Comparing the Major Digital Libraries | Church Music Library Online

"Much of what appears below is inspired by a short blog post entitled HathiTrust, DPLA and Google. Google Books began life in 2005, promising to digitize all of the books in the world. Lawsuits filed by major publishers quickly slowed that initiative. While Google Books still exists, it can be rather cumbersome to use, since most books cannot be viewed in their entirety, online in preview, snippet or not at all. A rather different enterprise is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which is primarily a partnership of academic and research libraries. It includes many of the books scanned by Google in its collection, but many others besides, making it a much larger resource. More importantly, HathiTrust offers a much better user interface that is more like a library’s online public access catalog (OPAC). Different again is the new Digital Public Library of America. Similar to HathiTrust, the emphasis of the DPLA is on public libraries and institutions, hence the name. It also seems to include more local, archival materials. How do they compare in terms of church music resources? As shown in an earlier blog post, a simple search for 'church music' in the DPLA results in just 407 items. Conducting the same search on HathiTrust results in 2,242,100 items, of which only 909,609 are full view (or full text?). Google Books churns up an astonishing 31,500,000 results for 'church music.' Sorting through this mass of results is no easy task, however. Whereas the HathiTrust offers numerous filters for author, subject, place and date of publication, language and format, Google does not."