Showing posts with label book-searching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book-searching. Show all posts

Monday, October 13, 2008

University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library - Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/13/08

University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library:

"One of the most important functions of the project, say its leaders, who plan to unveil the giant library today, is to create a stable backup of the digital books should Google go bankrupt or lose interest in the book-searching business.

The project is called HathiTrust...

Because most of the millions of books are still under copyright protection, the libraries cannot offer the full text of the books to people off their campuses, though they can reveal details like how many pages of a given volume contain any passage that a user searches for...

Only about 16 percent of the books in HathiTrust—or about 327,000 volumes—are out of copyright so that their full text can be delivered to all readers...

So why call the project "Hathi" (pronounced hah-TEE)—the Hindi word for elephant?

"The name resonated really well because elephants remember, elephants are large, and elephants are strong
," said Bradley C. Wheeler, chief information officer at Indiana University system. "
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/10/5061n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en