Category Archives: oa.hathi

HTRC Awards 4 SCWAReD ACS Projects | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has selected four projects to participate in its special round of Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD) project.

The projects will seek to build HTRC worksets drawn from materials related to historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities, and in doing so, to identify gaps in the HathiTrust collection where such communities are not represented in the digital library. The worksets will be analyzed using text and data mining techniques. The worksets, derived data outputs, and associated documentation will be shared at the end of the projects as illustrative research models of the text and data mining process. The four research models will join a flagship model that is being developed concurrently in collaboration with co-PI Maryemma Graham and her History of Black Writing project at the University of Kansas.

The four awarded projects are: …”

Update from the CDL, CRL & HT Collaboration – First Small Project to Realize Open, Collaborative Infrastructure for Shared Print + Webinars! – California Digital Library

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“Earlier this year in July, we shared news with the WEST membership that California Digital Library (CDL, administrative host for WEST), the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and HathiTrust released a set of framing documents that would guide their collaborative work to realize open infrastructure to support shared print as an integral part of contemporary collection management and development. 

Now we are happy to share that the three organizations have embarked on their first collaborative project: a freely available, web-accessible tool that will enable any library to compare lists of serial holdings with serial retention commitments in PAPR in order to distinguish, in the local list, what has been retained and what has not.

This project embodies the intention of the CDL, CRL & HT collaboration not to rebuild, but to build upon and connect the resources and capabilities that already abound in our community. This project is possible because of the cumulative efforts of many: the original work undertaken by CRL and CDL, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to conceive and develop PAPR; subsequent contributions by WEST in developing the AGUA graphic interface and on-the-fly reporting capability; and, as an added bonus, the collaboration aims to open up a new dataset for comparison: HathiTrust’s digital serials….”

SCWAReD Advanced Collaborative Support Program: Call for Proposa… | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) requests proposals for a special funded round of its Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) program, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for HTRC’s “Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD)” project.

ACS is a scholarly service offering collaboration between researchers and HTRC staff to solve challenging problems related to computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus. In this special cycle of ACS, we seek to collaborate with scholars to recover volumes in HathiTrust that tell the story of historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities, and to identify gaps in the HathiTrust collection where such communities are not represented in the digital library. …”

Indiana University awarded $500,000 from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | IT News & Events

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“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded a $500,000 grant to Indiana University (IU) to support the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC).

The grant will allow HTRC to develop reusable worksets and research models, curated by experts, for analyzing texts from the 17-million-volume HathiTrust Digital Library. The project—Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD, pronounced “squared”)—aims to develop new methods for creating and analyzing digital collections, with an emphasis on content related to historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities….”

Auburn University Libraries / AU Libraries deactivates HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service | What’s New at the Auburn Libraries

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“With the reopening of the Auburn University Libraries’ buildings, the justifications for keeping emergency temporary access to additional HathiTrust assets no longer apply and this access was deactivated on Friday, Aug. 14. Library patrons are now welcome to enter the library to select materials from the stacks or request delivery of materials through Campus Delivery services, https://www.lib.auburn.edu/jcourier/index.php. …”

Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early, returning to traditional controlled digital lending – Internet Archive Blogs

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“Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation during the closures. 

We have heard hundreds of stories from librarians, authors, parents, teachers, and students about how the NEL has filled an important gap during this crisis. 

Ben S., a librarian from New Jersey, for example, told us that he used the NEL “to find basic life support manuals needed by frontline medical workers in the academic medical center I work at. Our physical collection was closed due to COVID-19 and the NEL allowed me to still make available needed health informational materials to our hospital patrons.” We are proud to aid frontline workers.

Today we are announcing the National Emergency Library will close on June 16th, rather than June 30th, returning to traditional controlled digital lending. We have learned that the vast majority of people use digitized books on the Internet Archive for a very short time. Even with the closure of the NEL, we will be able to serve most patrons through controlled digital lending, in part because of the good work of the non-profit HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust’s new Emergency Temporary Access Service features a short-term access model that we plan to follow. …”

HathiTrust: A Digital Library Revolution Takes Flight

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“The phrase “closed until further notice due to COVID-19” has become all too familiar. And, while we have started to grow accustomed to losing access to many resources that typically define our community existence, there’s one that’s particularly crucial to student and faculty researchers: libraries. For some, it may be easy to write off libraries as “nice-to-have.” But for scholars, they are essential. And as library doors began to shutter throughout California and much of the world, the potential impact on the academic community was profound.

Thankfully, the University of California has been preparing for this moment for decades. In 2008, the UC Libraries co-founded HathiTrust, and started contributing scanned copies of books and journals to the new organization. Based at the University of Michigan (U-M), HathiTrust is a large-scale repository of digital content collaboratively created by academic and research institutions. As researchers lost access to vital hard-copy materials, it initiated an Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) to give UC researchers critical access to more than 13 million digital volumes. This revolution has been immediately impactful — and a profound advancement in sharing digital content….”

Research Library Digitization Has Found Its Moment  | Ithaka S+R

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“Recent weeks have seen the collapse of the print format. With academic libraries closed during the pandemic, acquisition, processing, browsing, circulation, and interlibrary lending have come to a halt for tangible materials. 

But even before the pandemic, the primacy of print had passed. Academic libraries are no longer principally defined by their tangible collections nor even their physical spaces. They are easily the most digital part of the academic enterprise at traditional institutions of higher education. Libraries have fostered the creation of extraordinary digital collections, through a combination of content licensing, open access initiatives, and collection digitization. They have provided infrastructure and services that are accessible remotely. While libraries remain more than just their digital collections and services, the digital transformation has allowed libraries to provide tremendous value to the faculty members and students who have been displaced. 

One especially outright hero today is HathiTrust. Its Emergency Temporary Access Service enables its members to make vast swathes of their unavailable print collections accessible digitally. In essence, whatever components of a given member institution’s print collection have become temporarily unavailable can be “loaned” digitally to affiliates of that institution. For some members, this amounts to millions of books, in some cases well over half the print collection. The ability to simply “turn on” digital access to such a high share of the print collection on a temporary basis is an absolutely amazing benefit to Hathi members. It would be a surprise if other libraries were not clamoring to join the collaboration just for this benefit alone. …”