December 13, 2013 
Top News
New Partners
HathiTrust was pleased to welcome the University of Alabama as a new member in November, and, in late-breaking news, the University of Massachusetts in early December. Please see the press releases for Alabama and UMass Amherst for more information.
Executive Director Search
The Search Committee for the HathiTrust Executive Director position completed its preliminary review of applications and conducted telephone interviews with nearly a dozen top candidates. The Search Committee expects to conduct in-person interviews in January.
HTRC Call for Proposals
The HathiTrust Research Center is seeking proposals for prototyping projects to define and implement a tool or service that will help scholars better identify and select relevant resources at scale from the HathiTrust corpus and/or facilitate the construction of large-scale worksets useful for scholarly analyses. Grants of $40,000 will be offered to each of four successful respondents to be conducted over a nine-month period beginning April 2014. Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project (WCSA) is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
A complete copy of the RFP is available online at http://worksets.htrc.illinois.edu/worksets/?page_id=20. Letters of intent are due December 16, 2013 and full proposals are due January 13, 2014.
Government Documents Initiative
HathiTrust has prepared a FAQ to accompany the recent call for US federal government documents records. The records will be used for analysis to gain a greater understanding of the total corpus of US federal government documents in support of HathiTrust’s gov docs initiative. More information is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/usgovdocs.
Nominations for User Support Working Group
The User Support Working Group is seeking nominations for 2-4 new members. This is a great opportunity to get involved in the day-to-day work of the partnership. We are seeking both staff who have expertise in providing user support, and those who have expertise in cataloging to do investigation into reports of cataloging errors we receive from users. Nominations should be submitted by January 17, 2014 via the nomination form at http://bit.ly/1f9LrAa. The form includes information about expected workload and learning opportunities.
Ingest
Validation service for locally-digitized materials
HathiTrust created a beta version of a new web-based service to validate single image files, which is available at http://bit.ly/1gvD9q7. Please feel free to try the validator and provide feedback using the form at http://bit.ly/1byxI1t. Planning and development continued on a cloud-storage-based service to validate entire volumes, scheduled for release in January.
General
HathiTrust began ingest of a set of locally-digitized AgriLife Research Bulletins (formerly the Bulletin of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station) from Texas A&M University, and completed ingest of a set of University Press of Florida backfile publications, in time to mark University Press Week. The UPF collection of materials can be viewed at http://bit.ly/1guQG1h.
Working Groups and Committees
Program Steering Committee
The Program Steering Committee is in the process of appointing a Government Documents Initiative Planning and Advisory Group and will be appointing members in the next few weeks. This is in response to one of the ballot initiatives approved at the Constitutional Convention. The PSC is also recommending allocation of funds to complete a framework for certifying the quality of individual volumes in HathiTrust, and, if approved, will appoint an advisory group to oversee this effort. The Committee continues to work on charges for a Shared Print Archive initiative, a reconstituted Collections Committee, and new initiatives regarding rights and access and metadata policy.
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 | 3,596 | 9,005 | 155,674 | 299,885 |
CRMS-World | 2,000 | 5,072 | 41,816 | 79,420 |
Total | 5,596 | 14,077 | 197,490 | 379,305 |
Government Documents Registry
The project team has updated initial use cases based on focus group feedback and drafted initial functional requirements for the registry. The team continues to analyze existing metadata records to define possible methods for identifying duplicate documents. A list of known federal agencies has been compiled and is being used to review the comprehensiveness of sources for name authority records such as VIAF and the LC Name Authority Headings.
HathiTrust Research Center
HTRC co-director Prof. Beth Plale gave a talk at Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag, Netherlands on Nov 15 on “Opportunities and Challenges of Text Mining HathiTrust Digital Library”. Text mining at scale was demoed at IEEE/ACM Supercomputing November 17-22 in Denver, and the HTRC team demonstrated text mining by dynamically deploying a Hadoop cluster onto Big Red II at Indiana University. In early November, the HTRC team held a hands-on session at Indiana University for 25 researchers from a variety of disciplines, hosted by Catalyst Center for digital humanities.
mPach
University of Michigan staff began scoping services to be offered by Michigan Publishing using the mPach platform, and considering arrangements that will need to be made to support use by HathiTrust member institutions or other organizations. To clarify the relationships between various parties potentially using mPach, the list of modules has been revised to separate Submitter from Prepper, and the diagram of the major parts of mPach has been revised to show that Submitter (the mechanism that does final validation before submitting content to HathiTrust) will be operated by Michigan Publishing.
Zephir
Partner submissions of bibliographic metadata have gone smoothly since the transition of bibliographic management from the University of Michigan to the California Digital Library’s Zephir system at the beginning of November. CDL has ingested 257,072 new or updated records through Zephir since that time. Information on submitting records to Zephir is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/bib_data_submission for an overview of the bibliographic metadata submission process.
Development Updates
HathiTrust institutions performed the following work related to applications and Web interfaces:
Development Environment
Staff completed work on web server upgrades for the HathiTrust development environment and began testing of the application codebase in preparation for subsequent upgrades to production servers.
Full-text Search
Staff continued progress to support full-text indexing of JATS content, and indexing of volumes in general into a configurable number of “chunks” to improve relevance ranking of large documents. Staff ran processes to re-index approximately 18,000 volumes affected by the bug reported in last month’s update, and approximately 5.5 million volumes whose associated metadata was affected by updates of print holdings received from partner institutions.
Image Server
Staff modified the image server for HathiTrust applications to use Unifont when embedding OCR in PDFs in cases where the language of the volume is not supported by Deja Vu Sans. This will allow more PDFs to be searchable.
Print Holdings
Staff loaded updated holdings information from HathiTrust partners, submitted prior to partner 2014 fee calculations.
Outages
No outages were reported in November
New Growth
As of December 1:
| November | Overall | |
| Boston College | 0 | 2,363 |
| Columbia University | 0 | 65,035 |
| Cornell University | 3,607 | 437,475 |
| Duke University | 1 | 4,525 |
| Harvard University | 5 | 237,435 |
| Indiana University | 159 | 195,579 |
| Library of Congress | 0 | 89,724 |
| North Carolina State University | 0 | 3,196 |
| Northwestern University | 176 | 37,464 |
| New York Public Library | 3 | 288,370 |
| Penn State University | 1,179 | 66,491 |
| Princeton University | 0 | 251,709 |
| Purdue University | 0 | 44,695 |
| Texas A&M University | 26 | 26 |
| Universidad Complutense | 12 | 112,013 |
| University of California | 10,419 | 3,445,878 |
| The University of Chicago | 181 | 35,568 |
| University of Florida | 176 | 9,763 |
| University of Illinois | 539 | 112,965 |
| University of Michigan | 2,765 | 4,665,517 |
| University of Minnesota | 690 | 112,965 |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 0 | 17,025 |
| University of Wisconsin | 43 | 555,921 |
| University of Virginia | 0 | 50,821 |
| Utah State | 0 | 117 |
| Yale University | 0 | 23,678 |
| Total | 19,981 | 10,866,212 |
Public Domain (~32%)
| Total* | 31,247 | 3,525,560 |
* Includes volumes opened through copyright review and rights holder permissions
Summary of Issues Received by User Support
| Issue Type | November | October |
| Content | 253 | 249 |
Quality | 244 | 242 |
Collections | 8 | 7 |
| Cataloging | 134 | 189 |
| Access and Use | 105 | 164 |
Copyright | 49 | 90 |
Permissions | 6 | 8 |
Takedown | 0 | 2 |
Print on Demand | 1 | 0 |
Inter-library loan | 0 | 0 |
Full-PDF or e-copy requests | 15 | 12 |
Datasets | 1 | 4 |
Data Availability and APIs | 2 | 2 |
Reuse of content | 7 | 3 |
| Web applications | 27 | 36 |
Functionality problems | 4 | 11 |
Problems with login specifically | 2 | 1 |
General Questions about Login | 0 | 1 |
Partners setting up login | 5 | 0 |
Usability issues | 0 | 0 |
Feature requests | 2 | 2 |
| Partner Ingest | 5 | 3 |
| General | 66 | 105 |
Partnership | 5 | 6 |
Infrastructure | 0 | 0 |
Miscellaneous | 61 | 99 |
| Total | 590 | 746 |
Most Accessed Volumes
November Forecast
- Continue adding support for full-text indexing of JATS articles, and indexing of volumes in "chunks".
- Continue development of ePub and PDF generation from JATS.
- Continue to explore relevance ranking solutions.
Papers & Presentations
- Sigrid Cordell, Jeremy York, “HathiTrust: The Collection and Its Uses”, NEFLIN Webinar, November 7, 2013.
- Beth Plale, “Opportunities and Challenges of Text Mining HathiTrust Digital Library”, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, Netherlands, November 15, 2013.
Partner-specific Papers & Presentations
- Craig Willis and Miles Efron, “Finding information in books: characteristics of full-text searches in a collection of 10 million books”, ASIS&T 2013.
- Kat Hagedorn, Meghan Musolff, Angelina Zaytsev, “Your Road Map to Digital Collections at the Library”, UM Digital Collections/HathiTrust Workshop, University of Michigan Library, November 21, 2013.