What is HathiTrust and How Can it Make a Difference?

‘Sourcing and Scaling’ brought to the collective collection

What is HathiTrust?

HathiTrust is attempting nothing short of creating a comprehensive repository of published literature, primarily though not exclusively through digitization.

Language Distribution (1)

* All data was current as of March 20

Language Distribution (2)The next 40 languages make up ~13% of total

Publication Date

Originating Institution

Content over time

HathiTrust is about collections, writ large, and not about Google digitization.

The first order of HathiTrust business is long-term preservation of this digital content, and we don’t believe in preservation without access.

HathiTrust takes the business of sustainability seriously, with regard to governance, finances and technology.

The HathiTrust Business Model, v.1: Depositor Pays

all of the reasonable costs of sustaining the archive—including replacement costs and a sort of insurance policy—are combined to create a sort of atomic cost unit (in this case, a GB of content)

What are “all of the reasonable costs of sustaining the archive”?

How much does it cost?

Financial contributions of partners

HathiTrust Functional Framework

What is the cost of this atomic unit, the GB, and how does that relate to the content we’re storing?

What are replacement costs and an insurance policy?

High cost is off-set by large benefit

Collective collections have their benefits

The HathiTrust Business Model, v.2: Costs based on holdings overlap and the perceived benefits we derive

an ARL institution that wishes to use HathiTrust as part of a larger strategy—part of a “cloud” strategy

new cost model: http://www.hathitrust.org/cost

For public domain volumes: (PD*X*C)/N

For a given in copyright volume:IC=(C*X)/H

sharing in the curation; having a voice in shaping the future

But how can HathiTrust make a difference??? (x3)

Collective digital curation

driving down costs

reducing bibliographic indeterminacy

making meaningful decisions about formats and quality

increasing discoverability

consolidating development talent

improving strength of archiving

Collective print curation

a means by which to associate all of our holdings of print

perform record-keeping in a coordinated way

Subsidiary benefits

improve description

quantify problems

exerting collective attention to solving problems

scale!

“transfer resource[s] away from 'infrastructure' and towards user engagement.”

Lorcan Dempsey