Historical Math Collection Incorporated into HathiTrust

Since the earliest days of MBooks, DLPS has been looking forward to ingesting our previously-digitized page image volumes into the repository. The release of Collection Builder had our colleagues interested in building collections that combined our existing content with the millions of books coming through the Google digitization process, increasing our interest.

Though it has taken longer than we had hoped, the Historical Math Collection is now available through the HathiTrust Collection Builder interface: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=1730264573

Much of the credit for this goes to our colleagues in Core Services, who have had to develop an ingest process that takes into account the differences in files, formats, and metadata, and Library Systems, who have had to develop a process to create the automatic links in Mirlyn (our OPAC) without the use of the barcode scan that is central to the Google digitization workflow. The Historical Math collection was selected because of its size -- neither too big nor too small at just under a thousand volumes -- and its age -- not so early in our digitization workflow that many anomolies were likely to be encountered. We will continue adapting the ingest process to incorporate all of our page-image volumes over the coming months. More work remains to develop a standalone collection interface, similar to the one at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/umhistmath, and assess usability.

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