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  • LISWire: HathiTrust full-text index to be integrated into OCLC services

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    September 8th, 2011LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    OCLC and HathiTrust have signed an agreement that will allow OCLC to integrate the HathiTrust full-text index into OCLC services, enabling member libraries and their users to more easily discover resources from this important digital collection through WorldCat.

    Under this new agreement, OCLC will be able to integrate the full-text index of HathiTrust collections into services such as WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. Following integration of the full-text index, users will be able to search beyond bibliographic records to include the full text of these cooperatively built library collections in their searches.

    Content from the HathiTrust Digital Library complements member libraries’ collections already in WorldCat. Through a single search of WorldCat.org or WorldCat Local, users will easily find HathiTrust resources and other materials available in their own collections, and in the collections of thousands of libraries around the world that are part of the OCLC cooperative.

    As a digital repository for great research libraries, the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the massive digitized collections of partner institutions. HathiTrust offers libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections, or born-digital materials. The representation of these resources in digital form offers expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning.

    “For HathiTrust, access is a key part of our preservation mission,” said John Wilkin, Executive Director of HathiTrust. “Resources that remain hidden will not be effectively preserved. While we will continue to support a standalone full-text search of HathiTrust (maintained by HathiTrust), we believe that getting our content into the flow of where our users are is critically important. We are pleased to see the addition of OCLC’s services in exposing the HathiTrust content.”

    “OCLC and HathiTrust have worked together for several years on behalf of our member libraries to provide easy access to these valuable resources,” said Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development. “OCLC includes 4.7 million records in WorldCat representing the HathiTrust Digital Library, and we continue to synchronize with the HathiTrust daily. This new agreement is an important next step to providing discoverability and easy access to this significant collection.”

    Earlier this year, OCLC and HathiTrust began testing a unique WorldCat Local user interface for discovery of items accessible through the HathiTrust Digital Library. The WorldCat Local prototype for the HathiTrust Digital Library, available to anyone on the Web (http://hathitrust.worldcat.org), was designed and implemented by both organizations in close cooperation as a means to further develop a shared digital library infrastructure. HathiTrust Digital Library records are discoverable through the separate WorldCat Local interface, as well as through WorldCat.org, available on the Web at www.worldcat.org.

    OCLC and HathiTrust continue to work together to increase online visibility and accessibility of the digital collections by creating WorldCat records describing the content and linking to the collections via WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local.

    HathiTrust was launched in 2008 by the then 12-university consortium, known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), and the University of California system. It has grown to more than 60 partners including Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Duke and Johns Hopkins. In the past two years, those partners have contributed more than 9.5 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections. More than 2.5 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web.

    More about HathiTrust is at www.hathitrust.org/.

    About OCLC
    Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world’s largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat on the Web at www.worldcat.org. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.

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