Tuesday, March 29, 2011

HathiTrust/Summon Deal Increases Search Access to In-Copyright Works

By Josh Hadro Mar 28, 2011

With the Google Books corpus on hold, many have turned their attention to other possible venues of research access for students and scholars, including the HathiTrust digital archive. Initially built upon a foundation of Google book scans, HathiTrust (based at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) has grown to encompass more than eight million volumes from a variety of sources. Now, a partnership with Serials Solutions (a ProQuest business unit) presents a new option for academic libraries seeking to give researchers an entre into a massive collection of research.

The Summon integration is set to go live this summer, and will allow subscribing institutions to link their print holdings to the heavy-duty search indexing that's been done by the HathiTrust for works in its collection. Asked how tight the integration between the two would be, Michael Gersch, ProQuest Senior Vice President and General Manager, Serials Solutions, told LJ a Hathi-enabled Summon setup "will search the full text of HathiTrust volumes and point users to the correct place for their institution. That could be a book on the shelf, an ebook through a vendor such as ebrary, or an open access source (freely available in the case of public domain works) version such as Hathi itself or Project Gutenberg."

The HathiTrust corpus is already searchable via two interfaces, including a WorldCat prototype built by OCLC, and the native HathiTrust interface, slated to be upgraded this summer as well. With a Summon implementation, librarians can also choose to include the entire HathiTrust search index, or just the public domain materials

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From: Library Journal.com 3/28/11

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