International Identifier for serials
and other continuing resources, in the electronic and print world

The HTRC Workshop Series Returns for Spring 2020

The HathiTrust Research Center offers a workshop series to develop a community of users, teachers, and supporters of computational text analysis with HathiTrust data. Each training event is 1.5 days long and consists of a full day train-the-trainer session for librarians and a half day introduction to text mining with HathiTrust session for researchers. This new series, which will span from March to May 2020, builds on previous train-the-trainer workshops from HTRC.

Learn more about hosting | attending.

It’s No Secret – Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public Domain

Since 2008 the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has been researching hundreds of thousands of books to find ones that are in the public domain and can be opened for view in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Over the past 11 years, 168 people across North America have worked together for a common goal: the ability to share public domain works from US libraries. As of September 2019, the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has performed copyright reviews on 506,989 US publications; of those, 302,915 (59.7%) have been determined to be in the public domain in the United States. The opening of these works in HathiTrust has brought the total of openly available volumes to 6,540,522. In early January 2020, 40,000+ titles in the 17 million item HathiTrust corpus will be in the public domain in the U.S. with some global access. Thanks to HathiTrust’s 148 member libraries committed to preservation and access of these titles.

iPRES 2019 Proceedings Now Available

The Proceedings of iPRES 2019 are now available for download! As the official record of all the peer reviewed submissions presented at the conference, the proceedings ensure visibility and promotion of both academic research work and the projects and initiatives of institutions involved in digital preservation practices. You can download the iPRES 2019 Proceedings as a PDF (ISBN: 9789062590438) or EPUB (ISBN: 9789062590452) file via the iPRES 2019 Web Site and soon also via the Phaidra Repository to be found on https://ipres-conference.org.

Taming the Pre-Ingest Processing Monster

One of the biggest threats to ensuring long-term access to our digital heritage is the cost of preservation; also, one of the critical cost drivers is the set of activities associated with selection, acquisition, and other pre-ingest processing (such as quality assurance of acquired artifacts). Therefore, this question is raised: how do we scale what might be called “pre-ingest” activities without scaling up our costs at the same rate?

As Portico was working on their “next-generation” technical infrastructure, they developed new analytics services.  These services automated among others the insurance of storage policy consistency and some of those pre-ingest processes associated with quality assurance of content.

Million-page science collection to be digitised

The not-for-profit technology provider for research and education, Jisc, and the publisher Wiley, are to digitise a one-million-page collection on the history of science. Through the partnership, the resulting digital collection will be free to all UK universities and colleges and, once the licences to the content expire, will be made available openly and globally password-free. Scholars and teachers will be able to freely access materials dating roughly between 1800 to the 1970s via the Wiley Digital Archives platform. The history of science collection will be available from March next year, giving access to primary source material that might otherwise have been hard to access, and difficult to use.

DNB Newspapers Portal

Historical newspapers are an important resource for academic research in various disciplines – particularly in Germany, where the newspaper sector is and always has been particularly diverse and prolific. The large-scale digitisation, full-text cataloguing and provision of online access to historical newspapers is an important desideratum. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has set up a funding programme in support of this work.

The project “DDB Zeitungsportal” (DDB Newspaper Portal) will encompass the development and implementation of a portal that provides centralised, user-friendly access to digitised historical newspapers from all over Germany. The technological and organisational basis for this portal is the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library – DDB).