UC Participation in HathiTrust

I posted a blog on November 9, 2011 to highlight selected results from the HathiTrust Constitutional Convention.  The statement below from the Council of University Librarians (CoUL) puts my post into perspective and explains why we are participating in the HathiTrust. I trust you will find the CoUL statement interesting and useful.

Best regards, Bernie

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To: Diane Bisom, Chair, SOPAG, for distribution to the ACGs and campus libraries

From: Ginny Steel, Chair, CoUL

Re: UC Participation in HathiTrust

As you may know, the University of California Libraries, a founding member of the HathiTrust Digital Library, recently participated as a delegation to the HathiTrust Constitutional Convention in Washington DC, along with 63 other partner institutions. The purpose of the Constitutional Convention was to formalize the governance structure for HathiTrust now that it has a sizeable membership and has established itself as a trusted digital repository. A review of the Constitutional Convention and the outcomes of the ballot initiatives presented and deliberated are available at:

http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2011/10/17/hathitrust-update-september-2011-%e2%80%93-constitutional-convention-and-much-more/

and the official notes from the Constitutional Convention are at:

http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/HathiTrust-ConCon-Notes.pdf

The HathiTrust Digital Library is an inter-institutional digital preservation repository of primarily mass-digitized books made accessible through a highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and, as appropriate, access services for public domain and in- copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. The Council of University Librarians (CoUL) has identified participation in the HathiTrust Digital Library as a major collaborative strategic initiative of the ten University of California Libraries and the California Digital Library (CDL). Through membership in HathiTrust, the UC libraries will be able to maximize long-term access to digital content, a key element in our quest to capitalize on technological opportunities to accelerate the transition to a primarily digital environment. CDL and UC Libraries staff are participating in the strategic development, technology architecture development, and governance of the HathiTrust.

Membership in the HathiTrust provides the following significant benefits to the UC Libraries:

· Unification of our UC content digitized by Google and the Internet Archive (IA). Books digitized by Google (including more than 1.4 million volumes from UC) form the backbone of the repository, but Internet Archive-digitized volumes and locally-digitized books from the University of Michigan are also included. UC will contribute all of its mass digitization materials (currently almost 3 million volumes). The HathiTrust is also committed to including public domain content from non-Google partners.

• Greater service to users through combined content and access to materials digitized by other institutions. This includes content from partner libraries found nowhere else on the web or specifically opened (in the case of copyright-restricted materials) by copyright holders for access to users in HathiTrust.

• Opportunity to provide deeper support for scholarly access to mass digitized materials, including the abilities to retrieve content in different formats (e.g. plain text, PDF, and page image), browse and facet search results, define full-text searches across selected bodies of content, and save items to targeted collections.

· Reduced costs resulting from sharing access and preservation services with multiple partners.

The Council of University Librarians views the HathiTrust Digital Library as a significant tool in the development and support of the UC Libraries’ digital collections and as a resource for expanding access to and delivery of UC’s remarkable collections.

Additional information about the HathiTrust is available at: http://www.hathitrust.org/home and at: http://www.cdlib.org/services/hathi/faq.html