HathiTrust Update
By Joan Starr, Manager, Strategic and Project Planning and Heather Christenson, Mass Digitization Project Manager
Ingest of University of California’s Google books has begun
Through the diligent efforts of a CDL and University of Michigan team, UC’s Google-digitized books are now flowing into the HathiTrust repository, and ingest is progressing well. At the time of this writing, the number of volumes available via the HathiTrust beta catalog is 136,125 and this number grows weekly. Now that the UC Google ingest is underway, the first stage of planning for the ingest of UC’s Internet Archive-digitized books has begun. For a look at the full range of public domain volumes available from all participating HathiTrust institutions, please see the “visualization” by LC classification and by language.
Formation of Working Groups on Research Center and Development ‘sandbox’
HathiTrust issued calls last month for names of participants in two new working groups: one to develop a proposal for a Research Center to be created under the terms of the Google Settlement, and one to create a development environment for HathiTrust partners to build and test repository applications and services. It is expected that membership of these two groups will be finalized in June. The UC development representatives are: Stephen Abrams, Lynne Cameron, Stephanie Collett, Paul Fogel, Erik Hetzner, John Kunze, David Loy, Andy Mardesich (all of CDL), and David Minor (UCSD).
HathiTrust-OCLC Catalog Project
In May, the HathiTrust-OCLC Catalog Implementation team developed a detailed communication plan for collaboration on the project. This plan includes biweekly meetings of the newly formed metadata subgroup, which will focus on metadata questions including display of access rights, faceting, and sorting of volume information. The UC representative on the team is Adam Brin (CDL). To read more, visit the new project blog at http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/hathitrust-oclc.
“Page Turner” upgrade
UC and Michigan are collaborating in the creation of an updated Page Turner application for viewing volumes in HathiTrust. Staff at CDL took a close look at the open source book reader GnuBook and outlined the steps for integration into the current HathiTrust Page Turner. Staff from both institutions discussed implementation possibilities in a conference call in May, and development is expected to begin in June.
New Blogs for Large-scale Search and the HathiTrust-OCLC Catalog Project
Two new blogs have been launched on the HathiTrust website (http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs). One will provide up-to-date information on HathiTrust’s efforts to enable full-text searching across the entire repository (http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/large-scale-search), and the other will track the development of the permanent HathiTrust catalog, proceeding in collaboration with OCLC (http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/hathitrust-oclc). RSS feeds for the blogs are available at http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/large-scale-search/feed and http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/hathitrust-oclc/feed.
HathiTrust Strategic Advisory Board
The HathiTrust Strategic Advisory Board (SAB) has been established. This group, which consists of 4 representatives from the CIC, and 3 from UC, will review and consider implications of the HathiTrust development agenda, convene task forces to address specific issues, and develop policies for HathiTrust and its partners. Our UC representatives on the SAB are Patricia Cruse (CDL), Robin Dale (UCSC), and Bruce Miller (UCM). A description of the governance structure and full listing of representatives from all participating institutions is available via the HathiTrust website.
HathiTrust official Development Updates are now issued on a regular basis. We also plan to present UC highlights on a regular basis here in the CDLINFO newsletter.
More information about the UC Libraries’ mass digitization projects may be found on the Inside CDL web site.