HathiTrust Launching Full-Text Library of Books; Information Today, 10/22/09

Barbara Quint, Information Today; HathiTrust Launching Full-Text Library of Books:

"With all the controversy still swirling around Google Books and its post-settlement offerings, an alternative route to the millions of digitized books and journals supplied by leading Google Book Search library partners has arrived. The HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org) is a collaboration of 25 research libraries already participating in Google Book Search to produce a shared digital repository for preservation and access to a curated collection. By mid-November, the HathiTrust Digital Library will have a full-featured, full-text search service for 4.3-5 million items. The searches will retrieve bibliographic citations and page references, including those for in-copyright books. Content will extend beyond the digitized copies of books returned to early library partners by Google. HathiTrust is pushing to acquire other digitized special collections from its members, as well as making arrangements for opening access to university press books.

Begun in October 2008, HathiTrust members currently include the 10 University of California system libraries, plus the California Digital Library, Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University, The University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Illinois at Chicago, The University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Virginia. The depository currently includes digitized volumes from the University of Michigan, University of California, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin."

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/HathiTrust-Launching-FullText-Library-of-Books-57575.asp

Librarian Opposes Google's Library Fees, NPR's All Things Considered, 2/21/09

Podcast via NPR's All Things Considered; Librarian Opposes Google's Library Fees [4 min. 29 sec.]:

"Google wants to give you access to its huge database of scanned, out-of-print books, but the company is going to charge for it. Robert Darnton, head librarian at Harvard University, says the deal violates a basic American principle — that knowledge should be free and accessible to all."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100969810

Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged, The New York Times, 4/3/09

The New York Times; Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged:

"The dusty stacks of the nation’s great university and research libraries are full of orphans — books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian. Google has been scanning the pages of those books and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.

But a growing chorus is complaining that a far-reaching settlement of a suit brought against Google by publishers and authors is about to grant the company too much power over orphan works...

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”...

Most of the critics, which include copyright specialists, antitrust scholars and some librarians, agree that the public will benefit...

“They are doing an end run around the legislative process,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance, which is working to build a digital library with few restrictions.

Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in October, has been building slowly as its implications have become clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School. It is not clear that any group will oppose the settlement outright.

These critics say the settlement, which is subject to court approval, will give Google virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them. Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June...

The settlement, which covers all books protected by copyright in the United States, allows Google to vastly expand what it can do with digital copies of books, whether they are orphans or not."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=google%20book&st=cse

New European online library to remain down until January, Sydney Morning Herald, 12/10/08

Via Sydney Morning Herald: New European online library to remain down until January:

"With 14 staff members and at an annual cost put at around 2.5 million euros (3.2 million US dollars), Europeana -- which can be found at www.europeana.eu -- has more humble beginnings, despite the massive interest.

The prototype which was launched, briefly, last month contains around two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain, as the most recent items are plagued by problems linked to copyright and their use online."

http://news.smh.com.au/technology/new-european-online-library-to-remain-down-until-january-20081210-6v42.html

Questions Raised About Google Library Project’s Impact On Knowledge Access, Intellectual Property Watch, 11/26/08

Via Intellectual Property Watch: Questions Raised About Google Library Project’s Impact On Knowledge Access:

"Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently raised concerns about Google’s new settlement with publishers allowing the search engine to continue borrowing millions of books from libraries and scanning them to make a digital library.

His remarks were made to an international library copyright event in Chisinau, Moldova on 13 November where he spoke on the subject of “copyright’s ever-expanding empire” addressing digital rights management (technologies for controlling copyrighted content), licences and the privatisation of public information.

The key concern is that the Google project, likely to go into effect in 2010, will be in the private sector, which has different implications than public libraries, which von Lohmann described...

The Google project was settled out of court, which may prevent the outcome from being a precedent, noted von Lohmann, who added, “I think it [the Google project] raises many questions that are going to be with libraries for many years.”"

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1332

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