Measuring Content Quality in a Preservation Repository: HathiTrust and Large-Scale Book Digitization

Abstract

As mechanisms emerge to certify the trustworthiness of digital preservation repositories, no systematic efforts have been devoted to assessing the quality and usefulness of the preserved content itself. With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Michigan’s School of Information, in close collaboration with the University of Michigan Library and HathiTrust, is developing new methods to measure the visual and textual qualities of books from university libraries digitized by Google, Internet Archive, and others and then deposited for preservation. This paper describes a new approach to measuring quality in largescale digitization; namely, the absence of error relative to the expected uses of the deposited content. The paper specifies the design of a research project to develop and test statistically valid methods of measuring error. The design includes a model of understanding and recording errors observed through manual inspection of sample volumes, and strategies to validate the outcomes of the research through open evaluation by stakeholders and users. The research project will utilize content deposited in HathiTrust – a large-scale digital preservation repository that presently contains over five million digitized volumes – to develop broadly applicable quality assessment strategies for preservation repositories.