To mark the major milestone of the HathiTrust Digital Library amassing its 10 millionth volume, the U-M Library will host a celebration at 4 p.m. Friday in the Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery.
Light refreshments will be served at the event.
HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a collaboration of the 13 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia. The seed for that collaboration was planted by a 2006 U-M proposal that a consortium of libraries share a repository of their growing digital collections.
Today HathiTrust encompasses almost 70 institutional partners and the digitized collections of some of the largest libraries in the world, including content that is not available online anywhere else. While only a portion of the 10 million volumes are readable online — about 28 percent of the repository is in the public domain — all of them are discoverable and searchable.
John Wilkin, associate university librarian and executive director of HathiTrust, emphasizes the repository’s preservation mission. “This collaborative effort among research institutions ensures that these works will be preserved and discoverable long into the future. It’s our contribution to posterity,” he says.
While Wilkin stresses that the collaborative nature of HathiTrust has been critical to its success, he adds that the university can take special pride in its leadership role in the organization’s founding and early development. “We should celebrate this achievement, because the University of Michigan’s early commitment to digitization has helped make it possible,” he says.
