HathiTrust Research Center Announced

On Monday of this week Indiana University and the University of Illinois announced the creation of the HathiTrust Research Center. Our press release states that:

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) will enable open access for nonprofit and educational users to published works in the public domain stored within HathiTrust, an extensive collaborative digital library of more than 8 million volumes and 2 billion pages of archived material maintained by major research institutions and libraries worldwide.

Leveraging data storage infrastructure at Indiana University and computational resources at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the HTRC will provision a secure computational and data environment for scholars to perform research using the HathiTrust Digital Repository. The center will break new ground in the areas of text mining and non-consumptive research, allowing scholars to fully utilize content of the HathiTrust Library while preventing intellectual property misuse within the confines of current U.S. copyright law.

For more information please see: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/18245.html

We also got some coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Also listed in Marshall Breeding’s Library Technology Blog.

Also listed in Roy Tennant’s Digital Libraries Blog.

Thiel on Higher Education Bubble

This is an interesting piece – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/– from techcrunch about Peter Thiel and his belief that we are now in a higher education bubble that is at its apex. This from a man who saw the dotcom bubble and the home mortgage bubble before either burst. The cool part is he is not just predicting the bubble – he is doing something about it – trying to make it acceptable for the best talent to start companies rather than going to college – at least putting off college for a while to try something different. This piece is worth a read.

IU and Project Bamboo

I am in the Republic of Berkeley today at Cal in a Project Bamboo kickoff meeting. I am very excited to hear how the corpora space is thinking about engaging the digital humanities community. They are looking to use simpler visualization tools that can help form a context around smaller sets of documents in order to inform how larger sets of documents could be used with tools like google’s n-gram service or possibly for future bamboo services. IU is working on components of workspaces and collection interoperability, namely working on hubzero and alfresco interop.