Getting to 5 Million: HathiTrust's Collection of Open Books | HathiTrust Digital Library

"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!) Earlier this week, Rick Anderson offered in the Scholarly Kitchen a nice commentary on the significance of this event for the public at-large and for the library community. Rick sketches the broad outline of how we got here today, through partnerships with Google and among research libraries. I want to add that the HathiTrust collection is the product of hundreds, if not thousands, of people at our 105 member institutions, at Google, at Internet Archive, and many other content producers and distributors. This includes executives and front-line staff, librarians and publishers, technologists and end users. It’s an honor to be involved with it today. In this post, I’d like to go into some detail to shed more light on the characteristics of these materials, our work to open them, and how we are endeavoring to make them as useful as possible. Numbers geeks, get ready ... I’m referring to 5 million open works not public domain works. That’s because nearly 20,000 works in this this group have been licensed by the rights holder to be opened for public display. (That’s a very small percentage, but is still a substantial number of affirmative choices to support open access). We’ve tended to use the 'public domain' as shorthand for the entire set of works, but in this post I’ll split hairs to better explain our processes and policy.  Some of our collection is public domain only in the United States and thus can’t be accessed outside of the US (there is also a portion that are in the public domain only outside the US). Here’s a snapshot as of April 1. (The total number of volumes held in HathiTrust on that date was 13,305,071.) ..."