HathiTrust: The elefant in the library

Abstract

The author is a librarian of the HathiTrust partnership, California. He describes the beginning and the development of a huge collaborative project comprising around 60 American libraries. Its mission is “To contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, and sharing the record of human knowledge”. HathiTrust has organized a great common repository of digitized library materials. The reposytory provides open access to over 10 million digital units. The author points out advantages of cooperation in such a project and discusses tasks undertaken to enrich the library.