For those who thought Google Book Search and its Library Partners program represented the death knell for libraries, take a deep breath and check out the latest digital elephant in the room, HathiTrust. HathiTrust is a shared digital repository aimed at bringing the vast collections of print books and journals currently housed in libraries into the digital world for the purposes of access, discovery, and preservation. The project began as a partnership of the 13 university libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the 10 libraries of the University of California system, and the California Digital Library (CDL). The University of Virginia Library also officially joined the partnership on Oct. 13, 2008, the same day the repository itself was announced....
[All these institutions are] members of...Google Book Search Library Partners program. While it might seem like the HathiTrust repository would be in direct competition with projects like Google Book Search and the Open Content Alliance (OCA), HathiTrust’s leadership would disagree. Laine Farley, interim executive director of the CDL, sees the projects as complementary to each other and that the HathiTrust can fill a special academic niche. "We have become convinced that there are some approaches to using this content, from an academic standpoint, that Google may not address."
One of the areas in which the projects diverge is the importance placed on long-term preservation....
[M]any of the HathiTrust partners...have been developing the technological infrastructure necessary for creating large-scale searching, rights management, and backup capabilities for this amount of information....[T]he rights management system allows for manual overrides of the automated assertions to allow for a wide variety of instances, including occasions where rightsholders allow open access to their work....
The partners have already developed one API that allows local library catalogs to get URLs and rights information from the HathiTrust site....
The current partners have funded the HathiTrust for "an initial 5-year period beginning January 2008, with a planned process of review and renewal". Future partners "will be charged a one-time start-up fee based on the number of volumes added to the repository, in addition to an annual fee for the curation of those volumes," according to the HathiTrust FAQ....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/23/2008 11:13:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
