April 2023 update

Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust
HathiTrust in the Future: Strategic Visioning Kicks Off!
HathiTrust is Hiring: Search Engineer
Save the Date Community Week: July 10-14, 2023
Farewell to the U.S. Federal Docs Registry Interface
The HathiTrust Research Center at the Code4Lib Conference
Welcome, New Digital Object Quality Corrections Group Members
From the Collection: Harlem Shadows

Welcoming New Members to HathiTrust

We are pleased to announce that Colorado State University has joined the HathiTrust member community. See the full membership list on our website.

HathiTrust in the Future: Strategic Visioning Kicks Off!

We recently announced the launch of an in-depth process of exploration, discovery, and strategic visioning that will take place through the end of 2023. To guide this effort, we have partnered with Athenaeum21 (A21), a long-standing collaborator in the library and cultural heritage community. Throughout the project’s three phases — Discovery/Listening, Visioning, and Sharing — we will connect with people throughout HathiTrust member libraries, including subject librarians, deans, collection managers, directors, and more. Through surveys, interviews, and workshops, we’ll ask you to think creatively about areas of need and opportunity, and about HathiTrust’s unique possibilities and value. We’re fortunate to be guided by an outstanding Visioning Task Force of selected individuals representing the breadth and depth of HathiTrust’s constituents to provide continuity and consistency throughout the project. Your participation is vital in creating a vision for our future services and programs that will benefit your library and communities, so we encourage you to participate wherever you can and welcome your informal feedback anytime (vision@hathitrust.org).

HathiTrust is Hiring: Search Engineer

HathiTrust is seeking an experienced Search Engineer who will be responsible for indexing and searching data, including bibliographic metadata and the full text for over 17 million scanned books. The Search Engineer will work with developers, librarians, and other partners to deliver more relevant catalog and full-text search results for a diverse user audience.

We welcome applications from individuals at member libraries (and beyond). The position is open through Monday, April 24, 2023. Read more about the job and apply here: https://www.hathitrust.org/search-engineer

Save the Date Community Week: July 10 – 14, 2023

HathiTrust Community Week is back! During the week of July 10, members of our wider community will come together virtually to share projects, research, and workshops related to HathiTrust with other members of the community. These sessions are geared towards people that have an interest in or responsibility for HathiTrust at their own institutions. Sessions may include member presentations and panel discussions, demonstrations and collaborative projects on topics such as shared print, collection development, accessibility, outreach, and metadata. A call for proposals is coming soon so start thinking . . . (For inspiration, check out the program and session recordings from last year’s event!)

Farewell to the U.S. Federal Docs Registry Interface

The U.S. Federal Documents Registry database began in 2013 with the goal of creating a comprehensive inventory of items published by the U.S. government. This project supported our HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents program’s goal to identify materials that had yet to be digitized.  Although this database was primarily intended to support HathiTrust’s own collection analysis, we have offered a public search interface.

After determining that the public interface has been rarely used, we have decided to discontinue that service effective April 24. The U.S. Federal Documents collection is still maintained in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We will continue to maintain the Registry database itself, which has high value to many HathiTrust member libraries and has been used to identify U.S. federal documents that are held by libraries but not yet digitized and deposited into the HathiTrust repository. We will continue to leverage the database in collection analysis work with our member libraries. We will explore future service models for providing access to the Registry data, and welcome comments or suggestions from our members at support@hathitrust.org.

The HathiTrust Research Center at the Code4Lib Conference

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) presented a pre-conference workshop at Code4Lib 2023 on March 14th. The workshop highlighted a new API being developed as part of the NEH-funded project, Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction (TORCHLITE). The API will provide quick and easy access to the Extracted Features dataset, a derived dataset consisting of volume metadata and word-level statistical data for the HathiTrust corpus. The HTRC team is building the new API and an interactive dashboard to allow our user community to develop its own tools for interacting with data from the 17.5 million-volume HathiTrust Digital Library. This workshop provided an introduction to the Extracted Features dataset and the new TORCHLITE API, and set the stage for an NEH-funded hackathon in Fall 2023.

The following teaching materials from the workshop are available for reuse and remixing:

• Slides and handout
• Observable Code Notebook

Welcome, New Digital Object Quality Corrections Group Members

We are happy to announce the newest members of the Digital Object Quality Corrections group (DOQC). A subset of the HathiTrust User Support Team, DOQC team members review content quality problems and work with Google and contributing institutions to improve the quality of content scans. Thanks to all those who submitted an application and if you were not selected in this round, we encourage you to apply in the future.

Joining DOQC are Bob Persing (University of Pennsylvania), Karen Pavao (McMaster University), Kurt Hanselman (San Diego State University), Lindsay Pilliod (Georgia State University), and Shannon Willis (Clemson University).

From the Collection: Harlem Shadows

Caption: Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent artistic and cultural movement of the 1920s.
Title: Harlem Shadows
Authors:  McKay, Claude, 1890-1948.
Published: New York, Harcourt, Brace and company, 1922. (Contributed by Library of Congress, HathiTrust member since 2011.)

In the News, Publications, and Research

Roxanne Owens, Chair & Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, DePaul University. Editor, Illinois Reading Council Journal. “Editor’s Note: Archive Dive with Roxanne Owens,” Illinois Reading Council Journal, Spring 2023, Volume 51, Number 2.

“Digital archives such as the HathiTrust are a powerful resource for learners today. They
provide textual, visual, and audio resources . . . that provide multiple perspectives on various areas of the curriculum. As teachers, we can provide a much more well-rounded picture of the past through these sources.”

HathiTrust Staff on the Road

HathiTrust staff will be attending the following events. Please contact us if you wish to meet up!

April 17-18, 2023, University of San Diego Digital Initiatives Symposium, San Diego, CA: Mike Furlough.

May 1-3, 2023, Association of Research Libraries Spring Meeting, Denver, CO: Mike Furlough

May 23, 2023, Google Scanning Partner Libraries meeting, Ann Arbor, MI: Aaron Elkiss, Mike Furlough, Jennifer Vinopal, Val Waldron

May 24-25, 2023, Google Books Library Summit, Ann Arbor, MI: Aaron Elkiss, Kristina Hall, Jennifer Vinopal, Val Waldron

June 22-27, 2023, American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL: Heather Weltin.