“The HathiTrust Dig­i­tal Library, a part­ner­ship among some of the US’s largest aca­d­e­mic research libraries, has announced a ser­vice that is expected to trans­form how researchers use the more than 1.6 bil­lion pages (4.6 mil­lion vol­umes) in its collections.

The ser­vice allows for full-text search­ing capa­bil­i­ties across the entire library. Researchers can now search pub­lic domain and in-copyright works by key­word or phrase. Based on open source Solr/Lucene tech­nol­ogy, the ser­vice expands on an exper­i­men­tal search of pub­lic domain vol­umes, intro­duced in Novem­ber 2008. Full-text search will con­tinue to be sup­ported across the repos­i­tory as it grows at a rate of hun­dreds of thou­sands of vol­umes every month.

In com­bi­na­tion with the HathiTrust Dig­i­tal Library’s care­fully curated bib­li­o­graphic data, the new func­tion­al­ity allows researchers to more effi­ciently locate items rel­e­vant to their research. It also lays the foun­da­tion for future ser­vices such as full-text search with faceted brows­ing, advanced search, ‘more like this’ options, and tools that can be used in com­pu­ta­tional research.

HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org) is a col­lab­o­ra­tion of the thir­teen uni­ver­si­ties of the Com­mit­tee on Insti­tu­tional Coop­er­a­tion, the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia sys­tem, and the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia. It cur­rently includes digi­tised vol­umes from the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin. The HathiTrust part­ners seek to develop the repos­i­tory and its ser­vices to meet the long-term needs of their aca­d­e­mic com­mu­ni­ties, and offer a unique resource on the Web for schol­ar­ship and research.”
 

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