A New Blog From HathiTrust and 2011 Mid-Year HathiTrust Review Now Online

Blog News

1. Perspectives from HathiTrust is the title of a new blog from the organization. The premiere post was written by John Wilkin, the Executive Director of HathiTrust and the Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology (LIT) at the University of Michigan. The blog post is titled, “HathiTrust and Discovery”

Wiklin Begins:

It is a core tenet of HathiTrust that preservation cannot take place without access. The coupling of preservation and access is both philosophically and strategically central to HathiTrust’s mission, as awareness of the materials in our collections helps to create the value that leads to preservation. And because discovery is integral to access, HathiTrust has worked hard on a multi-pronged strategy for discovery. Key to this strategy are our ongoing efforts to ensure that HathiTrust content is “in the flow” of library discovery more generally, as illustrated by our recent agreement to integrate the HathiTrust full text indexes into the Summon discovery service, and our collaboration with OCLC to create a permanent bibliographic catalog for HathiTrust.

Read the Complete Blog Post

The Large Scale Search Blog, that posts about technical issues at HathiTrust is available here.

Hat Tip/Thanks to the California Digital Library for sharing the info.

Report

2. The HathiTrust has published their 2011 Mid-Year Review.

Here are a couple of items included in the report.

New Members

HathiTrust was pleased to welcome 2 new partners in the first part of 2011: Boston University, and Lafayette College, its first liberal arts college partner. Several other institutions have joined and will be announced in the coming weeks. As of June, HathiTrust has 58 partners.

New content

HathiTrust partners contributed more than 900,000 volumes to the repository between January and June 2011, raising the total number of volumes to over 8.8 million. Nearly 2.5 million volumes are in the public domain. New institutions to contribute content in 2011 include:

• Harvard University
• Library of Congress
• University of Virginia

WorldCat Local Prototype

In January, HathiTrust and OCLC announced the release of a collaborative prototype bibliographic catalog. In the next year, this catalog is planned to replace the temporary catalog HathiTrust has had in place since April 2009. More information about the catalog initiative is available in OCLC’s press release. Information about HathiTrust’s discovery strategy more broadly is posted in the first entry in HathiTrust’s new blog: Perspectives from HathiTrust.

The Complete 2o11 Mid -Year Review is Available Here. 

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation