Spring is here and the March HathiTrust update is hot off the press.  The news includes:

• A reminder about submitting nominations for the Program Steering Committee
• A report on the HathiTrust Research Center’s first production release
• An announcement of the hiring of Valerie Glen to the government documents registry analyst position for HathiTrust
• An invitation to take a survey on HathiTrust created by Syracuse University to gather information about institutions’ experiences with HathiTrust. The survey includes questions about print disabilities services, special collections, digital humanities, use of HathiTrust, and technical implementation issues. The survey is available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9ZZ9KMW until April 26.
• An brief update on HathiTrust Board activities
• Preparations to release a redesigned website (the release is planned for next week – screenshots are available at the end of the online version of the newsletter) 

And of course, our regular project and development updates.

The HathiTrust update on February activities is now available.  Top News: the HathiTrust Research Center plans a release of software infrastructure at the end of March, loaded with the latest and greatest service components and tools.

And across HathiTrust, we continue to make progress on many activities.  Among them:

• HT copyright reviewers have found 5,505 public domain volumes out of 11,217 reviewed in the month of February
• The user support team engaged with 698 inquiries
• 22,930 volumes were ingested into HathiTrust, bringing our total to 10,645,334

For the full update visit http://www.hathitrust.org/updates_february2013

The January HathiTrust update was released on 2/15/13, and, in addition to the regular updates on ingest, projects, working groups and new development, the new bylaws have been adopted by the HathiTrust partners.

As our year begins, it’s worth checking in on the HathiTrust resources page – a growing list of user guides and “how to” created by HathiTrust partner libraries.    If you have created resources about HathiTrust (including videos, library guides, etc.) that you’d like to share, please let HathiTrust know (feedback@issues.hathitrust.org), and feel free to use and share those that are available.

CDL is delighted to announce that Matt Pearson began work in the Mass Digitization Team of the Collection Development and Management Program on January 14, 2013 as our new Digitization & Services Coordinator.  

Matt brings a rich set of skills to CDL, and will be a key member of the Mass Dig team, providing planning, coordination, analysis and support for systemwide digitization projects.  He will also serve as point person for the UC Library Reprints Service.  

Matt comes to us from Stanford, where he has been deeply involved in many digitization projects and activities.   His early work was as a photojournalist for Boston newspapers and media outlets, and he has previously served as a technical photographer and imaging services project manager for the Northeast Document Conservation Center.  Matt is in the Master of Library and Information Science degree program at the San José State University School of Library and Information Science.

Welcome, Matt.

December’s HathiTrust update is now available. There is a new feature of the “Most Accessed Volumes in HathiTrust.” Check out what our users are examining, from Korean American investigations to Forest Leaves.

A host of other interesting topics are also covered this month: access to out-of-print and brittle or missing items; the recently released HathiTrust Research Center video; local and Internet Archive digitization; and more.

Learn how researchers are recognizing previously invisible patterns in literature, creating visualizations and sharing results.

November was a busy month at HathiTrust.  HT prepared technical systems to offer access to out of print and brittle works at partner institutions; worked with several institutions on deposit of locally-digitized materials; received the first deposit of content from the University of Florida; and welcomed a new member to the User Experience Advisory Group.

Work continued on projects such as Zephir (HT’s bibliographic management system), mPach (a package of tools being developed to provide a modular platform to enable the publication of open-access journals in the HT repository), and updates to HathiTrust Web applications. There is also a story with a happy ending, apt for the holidays, about full-text search.  

Additionally, note there is a special message this month regarding bibliographic corrections to HathiTrust records.

Top HathiTrust news for October includes the announcement (within the Board of Governors), of HathiTrust Executive Committee officers, including UCSD’s Brian Schottlaender as Executive Committee chair, as well as information about funded opportunities for PhD students to work with the HathiTrust Research Center. The newsletter also contains updates on copyright review, the new bibliographic data management system under development by the California Digital Library, full-text search, and much more.

September’s HathiTrust update includes late breaking news on the decision to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and others against HathiTrust. Top news items for September include the recent HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp, a new initiative to form a comprehensive registry of government documents, and infrastructure changes related to handling of works in HathiTrust whose print counterparts are out of print and brittle.  Included also are regular updates on content ingest, working groups, projects, and development

UC’s contributions to development this month include California Digital Library (CDL) staff’s completion of a portion of development needed to sync Zephir with rights information in the HathiTrust rights database.  Staff also reloaded records for HathiTrust items into Zephir as part of an iterative process to be sure rights and other necessary administrative metadata are being properly loaded.  CDL staff completed documentation of Zephir metadata ingest and workflow guidelines and will be working with HathiTrust project staff to add the information to the HathiTrust website as the launch of Zephir gets nearer.

For full-text search, California Digital Library staff refined the algorithm used to score spelling suggestions based on queries extracted from HathiTrust log files and improved the way suggestions are made when stop words and words that are inappropriately combined are present in the query. The next step will be to experiment with making suggestions in different languages.

In other news, Angelina Zaytsev was appointed to the position of HathiTrust Project Librarian. Angelina has worked for HathiTrust part-time for the last year, assisting in the coordination of numerous HathiTrust activities including ingest of content from partner institutions, processing permissions to open access to materials, general user support, and multiple duties “as assigned”. Angelina will continue these duties while taking on a greater role in managing and coordinating projects for HathiTrust.

The HathiTrust Research Center opened registration for the HTRC UnCamp, to be held in Bloomington, Indiana on September 10-11, 2012. More information can be found at http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_uncamp2012.

Learn more about these and other activities in the HathiTrust June Update.