University of Michigan (University of Michigan, School of Information)

Ongoing mass digitization of books and serials is generating extraordinary digital collections and transforming education and research at all levels. However, these efforts also have raised questions about the quality and usefulness of the digital copies produced by such large-scale projects. The University of Michigan’s School of Information and the University Libraries, in collaboration with the HathiTrust and the University of Minnesota Libraries, will investigate possible methods for detecting and measuring errors and other quality issues within mass-digitized literature, and analyze the potential impact of found errors on educational and scholarly use of these digital collections. The findings of this study will be a significant contribution to the field of information quality, and will inform digital repositories about assessing the quality of objects they have committed to preserving on a large scale.