In its October 24 issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article on the HathiTrust. This new collaborative initiative seeks to establish a repository for university libraries to archive, preserve, and share their digitized collections. The University of California system is one of the collaborating partners.
Books digitized by Google form the backbone of the repository, which currently contains over 2 million volumes digitized from the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The UC Libraries will be contributing all of our mass digitized materials from both the Google Books and Open Content Alliance projects.
A public search interface is currently being developed; in the meantime, you can sample the HathiTrust content through a subset of the University of Michigan’s online catalog – Mirlyn: HathiTrust Digital Library.
For more information:
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In Case Google Bails Out on Its Library Project, Universities Create a Backup, Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 24, 2008)
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HathiTrust: A Digital Repository for Libraries, by Libraries, Beth Ashmore, Information Today (October 23, 2008)