Taking the Long Way Around: Improving the Display of HathiTrust Records in Primo

Abstract

As with any shared format for serializing data, Primo’s PNX records have limits on the types of data which they pass along from the source records and into the Primo tool. As a result of these limitations, PNX records do not currently have a provision for harvesting and transferring rights information about HathiTrust holdings that the Kansas State University (KSU) Library system indexes through Primo. This created a problem, since Primo was defaulting to indicate that all HathiTrust materials were available to KSU Libraries (K-State Libraries) patrons, when only a limited portion of them actually were. This disconnect was infuriating some library users, and creating difficulties for the public services librarians. There was a library-wide discussion about removing HathiTrust holdings from Primo altogether, but it was decided that such a solution was an overreaction. As a consequence, the library IT department began a crash program to attempt to find a solution to the problem. The result was an application called hathiGenius.

Online and Distance Education for a Connected World

“…Students were therefore advised to use JustisOne (JustCite) to locate legal cases and legislation and Summon for everything else (Tury, 2014). Bengtson and Coleman (2019) provide a second example in the form of the Primo discovery layer used by Kansas State (K-State) University Library, which brought together most of their digital holdings, except for HathiTrust. The omission led to a swath of inaccurate records and resulted in over 30 complaints.…”

“…The stories outlined by Tury (2014) and Bengtson and Coleman (2019) are warnings to online libraries to ensure that services always remain reliable and accurate. Failure to do so can lead to services being undermined.…”

“…Many online libraries have found that discoverability is often hampered by misunderstandings by users of what is available, how it is available and in what form. For instance, Bengtson and Coleman (2019) cite examples where users expect all textual sources to be available in full-text form (which is not always possible) and misunderstandings regarding the ownership of e-resource content. Moyo (2004: 221) argues that users do not necessarily grasp the idea that the catalogue contains resources that the library itself does not own.…”

“…It must also be able to rely on a strong IT department or team of IT specialists, with strong knowledge and understanding of universal design and accessibility issues. As Bengtson and Coleman (2019) noted, the IT support would ideally be capable of 'sidewise development' or, in other words, the ability to creatively solve problems that are intractable within a proprietary or open source tool. However, careful thought needs to be put into these types of customisations -is there more than one person in the organisation able to provide support or further develop the customisation?…”

metaGraphos: a Web-based system for transcribing, proofreading and publishing scanned documents

“…It is well-known that online libraries contain a plethora of “difficult” scanned documents, such as the one mentioned above (Figure 1), but these cannot be effectively searched or semantically interlinked. Noteworthy efforts have already been made to improve the manipulation of this wealth of knowledge by the Google-Books project (Nagaraj and Reimers, 2021), the HathiTrust library (Bengtson and Coleman, 2019), the Internet Archive library (Li, 2020), Europeana (Freire et al , 2019) and others. These organizations mainly use various OCR techniques for the possible transcription of the digitized content, but the search within the recourses and their semantic enrichment are still in their infancy.…”