HathiTrust Update & Significant Milestone
By Heather Christenson, Mass Digitization Project Manager and CDL HathiTrust Project Manager
HathiTrust Reaches 1.1 Million Public Domain Volumes
The HathiTrust has collectively reached one of our long-anticipated goals; over 1 million volumes are now available in full view for users. As of this writing, HathiTrust partners, including UC, have contributed a grand total of 1,144,998 volumes (~19% of total) in the public domain. These and other statistics may be found on the right side of the HathiTrust home page.
UC Highlights from the April 2010 HathiTrust Update
The HathiTrust has released an update on April 2010 activities. The following are highlights of UC contributions to the HathiTrust, as well as items of special interest to our UC community.
UC’s digital volumes continue to be loaded into the HathiTrust
To date, over 1.3 million UC volumes are available in the HathiTrust. The California Digital Library (CDL) has now set up ongoing incremental download of books being digitized from NRLF, UCSC, UCSD, and UCLA into HathiTrust. CDL and University of Michigan (UM) staff continue to be in close communications as we progress with the ongoing loading of UC’s Google-digitized volumes. CDL is working with the UC campus libraries on a number of issues with bibliographic record completeness and formatting, and when those are solved a remainder of backlogged digital volumes will go into the repository.
As reported in an earlier CDLInfo post, UC’s Internet Archive-digitized books are now being loaded into the HathiTrust. To date over 90,000 SRLF volumes have been loaded.
Access to HathiTrust public domain volumes via UC-eLinks
As reported in April, HathiTrust public domain books are available via UC-eLinks.
Presentations
Heather Christenson gave presentations on mass digitization and the HathiTrust to the CDL Resource Liaisons and Users Council groups. The presentations focused on UC mass digitization activities and HathiTrust user-facing services.
PageTurner interface
Developers from UM and CDL have been collaborating to integrate new image serving capabilities in the HathiTrust with the GnuBook reader in order to improve the user experience in viewing books. A prototype application combing these services has been developed and next steps will involve merging the prototype with the current HathiTrust PageTurner application. Code developed by CDL to produce thumbnail views of volumes in GnuBook has been incorporated into the mainline code, maintained by the Internet Archive.
Bibliographic data management
CDL has created a draft set of requirements for a new bibliographic management system for HathiTrust. HathiTrust team members at CDL and the UM engaged in multiple teleconferences throughout April to define the scope of services and functions provided in the current management system at UM (Ex Libris’ Aleph product). More details can be found in the HathiTrust update.
Working Groups
UC continues to lead and actively participate in many other HathiTrust activities including the Strategic Advisory Board, Quality Ingest & Error Rate working group, Discovery Interface working group, and Collaborative Development Environment working group. More detailed information on the activities of these HathiTrust groups can be found on the HathiTrust web site: http://www.hathitrust.org/updates.
More information about our UC Mass Digitization projects, including the UC Mass Digitization FAQ and the Where to Find Our Books page, is available at: http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/massdig/.