Two Enhancements from HathiTrust: Interface Redesign and Research Center Tools

Redesigned Website

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.