Posts by Kat Hagedorn

Foreign Exchange Librarians: Our Time as Visiting Experts at Fudan University Library

In November 2108, I was fortunate enough to travel to Fudan University (Shanghai, China) to be a “Foreign Expert” at their library.

Formalizing Accessions from Patrons for HathiTrust: “Hey, would you like this book I've got?”

Over the past several months, Digital Content & Collections has worked on new procedures for handling accessions from patrons for HathiTrust. What happens if no HathiTrust contributing institution has their volume on their shelves, and the volume is a good addition to the HathiTrust corpus? In these cases, U-M Library steps into the breach. We can easily handle a small throughput of these volumes from HathiTrust, and we handle three kinds of accessions: physical, digital and virtual.

Teaser: Upcoming Blog Post on U-M Page Insertion Process in Google Volumes

In an upcoming LTT blog post (hopefully, before the end of the calendar year), we will discuss U-M Library's process of enabling page insertions to Google volumes for our HathiTrust Digital Library.

Quality in HathiTrust (Re-Posting)

This is a re-posting of a HathiTrust blog post. HathiTrust receives well over a hundred inquiries every month about quality problems with page images or OCR text of volumes in HathiTrust. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in most of these cases, there is something they can do about it. A new blog post is intended to shed some light on the thinking and practices about quality in HathiTrust.

How to Create (and Keep Creating) a Digitization Workflow

It’s possible we should have written this blog post years ago, when we first created our workflow for how we shepherd digitization projects through our Digital Library. Well, we were busy creating it, that’s our excuse. Three years later, we’re on our third iteration.

Chinese Papercuts Digital Collection

The Digital Library hosts a stunning collection of 15 rare propaganda Chinese papercuts from the Cultural Revolution. The original papercuts were discovered in a closet at the Center for Chinese Studies!

Practical Relevance Ranking for 11 Million Books, Part 3: Document Length Normalization

Relevance is a complex concept which reflects aspects of a query, a document, and the user as well as contextual factors. Relevance involves many factors such as the user's preferences, task, stage in their information-seeking, domain knowledge, intent, and the context of a particular search. This post is the third in a series by Tom Burton-West, one of the HathiTrust developers, who has been working on practical relevance ranking for all the volumes in HathiTrust for a number of years.