The Advanced Collaborative Support Program (ACS), a scholarly service at the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) offering collaboration between external scholars and HTRC staff to solve challenging problems related to computational analysis, is offering non-consumptive access to the entire HathiTrust collection. HTRC seeks proposals in three categories - Extracted features dataset, HTRC parallel analysis tools and Data Capsule service.
These services are developed from the entire text corpus of the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of 15 million volumes digitised from 45 research libraries in North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Approximately 60% of the collection is in-copyright and is available for data mining only through the HathiTrust Research Center. More descriptive statistics about the collection can be found online at https://www.hathitrust.org/statistics_visualizations.
HTRC anticipates awarding up to 4-6 ACS projects this round, depending on scope of projects on HTRC staff, with at least three awardees spots reserved for applicants from HathiTrust member institutions. Key content of the proposal should include the research context and problems, identification of one of the three operational interaction modes (I-III above) in which the scholar proposes to work, a detailed characterisation of the data to be engaged, projected outcomes, and if can be provided, a description of the type of assistance sought from HTRC.
The HTRC ACS awards are modeled in the form of HTRC staff time. Each awarded proposal will receive access to dedicated HTRC staff to collaborate on the proposed project during the award period. The HTRC ACS staff consists of specialists in both information and computer sciences.
Awardees can be individual scholars or a team of scholars. The HTRC staff member assigned to an award will provide, as needed, a general overview of HTRC tools and services, relevant components within their selected interaction mode. The staff member will also provide prototyping support and collection expertise. Awarded scholars are expected to collaborate on necessary parts of the project as agreed upon with HTRC prior to the project start time.
The successful respondent will demonstrate a feasible and adaptable use case grounded in the needs of an identifiable scholar or scholarly community; scholar(s) well qualified to conduct the work proposed; a viable work plan and schedule of completion for projects ranging from 6 weeks to 6 months; and a set of activities scoped within the range of HTRC's ability to provide technical support (e.g., datasets, compute cycles, prototyping, etc.).
Proposals coming from academic and non-profit institutions are eligible. 3 project awards are reserved for HT member institutions, but non-members are still eligible for an award.
For full consideration, an electronic copy of the complete proposal must be submitted by 5:00 pm (Eastern Time Zone U.S.) on June 19, 2017. Proposals should be submitted electronically as a single zip file containing all proposal elements to acs@hathitrust.org. Each proposal element - cover sheet, summary and rationale, narrative, bio-sketches - should be a separate file within the zip file. Acceptable formats for proposal elements are PDF and MS Word (.doc or .docx).
HTRC anticipates awarding up to 4-6 ACS projects this round depending on the magnitude of the obligation on HTRC staff, with at least three of the awards reserved for applicants from HathiTrust member institutions Pending membership applications will be considered during the award process. This 2017 call gives preference to projects that utilise the Data Capsule. A project result that can be generalised to benefit a larger scholarly community with similar research needs is seen as a plus. All proposals will be reviewed by the HTRC Executive Management group and the ACS group. Respondents will be notified of the HTRC's final decision, via email, by July 14, 2017.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
