Marie Concannon, the award winning Head of Government Information and Data Archives, Research and Information Services at the University of Missouri, came to our attention in 2018 when HathiTrust wrote two articles about her popular libguide Prices and Wages by Decade (see Part 1 and Part 2). Since then, our admiration for Marie has continued to grow as we’ve noticed the huge number of users her libguide refers to HathiTrust and the flow of correction requests she sends to HathiTrust Support. So, when Marie contacted the UC Libraries HathiTrust Help Center last summer, we saw our chance and pounced. Happily for us, Marie graciously agreed to be interviewed for this article.
Marie’s work on Prices and Wages by Decade has had a direct impact on HathiTrust. Marie informs us that the libguide has had over 7 million page visits to date and 70% of its 22K links are directly to HathiTrust volumes. This translates into a lot of users being referred to HathiTrust – more than 60K in 2025 alone. Work on the libguide has led to her submitting more corrections requests to HathiTrust User Support than any other user, and those requests for metadata and scan corrections have led to the improvement or amelioration of thousands of volumes.
Marie’s contributions to HathiTrust don’t end with her Prices and Wages libguide. She has also become an expert at searching HathiTrust and other digital libraries, and she shares this extensive knowledge with students and researchers by teaching in-depth workshops on the use of HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Internet Archive. As a reference librarian, she also meets with individual researchers on a day-to-day basis to help them locate resources and information, frequently referring them to HathiTrust.
Marie shared her response to what was “probably one of the most challenging reference questions” she has ever received. She used HathiTrust to help a bicycle historian on his quest to find the true inventor of the pedal-driven bicycle. His question got her “hot on the trail” searching HathiTrust for the intricacies of patent law in the 1860s. Her search included legal volumes on patent law and books written for a French audience of inventors and patent lawyers at that time. In describing her search, Marie shared a helpful trick for using HathiTrust:
“I do not know French, so it was fantastic to be able to read these foreign language books directly in HathiTrust, simply by turning on Google Chrome’s translation plug-in! All I had to do was switch to the plain text view in HathiTrust; then Google Chrome’s Translate did the rest.”
Another helpful trick Marie shared is to strategically search for common OCR mistakes to expand search results. For example, she suggested that bicycle historians try searching HathiTrust for “bioyole” in order to bring up additional results. While individuals can engage with this type of strategic searching, Marie also suggests that HathiTrust could potentially implement this search function on the back end:
"Imagine a checkbox in the HathiTrust search interface that a person could click to potentially get more results. It would be programmed to substitute all letters which are most commonly misread in OCR. For example, the letter "C" is often misread as "O." "P' for "F." "B" might be read as "8," and so on.”
We asked Marie what she saw as HathiTrust’s greatest strength, and her passion came across in her response:
“Perhaps its greatest strength is protecting the historical record. It encourages integrity of the print tradition in that it displays photographic images of pages, so users can easily compare copies of the same book across several libraries to make sure they all match. Because of HathiTrust, people of the future will always be able to know what books from the past actually said – unchanged and unedited. I’ve already found works popping up on the internet purporting to be true html versions of printed books, when in fact they have been rewritten in some sections. While this may sound like a dystopian science fiction scenario, it is already happening. And even worse, AI is picking it up! While it’s hard to stop that kind of unethical behavior, anyone who cares to check will always be able to see the original in HathiTrust.”
Marie also appreciates that HathiTrust makes the provenance of a work clear and obvious:
"Another huge strength is that HathiTrust enables a user to see the publication within its bibliographic context. For example, if it’s an issue in a series, it’s easy to see that, and to navigate around to other issues of the same serial. At the same time, HathiTrust doesn’t sacrifice screen real estate for this “envelope information.” I love being able to toggle to full screen, and magnify to my heart’s content. HathiTrust has found a way to give us the best of both worlds."
When asked what she would change about HathiTrust if she could, Marie had a lot of ideas, indicating that she has thought about potential tools and improvements quite a bit:
- Have persistent page-level links which show highlighting on selected passages. This will allow users to share links that focus the reader’s attention to the relevant portion of the page, a feature found in Google Books (see example).
- Develop pathways that allow libraries to work together to get missing fold-outs digitized. Foldouts often contain information that’s truly important or even central to the whole book.
- Flag incomplete volumes and those with legibility issues to ensure that libraries don’t discard their physical copies thinking the online version makes a suitable substitute.
- Allow users from member institutions to request a copyright review of a volume to see if it might be eligible for display in full view.
- Allow users to recommend titles for digitization. Faculty who are experts in their fields may notice the absence of important historic titles, and their input could be quite useful in filling gaps. This could lead to a centralized wish list of books needing digitization, that contributing libraries could consult when selecting items from their own collection to scan.
- Monetary Donations: Make a pathway for the general public to donate books of their own choosing to a HathiTrust library, along with a monetary amount sufficient to cover the cost of digitization and upload to HathiTrust.
When we asked Marie how she would envision HathiTrust in 10 years time, Maire responded with ideas for two potentially useful tools that are not yet in existence:
- A tool to easily convert information on a page into a data table
"I like to think that in the future, HathiTrust will have a feature which enables users to drag grid lines over a data table like the one on this page. Once the user has set lines where the rows and columns should be, HathiTrust would then transform the page into spreadsheet format for download, with actual numbers inside each cell, ready for mathematical calculations (after a manual spot check to make sure the numbers were read accurately, of course)."
- Advance Search option for illustrations
"There is an enormous amount of artwork and illustration in HathiTrust’s library which cannot be easily teased out through the search interface. Color illustrations are valuable, and especially for early publications like this one. It would be great if there could be a way to search for art beyond using the typical words like “plates” or “illus.” If artificial intelligence could be trained to identify artwork, photographs, maps and other such features at the page level, then perhaps the advanced search interface could include a field for 'contains image.'"