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University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A Guide to the HathiTrust Research Center

An introductory guide to the tools and resources of the HathiTrust Research Center.

Algorithm? What's that?

Unsure about the terms in this section?

Click on the Glossary tab at the top of this guide to learn more about words used in this guide.

What's a workset?

Worksets serve to define the scope of the group of texts being analyzed, in order to conduct research on them effectively. Thus, worksets allow researchers to cut out the "noise" or irrelevant material that would be there if analysis were to be carried out across the entire scope of the HathiTrust corpus.

Worksets have two functions:

Organizational

  • Gather material of interest in one place (like a "virtual study carrel")
  • Users can search/metadata criteria to "slice and dice" results into a usable workset

Algorithmic:

  • Delimit the "scope" of the analysis
  • You don’t want to run your analysis on the whole of the HathiTrust collection — you want to run it only on material that is interesting/relevant to you

Learn how to create a workset in the HTRC documentation: https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/x/cIFnAQ Note that you need to have an account with HathiTrust set up before accessing these resources.

Algorithmic:
  • Delimit the "scope" of the analysis
  • You don’t want to run your analysis on the whole of the HathiTrust collection — you want to run it only on material that is interesting/relevant to you

Learn how to create a workset in the HTRC documentation wiki: https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/x/cIFnAQ