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UC HathiTrust Update

August 19, 2010 Author: Heather ChristensonCategories: Tags:

By Heather Christenson, CDL Mass Digitization Project Manager and HathiTrust Project Manager

While some may have been enjoying the lazy days of summer, the HathiTrust has experienced a whirlwind of activity and growth.  UC continues to make great contributions!

We now have approximately 1,550,000 of the UC Libraries volumes in the HathiTrust, with 250,000 of them being in the public domain and viewable.  And the overall HathiTrust collection continues to build, now at approximately 6,580,000 volumes with 1,304,000 public domain volumes.

HathiTrust has added significant new partners: the New York Public Library in May 2010, and Yale University in July 2010, so we are now a partnership of 28 research libraries.

In addition to new partners, a number of essential new working groups have been formed, all with UC participation or leadership.  Reporting to the Strategic Advisory Board, a standing Collections Committee (similar to our UC Collection Development Committee model) will grapple with important collection development and management questions. Ivy Anderson (CDL) is chairing the group and Sharon Farb (UCLA) is participating.    There are also two new operational groups, reporting to the Executive Director.   Felicia Poe (CDL) is representing us in the Usability Working Group, and Heather Christenson (CDL) is chairing the new Communications Working Group.

Behind the scenes, operational and development work marches on.  HathiTrust continues to improve the robustness of the technical architecture with the addition of more storage, a test environment for full text search, and good progress toward a shared development environment for partners.   One highly visible improvement to HathiTrust end-user service is an enhancement to the Collection Builder tool.  Users can now add items to a collection from full-text search results.  (More information on using the Collection Builder tool is available on the HathiTrust web site).  And speaking of the web site, a redesign is in progress, with usability exercises launched and the Working Groups beginning to provide input.

HathiTrust continues to be a rich topic within the research library community.  A few items worth reading from the summer:

More details on recent HathiTrust activities can be found in the Update on July Activities .  More information about our UC Mass Digitization projects, including the Where to Find Our Books page, is available at: http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/massdig/.