The nation’s largest research libraries are collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital collections, including millions of books, organizers recently announced. These holdings will be archived and preserved in a single repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain will be available for reading online.
Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, the HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries, organizers say.
“This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the nation’s foremost research libraries and holds even greater promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners,” says John Wilkin, associate University librarian and the newly named executive director of HathiTrust. Hathi (pronounced HAH-tee), the Hindi word for elephant incorporated into the repository’s name, underscores the immensity of this undertaking, Wilkin says. Elephants also evoke memory, wisdom and strength.
“Before this collaboration,” Wilkin says, “the collections in each library existed in isolation. Now we are bringing them together, pooling resources and eliminating redundancies, and producing a valuable research tool that will be greater than the sum of its parts.”
As of today, HathiTrust contains more than 2 million volumes and approximately three-quarters of a billion pages, about 16 percent of which are in the public domain. Public domain materials will be available for reading online. Materials protected by copyright, although not available for reading online, are given the full range of digital archiving services, thereby offering member libraries a reliable means to preserve their collections. Organizers also expect to use those materials in the research and development of the trust.
“Digitization of print texts has the promise of being transformative of scholarship and of library practice,” says Paul Courant, U-M librarian, dean of libraries and former provost. “In both areas, the ability to search many texts and to preserve texts accessibly creates tremendous opportunities for collaboration amongst scholars and universities. HathiTrust has made a good start, and like the elephant for which it is named, we expect that it will prove able to carry and deliver valuable resources with grace and reliability.”
Volumes are added to the repository daily, and content will grow rapidly as UC, CIC member libraries and other prospective partners contribute their digitized content. The University of Virginia also is joining the initiative.
Each of the founding partners brings to this endeavor extensive and highly regarded expertise in the areas of information technology, digital libraries and project management. Creation of the HathiTrust supports the digitization efforts of the CIC and UC, each of which has entered into collective agreements with Google to digitize portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search project. Materials digitized through other means also will be made available through HathiTrust.
“HathiTrust exemplifies the next evolution of how great universities will work,” says Brad Wheeler, Indiana University chief information officer and HathiTrust executive board member. “IU and Michigan partnered swiftly among our IT and library organizations to develop HathiTrust, and we have done so at large scale with the CIC and the University of California. Collaboration that gets things done, saves money and creates an abundance of service for scholars is the way forward for higher ed.”
HathiTrust provides libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections or born-digital materials, organizers say. Preserving materials for the long term has long been a mission and driving force of leading research libraries. Their collections, accumulated over centuries, represent a treasury of cultural heritage and investment in the broad public good of promoting scholarship and advancing knowledge.
The representation of these resources in digital form provides expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching, and learning, but must be done with careful attention to effective solutions for the curation and long-term preservation of digital assets, they say.
“The CIC Libraries have always worked at a large scale, with big collections, big user communities and high expectations for service. They are not intimidated by big challenges, and will bring their comfort with this to the development of the shared digital repository,” said Mark Sandler, director of the CIC Center for Library Initiatives.
The CIC and UC each produce an estimated 10 percent of the new doctorates granted in the United States each year and together serve more than 600,000 students.
The Midwest-based CIC includes the universities of the Big Ten, plus the University of Chicago. Partner libraries represent Indiana University, University of Illinois, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Iowa, U-M, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Combined, they serve more than 385,000 students, employ more than 190,000 faculty members and staff, and expend $6 billion in research and development.
The UC system includes 10 research universities at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz plus the systemwide California Digital Library, with more than 220,000 students, 170,000 faculty members and staff, and more than 1.5 million alumni living and working around the globe. The University of California Libraries together comprise the largest single university library system in the world.
