate this information from print holdings.

In striving to create a consistent user experience of HathiTrust, the team has turned to user feedback on the temporary beta catalog (http://catalog.hathitrust.org/). Future months will see increased focus on display and interface concerns as well as functionality issues.

HathiTrust.org Website Reorganization — Due to the evolving nature of HathiTrust and the additional information it has been necessary to incorporate on the HathiTrust website, a comprehensive reorganization of the website was undertaken by staff at the University of Michigan. The website has an identical look and feel, but information about areas such as preservation, rights management, partnership, and access have been more clearly separated and defined to be easier to locate. As part of the changes, additional information about the requirements and benefits of becoming a partner, how to become a partner, and the costs of partnership have been added.

Strategic Advisory Board Meeting Minutes — The HathiTrust Strategic Advisory Board (SAB) met for the first time on June 17. The minutes of this meeting are posted on the HathiTrust website at http://www.hathitrust.org/sab. Future minutes of the SAB will be posted here as well.

May 8, 2009 [Download PDF]

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HathiTrust
Update on February 2009 Activities
March 13, 2009

News:

• General News
  
  • Strategic Advisory Board – Significant progress has been made towards the formation and formal charge of a Strategic Advisory Board for HathiTrust. The Strategic Advisory Board will guide HathiTrust development efforts, convene task forces to address specific issues such as cross-institutional technology development and de-duplication, and develop policies for HathiTrust and its partners.

HathiTrust
Update on December 2008 Activities
January 9, 2009

News:

• General News
  

HathiTrust
Update on October 2008 Activities
November 14, 2008

News

• The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the University of California join forces to launch HathiTrust – On October 13th, the 13 libraries of the CIC and the 11 libraries of the University of California (UC) system jointly announced the launch of HathiTrust. The California Digital Library will coordinate UC’s participation. The University of Virginia joins HathiTrust as one of the first participants using the infrastructure built by the partners.

HathiTrust
Update on August 2008 Activities
September 12, 2008

News

• Release of the HathiTrust web site – The HathiTrust released a web site at http://www.hathitrust.org/. The primary purpose of the website is currently to share information with partners and prospective partners, and to bring together technical documentation and resources like the HathiTrust API. In the future, we will work to develop the website into a mechanism by which users can explore the content in the HathiTrust repository.

HathiTrust
Update on July 2008 Activities
8 August 2008

Shared Digital Repository Update on April 2008 Activities 9 May 2008 This is the second regular update on activities in the Shared Digital Repository (SDR). These updates will be made available monthly, typically on the 2nd Friday of the month, and will provide a variety of information about the general health of the repository and updates on the development of the SDR. Each update will be sent via e-mail to an official representative (typically the library director) of a participating institution, and will be posted on the SDR website.