seminar
Unlocking the Secrets of 3 Billion Pages: Introducing the HathiTrust Research Center
This briefing will introduce the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC; http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc). The HTRC is the research arm of the HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org), an online repository dedicated to the provision of access to a comprehensive body of published works for scholarship and education. The HathiTrust is a partnership of over 60 major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. HathiTrust membership is open to institutions worldwide.
Over 10 million volumes have been ingested into the HathiTrust digital archive from sources including Google Books, member university libraries, the Internet Archive, and numerous private collections. The HTRC is dedicated to facilitating scholarship using this enormous corpus through enabling access to the corpus, developing research tools, fostering research projects and communities, and providing additional resources such as enhanced metadata and indices that will assist scholars to more easily exploit the HathiTrust corpus. This briefing will outline the mission and goals of the HTRC. It will also introduce current and planned projects, including its work on enabling the non-consumptive analyses of copyrighted materials. It will conclude with a discussion of the ways in which scholars can work with and through the HTRC
J. Stephen Downie is the Associate Dean for Research and a Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Downie is the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center. He is also Director of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) and founder and ongoing director of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). He was the Principal Investigator on the Networked Environment for Music Analysis (NEMA) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is Co-PI on the Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). He has been very active in the establishment of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community through his ongoing work with the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conferences and now serves as ISMIR's President. He holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition) along with a Master's and a PhD in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.