title: MEASURING CONTENT QUALITY IN A PRESERVATION  REPOSITORY: HATHITRUST AND LARGE-SCALE BOOK  DIGITIZATION
creators: Paul Conway
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.