Engaging metadata in HathiTrust to enhance access and discovery: The Cornell Veterinarian

Metadata Working Group Forum

Project Team:

John Cline, Steven Folsom, Michelle Paolillo, Jaron Porciello

Our aim We discuss how enabling article-level access for full-text

articles residing in HathiTrust to citations in PubMed facilitates a familiar and useful research experience for the community of practice;

We describe the sociotechnical process of our work and some of the factors in our decision-making

Our case: Cornell Veterinarian

A peer-review journal published by the Alumni Association and Society of Comparative Medicine, New York State Veterinary College College, from 1911-1994;

The journal is highly regarded in the field;

The Veterinary Library had funding and interest in making this title digitally available through scanning and hosting in e-Commons;

The entire run of the journal is fully available in HathiTrust;

Citations are available in PubMed, without links to full-text

Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services

Middleware service between technical experts and stakeholders;

Manage digital content creation and provide specific services such as digitization, preservation, digital publishing, repository services, copyright, web development and business modeling

Social Technical

Where social meets technical

HathiTrust does not have a linkable table of contents. Researchers rely on this to browse for articles of interest;

Cornell Veterinarian journal articles are unavailable to researchers in their natural research “habitat,” PubMed. It is unlikely they will seek out the content in HT.

HathiTrust is full-text searchable. A linked table of contents is of little value if full-text search is enabled;

The journal is fully and openly available in HathiTrust, even if direct links to articles are not provided

Scenarios and possibilities

Economic

All of our outcomes require staff investment, but the outcomes are radically different

A: Scan, develop front-end interface:, and deposit in e-Commons: Cornell Vet is online with linked TOC.

B: Explore HT metadata: Unknown. We might be able to provide full-text links to HT in a front-end interface or provide to PubMed.

Responsible digital stewardship

The material has already been digitized and available in a preservation repository;

If we create a boutique collection, are we ignoring the “natural habitat” part of our scenario?

We already contribute to HathiTrust. If we re-digitize, are we double-charging our own institution?

If we are successful, we can contribute code back to HathiTrust so others can replicate this process.