Our Blog

By Angelina Zaytsev, Collection Services Librarian The HathiTrust collection continues to grow steadily. As of January 1st, 2017, there are 14,816,187 volumes in the collection. Over one million volumes were added to the collection over the course of the preceding year, scanned from the library collections of 39 contributors. These included several new, unique collections, such as:

February 10, 2017

By Mike Furlough Note: This message was sent to HathiTrust members on December 20, 2016

December 21, 2016

By Mike Furlough and John Butler

September 16, 2016

Written by Mike Furlough Note: this is the lightly edited text of a talk presented at the 2016 CRL Collections Forum, @Risk: Stewardship, Due Diligence, and the Future of Print in Chicago, IL on April 14, 2016. The audio for this talk is available on YouTube.

June 17, 2016

Written by Mike Furlough In June, the United States Copyright Office (USCO) released "Orphan Works and Mass Digitization,” a detailed report proposing new orphan works legislation and proposing a pilot extended collective license (ECL) for in-copyright, published works that have been digitized.

November 17, 2015

By Aaron Elkiss, University of Michigan Library, Cross-posted from the University of Michigan Library Tech Talk Blog

June 18, 2015

by Jeremy York (HathiTrust) and Kat Hagedorn (University of Michigan Library) As reported in our monthly updates, we receive well over a hundred inquiries every month about quality problems with page images or OCR text of volumes in HathiTrust. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in most of these cases, there is something we can do about it. This blog post is intended to shed some light on our thinking and practices about quality in HathiTrust. We hope it will also encourage you to report any problems you might find so that we might have the opportunity to fix them, and deliver the highest quality collections we can for educational and research needs.

May 13, 2015

By Dan Cohen and Mike Furlough The Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust have had a strong relationship since DPLA’s inception in 2013. As part of our ongoing collaboration to host and make digitized books widely available, we are now working to see how we can provide our services to exciting new initiatives that bring ebooks to everyone. The Humanities Open Book grant program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is exactly the kind of program we wish to support, and we stand ready to do so. Under this funding program, NEH and Mellon will award grants to publishers to identify select previously published books and acquire the appropriate rights to produce an open access e-book edition available under a Creative Commons license. Participants in the program must deposit an EPUB version of the book in a trusted preservation service to ensure future access.

April 21, 2015

by Mike Furlough, Executive Director April 10, 2015 Just before the end of March we reached a significant milestone when we added the 5 millionth volume that is open for reading and downloading. Like any research library collection, HathiTrust is nothing if not eclectic, as evidenced by our 5 millionth volume, contributed by Ohio State University: A treatise on the disorders and deformities of the teeth and gums, explaining the most rational methods of treating their diseases by Thomas Berdmore (London, 1770). Berdmore was King George III’s dentist. According to his VIAF record he died at the age of 45 and his work was also published in Dutch. (Alert the medical historian in your family!)

April 10, 2015

By Mike Furlough, Executive Director, HathiTrust Since I started as Executive Director of HathiTrust in May of this year, I have done nothing but learn: learn about the organization, our operations, our finances, our people, and our partnership. I have traveled quite a bit, especially this fall, paying visits to HathiTrust members (thank you, libraries of Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Harvard, and Northwestern), several meetings of library organizations and consortia (thank you TRLN, GWLA, COPPUL, and ASERL), as well as a couple of special focus meetings on digital humanities and newspaper digitization (thanks to you all as well).

November 18, 2014