Major Library Partners Launch HathiTrust Shared Digital Repository

["Shana Kimball" <shana.kimball@gmail.com>]

*Please excuse multiple postings*

Major Library Partners Launch HathiTrust Shared Digital 
Repository - There's an Elephant in the Library; Organizers 
Promise It Will Never Forget

A group of the nation's largest research libraries are 
collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital 
collections, including millions of books, organizers announced 
today. These holdings will be archived and preserved in a single 
repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain 
will be available for reading online.

Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the 
Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 
university libraries of the University of California system, the 
HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation 
and access to information that university libraries have valued 
for centuries. UC's participation will be coordinated by the 
California Digital Library (CDL), which brings its deep and 
innovative experience in digital curation and online scholarship 
to the HathiTrust.

"This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the 
nation's foremost research libraries and holds even greater 
promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners," says 
John Wilkin, associate university librarian of the University of 
Michigan and the newly named executive director of HathiTrust. 
Hathi (pronounced HAH-tee), the Hindi word for elephant 
incorporated into the repository's name, underscores the 
immensity of this undertaking, Wilkin says. Elephants also evoke 
memory, wisdom, and strength.

As of today, HathiTrust contains more than 2 million volumes and 
approximately 3/4 of a billion pages, about 16 percent of which 
are in the public domain. Public domain materials will be 
available for reading online. Materials protected by copyright, 
although not available for reading online are given the full 
range of digital archiving services, thereby offering member 
libraries a reliable means to preserve their collections. 
Organizers also expect to use those materials in the research and 
development of the Trust.

Volumes are added to the repository daily, and content will grow 
rapidly as the University of California, CIC member libraries, 
and other prospective partners contribute their digitized 
content. Also today, the founding partners announce that the 
University of Virginia is joining the initiative.

Each of the founding partners brings extensive and highly 
regarded expertise in the areas of information technology, 
digital libraries, and project management to this endeavor. 
Creation of the HathiTrust supports the digitization efforts of 
the CIC and the University of California, each of which has 
entered into collective agreements with Google to digitize 
portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 
million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search 
project. Materials digitized through other means will also be 
made available through HathiTrust.

HathiTrust provides libraries a means to archive and provide 
access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special 
collections, or born-digital materials. Preserving materials for 
the long term has long been a mission and driving force of 
leading research libraries. Their collections, accumulated over 
centuries, represent a treasury of cultural heritage and 
investment in the broad public good of promoting scholarship and 
advancing knowledge. The representation of these resources in 
digital form provides expanded opportunities for innovative use 
in research, teaching, and learning, but must be done with 
careful attention to effective solutions for the curation and 
long-term preservation of digital assets.

"The CIC Libraries have always worked at a large scale, with big 
collections, big user communities and high expectations for 
service. They are not intimidated by big challenges, and will 
bring their comfort with this to the development of the shared 
digital repository," says Mark Sandler, director of the CIC 
Center for Library Initiatives.

"The University of California libraries have an unparalleled 
reputation for innovation in digital library development and 
inter-institutional collaboration," says Laine Farley, interim 
executive director of the California Digital Library. 
"Participation in the HathiTrust continues this tradition and 
will enable UC to provide its students and scholars with access 
to one of the most significant digital collections ever 
assembled." Adds Brian Schottlaender, the Audrey Geisel 
University Librarian at UC San Diego, "The University of 
California Libraries are pleased to work collaboratively with our 
CIC colleagues to build a rich and coherent resource accessible 
to scholars for the long-term."

"Researchers will benefit from the expert curation and consistent 
access they have long associated with the CIC research 
libraries," says Michael McRobbie, president of Indiana 
University. "Great libraries have long been essential to 
outstanding scholarship, and the HathiTrust collaboration among 
the CIC institutions, the University of California and others 
provides an essential tool for 21st- century scholars."

"Digitization of print texts has the promise of being 
transformative of scholarship and of library practice," says Paul 
Courant, University of Michigan librarian, dean of libraries, and 
former provost. "In both areas, the ability to search many texts 
and to preserve texts accessibly creates tremendous opportunities 
for collaboration amongst scholars and universities. HathiTrust 
has made a good start, and like the elephant for which it is 
named, we expect that it will prove able to carry and deliver 
valuable resources with grace and reliability."

"Before this collaboration," Wilkin says, "the collections in 
each library existed in isolation. Now we are bringing them 
together, pooling resources and eliminating redundancies, and 
producing a valuable research tool that will be greater than the 
sum of its parts."

The CIC and the University of California each produce an 
estimated 10 percent of the new Ph.D.'s granted in the United 
States each year and together serve more than 600,000 students.

The Midwest-based Committee on Institutional Cooperation includes 
the universities of the Big Ten, plus the University of Chicago. 
Partner libraries represent Indiana University, University of 
Illinois, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Iowa, 
University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of 
Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn 
State University, Purdue University and University of 
Wisconsin-Madison. Combined, they serve more than 385,000 
students, employ more than 190,000 faculty and staff, and expend 
$6 billion in research and development.

The University of California system includes ten research 
universities at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, 
Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa 
Cruz plus the systemwide California Digital Library, with more 
than 220,000 students, 170,000 faculty and staff, and more than 
1.5 million alumni living and working around the globe. The 
University of California Libraries together comprise the largest 
single university library system in the world.

Contact:  Liene Karels, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
734 764 6338  or lkarels@umich.edu
www.hathitrust.org