The launch of HathiTrust (Oct. 13, 2008)

Today, we officially launched HathiTrust, a multi-institutional effort to create the universal library--to bring together as comprehensive a body of works as possible and to do it in a way that ensures access, permanence, content preservation, and an advanced environment for research.  See the press release here:  http://www.hathitrust.org/press.  In short, HathiTrust is an effort born of libraries, working to bring the lasting contributions of libraries to bear on the growing body of digital materials available to students and researchers. Much has been said and written about the silo effect of digital libraries, the way that our early technological efforts balkanized content and failed to capitalize on economies of scale.  With the creation of HathiTrust, many of the world's great research libraries will work together to create a single, comprehensive library without walls.  Our partners will work to coordinate their investments both in curating content and in building services, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

In doing this, of course, we raise many questions:

Is this an effort that will compete with Google Book Search?
We believe in the value the private sector can bring to great challenges like discovery, but we also believe that our commitment to permanence sets us apart from private sector efforts.  Should Google or Microsoft lose interest or should their stockholders question the corporate commitment to these large bodies of information, these companies will move on to other problems.  The libraries that have initiated this effort are committed to the long-term preservation and availability of their content; doing so is part of their fundamental identity as research libraries.  Moreover, it is always likely that research libraries will support uses that the private sector does not value.  Consider, for example, data mining and other types of analysis.  We will be working to support this type of activity for the researchers of our institutions, and for the public more broadly.  You can be sure that when something in the HathiTrust is cited, you can always return to that source, to confirm, refute or build on previous work.

If HathiTrust strives to support access, what about access to its in-copyright materials?
The member institutions of HathiTrust obey the law and do not believe that, for example, "fair use" can be construed to mean authenticated access to this entire body of material for all of our users.  However, we do and will support many lawful uses of the in-copyright materials.  Under the terms of Section 108 of US copyright law, we may provide limited access to works that are in jeopardy and that are not readily available on the market.  In addition, for the first time ever, through the use of appropriate technologies we will be able to provide broad library access to many disabled users.  We also hope to work with rights holders to broaden access, not only to our constituencies, but to the world.  And, at the very least, one basic appropriate use is the preservation of this content.

Is HathiTrust a digital archiving effort to end all digital archiving efforts?
We believe that HathiTrust occupies an important space in a valuable and growing area of work by our community.  Where Portico works with publishers to curate actively published journal content, HathiTrust will serve as the vehicle for preserving books and many journals (particularly journals that have ceased publication).  We intend to grow HathiTrust in many ways, but we will also work actively with organizations like Portico, OCLC and CLOCKSS to strengthen the support our community gives to preserving digital content.

Is the content of HathiTrust "open"? 
The library partners who have created HathiTrust are committed to broad access to the content in this digital library.  Hundreds of thousands of public domain works are already available in HathiTrust, and not simply to the communities immediately served by our libraries.  We understand that many would like to copy large numbers of digitized works from HathiTrust, and where we have appropriate rights (for tens of thousands of volumes already), we will make that possible.  We know that this openness provides the greatest benefit to our users, and we will work to make the content in the HathiTrust more accessible as time goes on.

HathiTrust faces many issues going forward--the quality of the content deposited, challenges to digital preservation, governance and cost models --but HathiTrust has demonstrated success and efficiency in overcoming significant challenges it has faced thus far. By leveraging the capabilities of large-scale digitization and bringing together key partners, HathiTrust will create a new way for libraries to work together to ensure that the great values we have always stood for are supported well into the future.