UC Libraries partner with DPLA via HathiTrust

As announced today, HathiTrust Digital Library collections, including over 400,000 UC volumes, will be discoverable within the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) project.  Of HathiTrust’s nearly 11 million volumes, the 3.5 million that are in the public domain or have been made publicly available by rights holders will become a DPLA “content hub”—accessible to DPLA users via the sharing of metadata records. HathiTrust will continue to host and preserve the digitized volumes.  In a major new development, OCLC has agreed to apply Creative Commons “CC0” licenses to the hosted UC catalog records, to remove barriers to providing the records within DPLA’s data sharing agreement.

DPLA provides an online portal to freely-available digital material held by libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. By offering a unified discovery point for these disparate collections, DPLA aims to make readily available to the public the words, images, sounds, and objects of America’s shared cultural heritage.  HathiTrust will be by far the largest DPLA content hub, providing a foundation for DPLA’s services.

This new partnership emphasizes anew how the UC Libraries’ mass digitization collections form a core piece of the future digital library for all, via HathiTrust, and now DPLA.  For more information please see the official press release [http://dp.la/info/2013/06/18/hathitrust-to-partner-with-dpla/].