The Universal Library Is Us: Library Work at Scale in HathiTrust (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

Use the link to access the full text article from Educause Review.  " ... Enter HathiTrust. In 2008, a group of two dozen research libraries saw the opportunity to leverage the large-scale digitization collaborations they had entered into with Google, the Internet Archive, and others and to lay the foundation for a new, shared digital collection—one increasingly comprehensive in its representation of library collections and one owned and managed collaboratively by the library partners. The libraries viewed preservation as a primary goal, but only in conjunction with access. They consequently developed a robust digital preservation infrastructure with multiple levels of redundancy and geographic distribution, as well as a highly functional access platform. From the outset, the collection was intended to be developed along with libraries' print collections, providing an underlying preservation layer for print materials and enabling local and collective decisions about the management of print collections—in turn resulting in a more efficient use of physical library space and a stronger collective preservation infrastructure. Today, HathiTrust continues its evolution as an "above-campus" library service.1 The digital repository contains more than 11 million volumes contributed by 28 libraries. More than 400 languages are represented in the deposited collections, which include materials created from medieval times to the present. Of the 11 million volumes, 3.6 million are in the public domain and available on the web. A total of 92 academic and research institutions support the infrastructure for the materials. The institutions participate in a shared governance structure and contribute to a broad variety of initiatives centered on the shared digital collection and geared toward meeting individual and collective goals for preservation and access. These initiatives include the following ..."