The HathiTrust Research Center Workset Ontology: A Descriptive Framework for Non-Consumptive Research Collections

Abstract

The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is a digital library containing about 14 million volumes which comprise billions of pages of content. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a collaborative research initiative jointly led by Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This paper describes the development of a collections data model by the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis project, a HTRC research initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The resulting HTRC Workset data model is designed to aid humanities scholars by helping them to describe selected portions of the HTDL corpus that serve as the objects of their research. The resulting worksets are persistent, citable, and can be assessed by other scholars for reuse in additional research processes.

Keywords

• research collections
• formalisms
• data models
• digital libraries
• large-scale corpuses