Category Archives: oa.hathi

HathiTrust: A Digital Library Revolution Takes Flight

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“The phrase “closed until further notice due to COVID-19” has become all too familiar. And, while we have started to grow accustomed to losing access to many resources that typically define our community existence, there’s one that’s particularly crucial to student and faculty researchers: libraries. For some, it may be easy to write off libraries as “nice-to-have.” But for scholars, they are essential. And as library doors began to shutter throughout California and much of the world, the potential impact on the academic community was profound.

Thankfully, the University of California has been preparing for this moment for decades. In 2008, the UC Libraries co-founded HathiTrust, and started contributing scanned copies of books and journals to the new organization. Based at the University of Michigan (U-M), HathiTrust is a large-scale repository of digital content collaboratively created by academic and research institutions. As researchers lost access to vital hard-copy materials, it initiated an Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) to give UC researchers critical access to more than 13 million digital volumes. This revolution has been immediately impactful — and a profound advancement in sharing digital content….”

Research Library Digitization Has Found Its Moment  | Ithaka S+R

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“Recent weeks have seen the collapse of the print format. With academic libraries closed during the pandemic, acquisition, processing, browsing, circulation, and interlibrary lending have come to a halt for tangible materials. 

But even before the pandemic, the primacy of print had passed. Academic libraries are no longer principally defined by their tangible collections nor even their physical spaces. They are easily the most digital part of the academic enterprise at traditional institutions of higher education. Libraries have fostered the creation of extraordinary digital collections, through a combination of content licensing, open access initiatives, and collection digitization. They have provided infrastructure and services that are accessible remotely. While libraries remain more than just their digital collections and services, the digital transformation has allowed libraries to provide tremendous value to the faculty members and students who have been displaced. 

One especially outright hero today is HathiTrust. Its Emergency Temporary Access Service enables its members to make vast swathes of their unavailable print collections accessible digitally. In essence, whatever components of a given member institution’s print collection have become temporarily unavailable can be “loaned” digitally to affiliates of that institution. For some members, this amounts to millions of books, in some cases well over half the print collection. The ability to simply “turn on” digital access to such a high share of the print collection on a temporary basis is an absolutely amazing benefit to Hathi members. It would be a surprise if other libraries were not clamoring to join the collaboration just for this benefit alone. …”

HathiTrust Provides Emergency Temporary Access to Copyrighted Books – California Digital Library

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“In response to COVID-19 library service disruptions, HathiTrust has taken an important step to open up copyrighted material in their digital library to member institutions with copies of those items in their physical collections. UC faculty, students, and staff at all ten University of California campuses now have access to digitized books in HathiTrust that represent UC’s print holdings. This emergency, temporary service nearly doubles UC’s access, to a total of more than 13 million digital volumes, including the 6.7 million digitized public domain volumes already available via HathiTrust….”

Need a book from the UC Berkeley Library while we’re sheltering in place? Check here first. | UC Berkeley Library News

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“The good news? You found a book that is essential to your research.

The bad news? It’s tucked away behind locked doors during the closure of the university’s Library buildings — a big but necessary step in the fight against the spread of the coronavirus.

You’re out of luck — right? Not so fast.

Starting today (April 2), UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are able to take advantage of HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service, a boon to the campus community during this unprecedented time. The service provides access to digital versions of millions of the physical volumes held by libraries across the 10-campus University of California system — plus UC’s two expansive off-site library storage facilities — helping the Library continue to serve its mission of teaching and learning even during the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascade of disruptions that have followed….”

Emergency Temporary Access Service | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“The Emergency Temporary Access Service permits special access for HathiTrust member libraries located in the U.S. that suffer an unexpected or involuntary, temporary disruption to normal operations, such as closure for a public health emergency, requiring the library to be closed to its patrons, or otherwise restrict print collection access services.

The service makes it possible for member library patrons to obtain lawful access to specific digital materials in HathiTrust that correspond to physical books held by their own library. The Emergency Temporary Access Service will enable many HathiTrust member libraries to continue supporting the teaching, learning, and research mission of their institutions during said disruption in service….”

Emergency Temporary Access Service | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“The Emergency Temporary Access Service permits special access for HathiTrust member libraries located in the U.S. that suffer an unexpected or involuntary, temporary disruption to normal operations, such as closure for a public health emergency, requiring the library to be closed to its patrons, or otherwise restrict print collection access services.

The service makes it possible for member library patrons to obtain lawful access to specific digital materials in HathiTrust that correspond to physical books held by their own library. The Emergency Temporary Access Service will enable many HathiTrust member libraries to continue supporting the teaching, learning, and research mission of their institutions during said disruption in service….”

HathiTrust Response to Covid-19 | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“HathiTrust staff members are working hard to explore a new emergency service for member libraries that will provide expanded access for their students, faculty, and staff to digitized versions of items in member library collections. We intend to expand fair use access to our corpus to ensure that the academic communities of our members can continue teaching and learning with HathiTrust resources if physical access to print collections is compromised during the COVID-19 pandemic. Member libraries must meet specific emergency conditions and implement the service to the specifications that permit fair use access….

Academic Libraries Eligible for Emergency Access

HathiTrust member libraries located in the U.S. that have suffered an unexpected or involuntarydisruption to normal operations, such as closure for a public health emergency like COVID-19 pandemic, requiring it to be closed to the public, or otherwise restrict print collection access services. 

Emergency Temporary Access Service: Summary

 

Students, faculty, and staff ONLY at the affected institution will, upon logging in to HathiTrust, have access to copyrighted titles that the library owns and for which we have been able to identify a match through our ongoing holdings analysis. Users will be able to read the book online, in the web browser, but will not be able to download the work in full. …”

4.5 Million UC Volumes Digitized & UC’s Most Popular Full View Books in HathiTrust for 2019 – California Digital Library

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“The University of California Libraries recently contributed the 4,500,000th digitized book from their collections to HathiTrust Digital Library–a tremendous achievement resulting from 15 years of continuous digitization work. 

The vast majority of these millions of volumes were generated via the Google Books Library Project, which UC joined in 2006. That year the mass digitization of UC’s library collections began in earnest when the Northern Research Library Facility (NRLF) started sending books to the Google Books Library Project for scanning. UC’s work with the Google Books Library Project has never paused–by the time UC’s 3,000,000th volume was digitized in 2010, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, and UCLA had all begun sending collections to Google for digitization. Since then, UC San Francisco, the Southern Research Library Facility (SRLF), UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara have all participated, with UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UCLA, and NRLF continuing to do so….”

It’s No Secret – Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public… | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“Since 2008 the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has been researching hundreds of thousands of books to find ones that are in the public domain and can be opened for view in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Over the past 11 years, 168 people across North America have worked together for a common goal: the ability to share public domain works from our libraries. As of September 2019, the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has performed copyright reviews on 506,989 US publications; of those, 302,915 (59.7%) have been determined to be in the public domain in the United States. The opening of these works in HathiTrust has brought the total of openly available volumes to 6,540,522.

The Copyright Review Program, now an operational program of HathiTrust, began as a grant-funded ambition of the University of Michigan Library, under the leadership of Melissa Levine. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded three consecutive grants enabling the University of Michigan Library and grant collaborators to build a copyright review management system. The program is still going strong eleven years later, resulting in hundreds of publications determined to be in the public domain each week.

One way the Copyright Review Program determines the copyright status of items in the HathiTrust corpus is to determine whether they were properly renewed. In the United States, the copyright in works published between 1924 and 1964 had to be renewed about 28 years after the item was published; works could move into the public domain when their initial term of protection expired. The Stanford Copyright Renewal Database was one of the first to host monograph renewal records in an open access database, but much of the initial copyright registration information remains difficult to search. …”