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Big Strides for the Elephant – HathiTrust Mid-Year Update 2014

July 17, 2014 Author: Renata EwingCategories: Tags:

11_million   2014 has been a great year for the HathiTrust Digital Library, and the year is only half over!

Milestones

  • In February, HathiTrust surpassed 11 million volumes in its collection. Close to 4 million of these are in the public domain and in full view for everyone to read.
  • Mike Furlough was selected to be the new Executive Director. He began his tenure on May 15th.
  • In June, the U.S. 2nd Circuit released its ruling on the lawsuit brought by the Author’s Guild. It reaffirms HathiTrust’s work to digitize library books to expand access to library collections.
  • Also in June, a project (http://www.lib.umich.edu/imls-national-leadership-grant-crms) to review the copyright status of United States works in HathiTrust published between 1923 and 1967 was completed. The CRMS-US review project has opened access to 7,564 books identified to be in the public domain this year, and to 165,725 books since the project began in December 2008. HathiTrust’s CRMS-World review of non-U.S. works continues.

Happenings of Note

  • The pilot collection of 22 open access volumes from Knowledge Unlatched is now available on HathiTrust. Knowledge Unlatched is a non-profit that facilitates a process whereby libraries collaborate to fund open access to scholarly works that are then made available to the public under Creative Commons licenses.
  • Keio University of Japan, a Google partner library,  has contributed more than 90,000 volumes in full view since December 2013
  • In March, representatives of HathiTrust attended the Roundtable discussion on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization organized by the U.S. Copyright Office.  Read HathiTrust’s written comments on the Roundtable.

Enhancements

  • Extensive work has been done to improve the relevance ranking of search results.
  • A new spelling suggestion feature developed by CDL has been integrated and tested.

Book from Keio University
This is only a brief summary of HathiTrust’s many achievements and activities for the first half of  2014. Read the HathiTrust’s Mid-Year Review for more in-depth information and details.