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HathiTrust Federal Documents Registry Progresses to Beta
This is big news indeed. According to a press release, HathiTrust’s Federal Documents Registry — pulled together from the records of over 40 libraries — is now available as a beta release! Mike Furlough and Valerie Glenn gave a very good presentation of the project, methodology, etc. at IFLA last week. A HUGE thanks to […]
What Are We To Keep? (FAQ)
This document is meant to accompany the article, “What are we to Keep?” by James R. Jacobs, Documents to the People (Spring 2015) p 13-19. FAQ What is a Preservation Copy? Research that was prompted by JSTOR’s desire to determine how to guarantee that all of the printed material within its journals would remain available […]
What are we to keep? thoughts on the National Collection (DttP Spring 2015 feature article)
The Spring 2015 issue of Documents to the People (DttP) just arrived at my door. The feature article in this issue is titled “Thoughts on the National Collection” and was collaboratively written by myself, James R. Jacobs, along with Shari Laster, Aimee C. Quinn, and Barbie Selby. I’m posting my segment titled “What Are We […]
Document of the day. Or why a paper document may be better than a digitized version
I just received an old (historic NOT legacy) Department of Commerce publication off of the needs and offers list called "Commercial handbook of China" by Julean Arnold, commercial attaché (WorldCat record). It's actually a 1975 reprint of a 1919 publication. It's chock full of statistics relating to provinces, cities, and consular districts -- agriculture, minerals and mining, populations, exports and imports, revenues, transportation, ports and shipping facilities etc. In short, this is a gold mine of historic information and statistics from the Republic of China (pre-Communist China). The document was digitized and is available in HathiTrust as well as the Internet Archive (see book reader below). However, in comparing the digitized version with the paper version in hand, I came upon several issues:
- there are 3 foldout maps that were not digitized. These maps are critical information on railway lines and treaty ports in China. The bibliographic record has a physical description including "2 v. fronts., plates, fold. map, tables, diagrs., fold. charts" but no content note mentioning that the maps were not digitized.
- As I mentioned, the document is chock full of statistical tables. Have you ever tried copying and pasting tabular data from a PDF? It's even worse when the tables are displayed in landscape rather than portrait. I've verified that the OCR fails on those pages.
- Lots of readability/usability issues: The table of contents is partially obscured in one copy and the tables are often blurred or faint. also, HT is using a process of OCR now where you can search but not copy or paste.
- Lastly, I find it ... uh... interesting that this book says here "Copyright: Public Domain, Google-digitized." But, if you want to download the whole book, you have to be an HT partner.
Comparing Hathitrust and Google Books as repositories of government documents
June 18, 2012 / 1 Comment on Comparing Hathitrust and Google Books as repositories of government documents
Here are 2 recent items analyzing Hathitrust and Google books for their efficacy in giving access to Federal government documents. The first is an article by Laura Sare (Texas A&M) and compares Hathitrust with Google Books. The second is a presentation by Brian Vetruba (Washington U in St Louis) at "Leveraging Your Strengths: Regional Government Documents Conference" at the Federal Reserve Bank St. Louis on May 4, 2012. A Comparison of HathiTrust and Google Books Using Federal Publications. Laura Sare. Practical Academic Librarianship: The International Journal of the SLA Academic Division. 2(1) 2012 p. 1-25. (attached below. Fair use claim)
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