Overview of HathiTrust. Part of the program "Large-Scale Digital Initiatives," held at Colby College on February 24, 2012.

1. HATHITRUST
HTTP://WWW.HATHITRUST.ORG
Large-Scale Digital Initiatives and their potential
impact on the Maine Shared Collections Strategy
Colby College
February 24, 2012

2. MISSION
 The mission of HathiTrust is to
contribute to the common good by
collecting, organizing, preserving,
communicating, and sharing the
record of human knowledge.

3. GOALS
 To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital
archive of library materials converted from print that is co-
owned and managed by a number of academic institutions.
 To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways
that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning
institutions.
 To help preserve these important human records by creating
reliable and accessible electronic representations.
 To stimulate redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage
strategies among libraries, thus reducing long-term capital
and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage
and care of print collections.
 To create and sustain this “public good” in a way that mitigates
the problem of free-riders.
 To create a technical framework that is simultaneously
responsive to members through the centralized creation of
functionality and sufficiently open to the creation of tools and
services not created by the central organization.

4. NUMBERS*
 10,094,778 total volumes
 5,341,587 book titles
 265,840 serial titles
 2,778,690 volumes (~28% of total) in the public
domain
 60+ partners
*As of February 21, 2012

5. DATES AND LANGUAGES
 More than 40 languages are represented
 Top 10: English, German, French, Spanish,
Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, Latin
 Publication dates range from pre-1500 to 2009
 Bulk of holdings (~63%) published between 1960-2009

6. SOURCES AND FORMATS
 Libraries
 Google-digitized material
 Internet Archive / Microsoft – digitized material
 In-house digitized material
 University Press digitized material
 Currently includes text materials (PDF)
 Future plans:
 Digital audio materials
 Digital images (maps, photographs)
 Digitally created open access journals

7. SEARCHING FOR ITEMS: CURRENT INTERFACE

8. SEARCHING FOR ITEMS: PROTOTYPE
CATALOG (WORLDCAT LOCAL LAYER)

9. SEARCHING FOR ITEMS: UMAINE ONESEARCH
(SUMMON)

10. PRESERVATION
 Committed to preservation (was the basis for the
formation of HathiTrust)
 Certified Trusted Digital Repository
 Use of standard and open content formats that
meet community-accepted digital preservation
standards
 “Rigorous” validation of content upon ingest
 Regular checks on integrity of stored content
 www.hathitrust.org/preservation

11. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE GRANT?
 Right now:
 No grant partners are HathiTrust partners
 HathiTrust full-text index is available through Summon; this
could be turned on in Maine’s OneSearch
 Public domain items, items under Creative Commons
licenses are available for viewing, some may be downloaded
one page at a time
 Issues with Google scans (may be available to fully download
in Google Books)
 Partnership possibilities
 Some grant partners are looking into joining HathiTrust
 Individuals affiliated with partner institutions can download
full-PDFs of all public domain works, plus works made
available under Creative Commons licenses
 Partners can also contribute their own digitized material, if it
complies with UMich digitization standards.

12. ADDITIONAL GRANT IMPLICATIONS
 Digital availability is one factor being considered in
retention decisions (re: number of copies)
 Print on demand availability
 Distributed Print Monographs archive