hathitrust: sharing the care and feeding of the elephant: digital library federation forum 2012

HATHITRUST: SHARING THE CARE AND

FEEDING OF THE ELEPHANT

John Weise and Chris Powell and Kat Hagedorn University of Michigan Libraries

Introduction

HathiTrust ingests and integrates digital content produced by a variety of systems, processes, practices, and workflows at partner institutions. •  Google •  Internet Archive •  Locally scanned

e.g., Yale, Michigan, and several others.

Some of Michigan's Hats

•  Google partner •  HathiTrust administrator

o  Specifications and guidelines o  Ingest manager/gatekeeper

•  HathiTrust partner •  Michigan as Michigan

o  MDP scans to HT (i.e., Google scans) o  Local scans to HT o  Legacy migration to HT o  Investigate and fix problems

Making Decisions

Try as we might, to do what is right, there may be more than one right answer.

The aggregation of content in HathiTrust has revealed outcroppings in the data landscape that were not as apparent when segregated.

We won't talk about...

•  HathiTrust governance, the many benefits of partnership, or the lawsuit.

•  Users, data mining, or preservation per se, but they are inherent throughout.

•  Google's scanning processes except to illustrate a point.

In a nutshell

We're contemplating the impact of independent decisions made in the past on preservation and access today.

To do this, we'll talk about...

•  Michigan's digital library heritage. •  The impact of local decisions on global

preservation and access. •  Meaningful vs. meaningless variations in

practice. •  Variations in quality. •  The benefits of aggregation for preservation. •  Where we can go from here.

Our mass digitization heritage

Large scale, but sharp focus

•  Collaborative, but separate •  Curated

o  Condition o  Completeness o  Metadata availability o  Restricted scope o  Meaningfulness within the context of the collection

•  Separate systems obscured variation in application of agreed-upon standards

Now these texts are moving into an environment where the sharp focus that defined their previous online existence is less meaningful, and some shortcomings are now exposed.

Michigan's Local Legacy

•  5K-10K volumes/year back to the 1990's •  24K volumes migrated to HathiTrust. •  Relatively painstaking process.

o  Why?

Reasons volumes that don't make the automated move

•  A record for the item cannot be located in the catalog

•  Non-standard naming conventions •  Skips in file sequence •  Bitonal TIFF images aren't 600 dpi •  Various TIFF header anomalies •  JPEG2000 images that don't contain

resolution information

Successful volumes sharing the larger repository aren't all the same

•  Different libraries (even within the same institution)

•  Different materials (books, journals, photos) •  Different physical formats •  Different languages and scripts •  Different application of standards (including

MARC) •  Different decisions made along the way

Meaningful vs. meaningless variation

•  Variation you want to maintain vs. variation you want to obscure

•  Need for consensus •  Need for certainty that solutions are truly

global •  Why is this variation occurring? •  How can you spot variation in such a large

pool? •  How are truly meaningful variants identified

and preserved?

Digitization Decisions: Page Features/Book Structures

Digitization Decisions: Omissions

•  It's impossible to illustrate what you have omitted

•  It's also impossible to find where omissions occurred

Digitization Decisions: Inserts

Cataloging differences

Even among brief descriptions

And among expanded descriptions

The combined repository gives you a fresh and broader look at your collections and your practices.

Content quality problems

•  Issues we see with quality can be found in any collection

•  Some are unavoidable or were based on a particular decision due to resource issues

•  Some can be given special treatment if they occur frequently or are anticipated

•  There's a trade-off, naturally o  decision between a pristine corpus and a massively

useful corpus

Focus on potential physical volume errors NOT volume scan errors

These are volume scan errors...

Warp

Skew

RTL and upside-down (e.g., Japanese)

Unfolded foldouts

Pagetagging gone awry

Faint text

Pages misnumbered and duplicated in physical volume

page 135 page

139, which should be page 136

Pages missing in the physical volumes

page 96 page

99

pages 97 and 98 are not in volume

Benefits of corpus

•  Preservation •  Noting provenance and process of creating

these digitized volumes •  Aggregation •  Ability to compare volumes •  Reveal potential solutions to problems •  Certification of particular volumes

More hands make lighter work

•  Working with institutions on a collective level as opposed to singularly

•  Working together to find common models and workflows

•  Share experience and develop policies to mitigate newly discovered issues and maintain the corpus

Lessons we're learning as we go

•  You do NOT have to solve everything at once •  Don't let potential problems prevent you from

moving forward •  Decide what is the most important, and where

you use your resources, and do it at the beginning of your project, if at all possible

Contact info

•  www.hathitrust.org •  John: jweise@umich.edu •  Chris: sooty@umich.edu •  Kat: khage@umich.edu