HathiTrust Constitutional Convention

HathiTrust recently held a Constitutional Convention to determine the governance model for the partnership and to set directions for its next phase. Tom Leonard was UC Berkeley’s convention delegate.

Members submitted 7 proposals for discussion and vote at the convention (see the bottom of this post for comprehensive list.) Two of the proposals that were passed are of considerable interest to selectors:

Proposal 1 – Distributed Print Monographs Archive (Collections Committee) – PASSED

Libraries everywhere are feeling the need to reduce the amount of print material that they have to shelve locally, with the hopes of having an option to de-dupe across collections. Hathi members agreed that Hathi would be a good institution to organize a distributed print collection to parallel what Hathi has digitized. [For material that is still under copyright, this print collection would be protection against all copies going missing of a title; for material that is no longer under copyright, the print counterpart would act as an archival backup copy.]

The print archive would be held by various member institutions who agree to commit to long-term stewardship of the print.

HathiTrust will provide financial support to institutions who act as repositories.

Next step: HathiTrust will initiate a formal planning process to develop the necessary policies, operational plans, and business model required to establish and sustain a distributed print archive.

Proposal 4 – U.S. Government Documents (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) – PASSED

UC Berkeley shares an ongoing concern that U.S. government documents need to be preserved and accessible, that there is a lot of unnecessary duplication of print across institutions on the one hand, and that on the other, born digital government publications are not necessarily being collected and preserved in the most efficient manner. Member libraries voted to have HathiTrust facilitate collective action to create a comprehensive digital corpus of U.S. federal publications including those issued by GPO and other federal agencies. The project will include 1) developing a planning process to coordinate operational plans and a business model to coordinate digitization, ingest, and display of U.S. federal publications including those issued by GPO and other federal agencies and 2) begin consideration of born-digital publications of GPO and other federal agencies

The seven proposals are:

  • Proposal 1 – Distributed Print Monographs Archive (Collections Committee) – PASSED
  • Proposal 2 – Approval Process for Development Initiatives (California, Cornell, Columbia) – PASSED
  • Proposal 3 – Governance Structure (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) – PASSED
  • Proposal 4 – U.S. Government Documents (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) – PASSED
  • Proposal 5 – Mission and Goals (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) – NOT PASSED, But Referred to Board of Governors for additional discussion
  • Proposal 6 – HathiTrust Implementation Review Committee (Cornell, Columbia, California) – NOT PASSED
  • Proposal 7 – Fee-for-service Content Deposit – PASSED

 Best, Bernie