HathiTrust/Summon Deal Increases Search Access to In-Copyright Works

"Now, a partnership [of HathiTrust] with Serials Solutions (a ProQuest business unit) presents a new option for academic libraries seeking to give researchers an entre into a massive collection of research. The Summon integration is set to go live this summer, and will allow subscribing institutions to link their print holdings to the heavy-duty search indexing that's been done by the HathiTrust for works in its collection. Asked how tight the integration between the two would be, Michael Gersch, ProQuest Senior Vice President and General Manager, Serials Solutions, told LJ a Hathi-enabled Summon setup "will search the full text of HathiTrust volumes and point users to the correct place for their institution. That could be a book on the shelf, an ebook through a vendor such as ebrary, or an open access source (freely available in the case of public domain works) version such as Hathi itself or Project Gutenberg." The HathiTrust corpus is already searchable via two interfaces, including a WorldCat prototype built by OCLC, and the native HathiTrust interface, slated to be upgraded this summer as well. With a Summon implementation, librarians can also choose to include the entire HathiTrust search index, or just the public domain materials. Most recently published works are already featured on digital platforms, and many have struck agreements with search providers like Serials Solutions to bolster search access through other commercial search interfaces. Public domain titles, by contrast, are already searchable and viewable in full-text via the Google Books interface, among others. One of the long-missing pieces of the puzzle, however, has been deep search access to the class of materials known as orphan works—titles out of print but still under copyright...."