The HathiTrust April 2013 Update is now available.   Several important new developments are announced in the newsletter:

• Service to support access for users with print disabilities at partner institutions
• Updated, enhanced HathiTrust web presence and user interface

The newsletter also reports on a Board of Governors in-person meeting, activities related to ingest of locally-digitized materials from partner institutions, and next steps and plans for the HathiTrust Research Center.

In an important new development, HathiTrust now provides a way for the UC campuses to offer full view of some of the in-copyright books in HathiTrust to our print disabled patrons.   A designated representative on campus (typically someone from an office devoted to services for persons with disabilities) will be able to access works in HathiTrust that are owned by that campus, on behalf of users at the campus who have print disabilities, and can distribute full PDFs of the works to those users.   

Campuses must take action to implement this service.  

Details, including terms of use and a form to begin registration, are available at http://bit.ly/14keW0C. To register, please complete the form with appropriate signatures and send to feedback@issues.hathitrust.org. For campuses who intend to set up this service, more information about the service can be found on the HathiTrust site: http://www.hathitrust.org/accessibility.

HathiTrust expects to make improvements to the process as time goes on.  

CDL recently hosted a webinar series for Users Council that’s now widely available to UC staff.  (The CDL’s Users Council is a group responsible for communicating information between the CDL and the campuses concerning use of CDL tools, services and collections.  Users Council consists of a liaison from each UC campus, including LBNL, LLNL and the Regional Library Facilities.  A CDL representative is an ex officio member. ) 

The topics covered were chosen through a member survey, with survey expertise provided by CDL’s Senior Assessment Analyst Jane Lee. 

This year there were six lively sessions covering the following ground:

• Melvyl: A Snapshot of Issues, Patricia Martin, Director, Discovery & Delivery and Lena Zentall, Project Manager, Discovery & Delivery
• Services Today & Tomorrow, Laine Farley, Executive Director, CDL
• What’s Happening in Collections: 15 Triumphs in 30 Minutes, Wendy Parfrey, Shared Content Coordinator
• User Experience Design and CDL, Rachael Hu, User Experience Design Manager
• eScholarship: Supporting OA Scholarly Communication at UC, Catherine Mitchell, Director, Access& Publishing; Justin Gonder, eScholarship Product Manager; and Katie Fortney, Copyright Policy & Education Officer
• HathiTrust and Mass Digitization, Heather Christenson, Mass Digitization Project Manager

Each of the one-hour recordings, along with PowerPoint slides, is available for your viewing at:   http://www.cdlib.org/groups/users_council/

(The presentations are password protected because some of the information is not for public consumption.)

By Heather Christenson, Project Manager, Mass Digitization

HathiTrust has released an updated, fresh design and new features for its website. The latest design incorporates feedback submitted by HathiTrust users and input from HathiTrust’s User Experience and Communications working groups. We encourage you to test out the new interface and submit your suggestions and ideas via the feedback link at the bottom of the page.

Some of the highlights of the new interface include:

• Look and feel – HathiTrust has been given a fresh, user-friendly design that unifies all parts of the website.
• Accessibility – HathiTrust continues its tradition of style with function, paying particular attention to accessibility in major and minor functional components of the interface.
• An engaging homepage – A consolidated search area and prominent links to user collections, hand-picked books, and our mobile interface, invite users to explore the HathiTrust collection. Links to social media, the HathiTrust Research Center, and HathiTrust projects provide updates on activities and invite engagement.
• Login benefits – Users can now log in from anywhere on the site, and the login area of the homepage highlights the benefits of logging in to users from partner institutions.
• Improvements to the reading interface – Our new online reading interface increases the amount of space available for reading books, while still keeping reading controls and bibliographic information readily accessible.
• Persistent tabbed search box – Options for searching the bibliographic catalog and full-text of works have been combined into a single tabbed search, with help information to guide users in deciding which search to use. A persistent search header allows searches to be performed from any page on the website.

Special thanks to the University of Michigan programmers, designers, project managers, and systems staff who made the new design happen.

HT Research Center
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has announced new data mining and analytics tools, providing a much-needed entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrust’s contents. http://ovpitnews.iu.edu/news/page/normal/24146.html

Indiana University and the University of Illinois are the founding partners of the HTRC. The new infrastructure release follows an aggressive development path set forth by the HTRC Executive Management Team at the 2012 HTRC UnCamp, a gathering of HTRC developers, researchers and librarians. Users can now apply sophisticated computational research methodology across the large-scale collection, leveraging metadata crafted over time by libraries.

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.

He went on to say that these collections create a platform that supports not only the collection itself but also other connections.  He quoted Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media, who believed in creating ” a generative platform for undefined future uses”.  Such platforms must be open and support APIs. They must also be able to disclose their metadata as another means of exploring the collection that can “enable or disable” forms of inquiry.

These observations certainly ring true with CDL’s experience in aggregating collections and supporting platforms for their use, such as for eScholarship or Calisphere.  While these services may have once been focused on becoming portals, now they are more aligned with being platforms supporting a range of uses.  We know that most users arrive not through the front door but from a referral in another source or from a web search engine.  Objects need to be able to stand on their own rather than relying on an organized pathway to their place in the collection.  They must provide context to reveal the larger collection or their related associates within it.  But there is more to be done to enable those “undefined future uses” if we think about how the text (in the case of eScholarship) and the metadata could be mined, or how to take advantage of commentary and corrections from users.  We should focus on other ways to make these services function “at the network level” or to think about the web first, something Cohen noted as a principle when designing new services.  The problem to solve these days is not discovery but how to provide context and the means to select and filter, either within the service itself or to allow others to do so.  Search facets have been used for this purpose, but there are other methods to reveal the peaks and valleys within a collection and to enable deeper exploration.  Part of our curatorial role is to analyze collections and be open to having others analyze them, to help shape them for future scholarship.

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.