In the News: HathiTrust Partners with DPLA | Against-the-Grain.com

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-06-23

Summary:

"The HathiTrust Digital Library announced on June 18, 2013 that it will partner with the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content. DPLA provides an online portal to freely available digital material held by libraries, archives, and museums across the U.S. This collaboration is noteworthy for bringing together two complementary efforts—HathiTrust with its academic and research library focus, and the DPLA with a more public library focus. 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. According to HathiTrust executive director John Wilkin, the partnership reflects the complementary nature of the two organizations. 'The first priority of HathiTrust has always been preservation,' he said. 'But to fulfill the preservation mission, we must provide access: content that can’t be found and used risks being forgotten.' Wilkin stressed that HathiTrust will continue to enhance its own discovery and access platform, first launched in 2008. But DPLA puts HathiTrust’s collection before a broader audience, alongside innovative search and use tools, including timelines, maps, and a growing number of apps. A notable part of the announcement is the support from OCLC, the worldwide library cooperative, for the contribution of records possibly derived from its WorldCat database. The HathiTrust metadata will be contributed under the terms of a Creative Commons 'CC0' license. Sandy Yee, chair of the OCLC Board of Trustees, explains that DPLA’s Data Use Best Practices, which request that users provide attribution to metadata providers, are in keeping with OCLC community data norms. Yee said, 'We are very pleased to support the discovery of this rich aggregation of freely available texts via the DPLA. Their work and that of HathiTrust amplifies and extends the efforts of the thousands of library contributors to the OCLC cooperative.' (OCLC normally recommends use of the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY).' The partnership officially began on June 18 and the data is in the process of being transferred from HathiTrust to the DLPA. DPLA will be working to add a special interface for books to supplement its novel map and timeline browsing interfaces, but the HathiTrust content will be available through the current site as soon as the data is loaded. Dan Cohen, DPLA’s executive director, said, 'Over the last five years, HathiTrust has built an incredible digital infrastructure to store the scanned holdings of its many university and library partners, and we in turn look forward to providing a large general audience for these valuable works, and new pathways into them.'  A subset of some 1 million volumes from The HathiTrust has been searchable since April 2013 in StackLife, which was developed independently of the DPLA as an example of how people can create their own 'front end' to the DPLA’s collection, mashing it up with other collections. That makes the DPLA especially useful, since it doesn’t have to supply the only way of accessing its data. StackLife was created by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab. StackLife shows you a book on the shelf (spine) as it would be in a physical library ..."

Link:

http://www.against-the-grain.com/2013/06/in-the-news-hathitrust-partners-with-dpla/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.libraries oa.museums oa.metadata oa.pd oa.hathi oa.glam oa.dpla oa.archives oa.oclc oa.stacklife oa.libre oa.ch oa.copyright

Date tagged:

06/23/2013, 08:13

Date published:

06/23/2013, 04:13