5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"A week or so ago, a monumental thing happened: the number of public-domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository topped 5 million. And since no one (including HathiTrust, so far) seems to be making a very big deal about this, it seems like a good moment both to recap the achievements of HathiTrust and to consider a few of its implications for the future of reading and scholarship. For those unfamiliar with the outlines of its history, HathiTrust emerged in the wake of the Google Books Library Project, a massive and still ongoing program of book digitization that Google undertook in 2004 in cooperation with some of the most comprehensive research libraries in North America and the UK. The basic outlines of the agreement between Google and each library were simple: in return for allowing Google’s employees to come in and (non-destructively) scan most or all of the books in the library’s collection, the library would receive a digital copy of the resulting set of text images. This meant that when Google had finished its scanning project in a library and departed, the library was left with a full digital copy of its collection (or of the subset scanned by Google, anyway)—a copy which had cost the library nothing except the inconvenience of having Google underfoot for a year or so. Copyright law being what it is—for better or for worse—this was a project that brought a few legal issues to the surface, among them the question of what the library could do with the digital copies that resulted from this project. These various legal questions have been (and to some degree continue to be) addressed in the course of several lawsuits, and some of those have been discussed in the Scholarly Kitchen already and in many other places as well. I’m not going to replow that ground here. But one issue does seem now to be settled: one thing the Google partner libraries could do was get together and use the images resulting from that project to create an enormous, centrally managed, and robustly archived library of digitized books. That library now numbers over 13 million titles, most of which are in copyright and therefore not freely available for online reading. Instead, these can be used for research: if you need to figure out what terms appear in which books (and how often), you can use HathiTrust to do so; having identified the books that are of interest to you, you can then pursue full access to them by some other means. Other kinds of research are possible as well, within constraints designed to maximize access without crossing legal lines. Whether those lines are placed where they should be is an important and vexed question, which I won’t pursue here. Instead, I want to address some of the implications of Google’s project for access to an incredibly rich and varied treasure trove of books and other documents that are in the public domain. Until quite recently, these books were largely hidden from the public by their imprisonment in physical objects ..."