In the fall of 2022, one year after the roll-out of UC's SILS, CDL's Digitization team conducted research on the consistency and ease of discovery of links to HathiTrust materials across the 10 campus instances of UC Library Search. Their findings uncovered that campus search interfaces varied widely in surfacing links to HathiTrust items. In the interest of improving the uniformity and performance, the report was delivered to the SILS Leadership team in February 2023, and passed first to the SILS Operations Team and then to the SILS Discovery Operations Sub Team. The Discovery team reviewed the report and came to the conclusion that, since the report was completed in fall 2022, "the situation appears to have been resolved due to the activation (in the Network Zone) of the HathiTrust Worldwide collection that took place in January 2023, and no further action is required". The Digitization team re-checked the results of their research and concluded that activating the HathiTrust Worldwide Collection in the Network Zone had resolved the inconsistencies across campuses and had improved the discoverability issues that were documented in their report.
In January 2024, limited re-testing of the initial set of materials showed that the discovery of links to HT materials in SILS had reverted back to the state originally documented in 2022. After referral to the SILS Operations team's Discovery sub-group chair, an investigation was initiated. Ex Libris was notified of the issue and subsequently discovered a bug that affected the consortial use of that CDI (Central Discovery Index) collection in Alma. The bug was swiftly resolved and the discovery inconsistencies disappeared: Discovery of HT materials across UC is again consistent and effective.
If you notice any difficulties or inconsistencies in finding HathiTrust materials using one of the 10 instances of UC’s Library Search, please notify the Digitization team via their ticketing system. We plan to conduct periodic checks of the system, but campus colleagues are likely to experience and notice issues more swiftly than our periodic checks.