New Data Mining and Analytics Tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library

"The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) announced the availability of data mining and analytics tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of digital texts from more than 70 research libraries worldwide. The new tools provide a much-needed entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrust’s contents. 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. In Phase 2 of the HTRC (September 2012-March 2013), the HTRC Technical Working Group created production versions of the beta services previewed at the 2012 UnCamp event. The group is now working to open the resources to community testers who are part of the HTRC User Group Community. (For subscription details, see https://list.indiana.edu/sympa/subscribe/htrc-usergroup-l). 'This represents a major step forward in understanding how new knowledge can be derived from one of the largest digital library collections in the world,' notes J. Stephen Downie, professor in the graduate school of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and co-director of the HTRC. The HTRC service stack, which provides the analytical entry point, is based on a completely new technical architecture. This framework leverages existing analytics tools such as SEASR, digital library software such as Blacklight, and a services-oriented architecture application interface. The current production phase includes a HTRC Sandbox that is open to scholars for evaluation of the HTRC services stack as part of their experiments."