Posts tagged with HathiTrust in Blog Library Tech Talk

We just released a new feature in our full-text Large Scale Search for HathiTrust. When you do a search, you will see check boxes next to each search result. You can select items you want from the search results and create a personal collection.

Post by Maria Bonn. On Wednesday, the Scholarly Publishing Office activated more than 225,000 "buy a reprint" links in HathiTrust, increasing the number of public domain reprints available for purchase by more than 300%.

The HathiTrust repository has reached the 5 million volume mark!

For the past two years the University of Michigan Library has been making many of our digitized texts (including items that are in-copyright) available to persons with print disabilities through the HathiTrust Digital Library. Our Dean, Paul Courant, recently posted about this project on his blog so I thought it might be nice to offer more background and some technical information about this project.

A major milestone for the HathiTrust partners was reached on April 27, 2009 as we released a temporary beta catalog for the digital library, offering bibliographic search (title, author, subject, ISBN, publisher, and year of publication) and faceted browse of all items in HathiTrust. The catalog is built using the open source VuFind software and is temporary, pending the release of permanent catalog to be built by OCLC in conjunction with a HathiTrust partner team.

The launch of HathiTrust was #4 on Library Journal Academic Newswire's list of Top Ten Stories for 2008.

A recent blog pointed out that search is hard when there are many indexes to search because results must be combined. Search is hard for us in DLPS for a different reason. Our problem is the size of the data. The Library has been receiving page images and OCR from Google for a while now. The number of OCR'd volumes has passed the 2 million mark. This raises the question of whether it is possible to provide a useful full text search of the OCR for 2 million volumes. Or more. We are trying to find out.

Since the earliest days of MBooks, DLPS has been looking forward to ingesting our previously-digitized page image volumes into the repository. Though it has taken longer than we had hoped, the Historical Math Collection is now available through the HathiTrust Collection Builder interface.

Immediately after the HathiTrust announcement, one blog said that we'd built the digital library but forgot the front door. Why? Because there was no search functionality included in the initial release. Large scale search has always been a goal and we now have the first attempt at meeting that goal.

Start the new year with a look at some Historical Advice to Undergrads. Covering the period from 1856 to 1941, these guides, handbooks, and (let's be frank) sermons offer advice on scheduling your time, choosing appropriate courses, being popular, and remaining virtuous in the face of the temptations that will surround you on campus.