HathiTrust May 2017 Newsletter

"Top News

University of Mississippi Joins HathiTrust

HathiTrust Libraries Propose to Retain More than 16 Million Volumes in the Shared Print Program

Fifty HathiTrust member libraries have proposed retention commitments totaling more than 16 million print monograph volumes to be retained for 25 years under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. These volumes represent more than 4.5 million distinct book titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library (about 60% of the total). In parallel with identifying proposed retentions, HathiTrust has developed an MOU and policies to define the responsibilities of Retention Libraries and HathiTrust. The MOU will be presented for approval by the HathiTrust Board of Governors in June. The proposed retention commitments will be confirmed once the libraries have executed the MOU, expected by early fall 2017.

User Support Upgrade in June 

On June 12, 2017 HathiTrust User Support will be undertaking a major upgrade of the JIRA system we use to manage communications with members and general users. This upgrade will enable us to improve our service in the following ways:

• Users will receive an automatic notification when their request is created, reassuring them that their request will soon be answered.
• Users will be able to view and track their requests in the user support portal, as well as receive traditional communications via email.
• User support team members will be able to better manage open requests and will have improved capabilities for prioritizing critical requests.

As a result of this upgrade, members and users may experience slower response times during the period from June 12 through June 26 while the transition is underway. All messages and requests to feedback@issues.hathitrust.org will be carefully answered as soon as possible during this time. Once the upgrade is completed, we look forward to serving all users better as they work with HathiTrust!

Research Center Advanced Collaborative Support Submissions Due June 19

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is seeking proposals for Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) project awards. These awards are modeled in the form of HTRC staff and compute time to collaborate on the proposed project during the award period. 4-6 awards are anticipated, and awardees can be individual scholars or a team os scholars, either from HathiTrust member institutions or non-members, though 3 award spots will be reserved for applicants from HathiTrust member institutions. The HTRC ACS-dedicated staff will provide a general overview of HTRC components, the HathiTrust corpus and HathiTrust computational tools, to the awardees over the course of the project's time period. For this RFP, we are especially encouraging proposals that will utilize our Data Capsule to do analysis on in-copyright volumes in HathiTrust. Proposals should be concise, and include project narrative, detailed description of the data you're interested in engaging with, a schedule of completion, and list of deliverables. Full details of required components can be found in the full ACS RFP, available here. Deadline for submission is 5:00 p.m. Eastern, June 19, 2017, submitted electronically."