Archive for September, 2012

So many editors!

Posted on September 22, 2012 in Uncategorized

There are so many editors of serial content here at the University of Notre Dame!

In a previous posting I listed the titles of serials content with editors here at Notre Dame. I identified about fifty-nine titles. I then read more about each serial title and created a sub-list of editors which resulted in about 113 names. The original idea was to gather as many of the editors together as possible and facilitate a discussion on scholarly communication, but alas, the number of 113 people is far too many for a chat.

Being a good librarian, I commenced to classify my list of serials hoping to create smaller, more cohesive groups of people. I used facets such as student-run, peer-reviewed, open access, journal (as opposed to blog), and subjects. This being done I was able to create subsets of the titles with much more manageable numbers of editors. For example:

  • 15 science publications (19 editors)
  • 10 student-run publications (24 editors)
  • 12 open access publications (26 editors)
  • 17 humanities publications (41 editors)
  • 31 peer-reviewed publications (43 editors)
  • 26 social science publications (50 editors)
  • 28 published here at Notre Dame (56 editors)

One of our goals here in the Libraries to play a role in the local scholarly communication process. Exactly what that role entails is yet to be determined. Bringing together editors from across campus could build community. It could also make it easier for us to hear, learn, and prioritize issues facing editors. Once we know what those issues are, we might be able to figure out a role for ourselves. Maybe there isn’t a role. On the other hand, maybe there is something significant we can do.

The next step is to figure out whether or not to bring subsets of these editors together, and if so, then how. We’ll see what happens.

Yet more about HathiTrust items

Posted on September 14, 2012 in Uncategorized

This directory includes the files necessary to determine what downloadable public domain items in the HathiTrust are also in the Notre Dame collection.

In previous postings I described some investigations regarding HathiTrust and Notre Dame collections. [1, 2, 3] Just yesterday I got back from a HathiTrust meeting and learned that even the Google digitized items in the public domain are not really downloadable without signing some sort of contract.

Consequently, I downloaded a very large list of 100% downloadable public domain items from the HathiTrust (pd.xml). I then extracted the identifiers from the list using a stylesheet (pd.xsl). The result is pd.txt. Starting with my local MARC records created from the blog postings (nd.marc), I wrote a Perl script (nd.pl) to extract all the identifiers (nd.txt). Lastly, I computed the intersection of the two lists using a second Perl script (compare.pl) resulting in a third text file (both.txt). The result is a list of public domain items in the HathiTrust as well as in the collection here at Notre Dame as well as require no disambiguation because the item has not been digitized more than once. (“Confused yet?”)

It is now possible to download the entire digitized book through the HathiTrust Data API via a Web form. [4] Or you can use something like the following URL:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/htd/aggregate/<ID>

where <ID> is a HathiTrust identifier. For example:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/htd/aggregate/mdp.39015003700393

Of the about 20,000 items previously “freely” available, it seems that there are now just more than 2,000. In other words, about 18,000 of the items I previously thought were freely available for our catalog are not really “free” but instead permissions still need to be garnered in order to get these free items.

I swear we are presently creating a Digital Dark Age!

Links

  1. http://sites.nd.edu/emorgan/2012/08/hathitrust/
  2. http://sites.nd.edu/emorgan/2012/08/hathitrust-continued/
  3. http://sites.nd.edu/emorgan/2012/08/hathi-epilogue/
  4. https://babel.hathitrust.org/shcgi/htdc