The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion on Mon­day, Octo­ber 13, 2008, has announced the for­ma­tion of a giant library to serve as a back-up for Google Books, des­ig­nated as the HathiTrust.

“The…HathiTrust, …con­sists of the mem­bers of the Com­mit­tee on Insti­tu­tional Coop­er­a­tion, a con­sor­tium of the 11 uni­ver­si­ties in the Big Ten Con­fer­ence and the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, and the 10 cam­puses in the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia sys­tem. The Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia is join­ing the project, it will be announced today, and offi­cials hope to bring in other col­leges as well.”

Already HathiTrust  (a shared dig­i­tal respos­i­tory ), con­tains the full text of more than two mil­lion books scanned by Google.  How­ever, only about 16 per­cent of the books in HathiTrust—or about 327,000 volumes—are out of copy­right so that their full text can be deliv­ered to all readers.

To read the whole arti­cle: http://chronicle.com/free/2008/10/5061n.htm

“Global library coop­er­a­tive Online Com­puter Library Cen­ter, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that it will work together with HathiTrust to increase vis­i­bil­ity of and access to items in the HathiTrust’s shared dig­i­tal repos­i­tory. HathiTrust is a group of some of the largest research libraries in the US col­lab­o­rat­ing to cre­ate a repos­i­tory of their vast dig­i­tal collections.”

“OCLC and HathiTrust will work together to increase online vis­i­bil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity of the dig­i­tal col­lec­tions by cre­at­ing World­Cat records describ­ing the con­tent and link­ing to the col­lec­tions via WorldCat.org and World­Cat Local. The organ­i­sa­tions will launch a project in the com­ing months to develop spec­i­fi­ca­tions and deter­mine next steps.”

From Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, Jan. 29, 2009