NYPL Joins HathiTrust, as Repository Expands and Brands
Library adding 300,000 public domain works; watermarks now part of HathiTrust
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 05/27/2010
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- First public library in HathiTrust
- Internet Archive materials now being ingested
- Branding efforts identify originating institution
According to Ann Thornton, NYPL's acting Andrew W. Mellon Director, the library will add some 300,000 scans to the HathiTrust repository.
At least initially, everything the library is contributing will be public domain material, or material to which NYPL owns the rights, including "a wide variety of reference volumes, works of literature and history and social sciences, business, industry and science, foreign language works, and historical children's books," Thornton said.
Result of partnerships
As with most of the materials that make up the HathiTrust's core, the NYPL digital scans are the product of the library's partnership with Google Book Search.
The HathiTrust is also now beginning to ingest materials scanned via other initiatives like the Internet Archive (IA) scanning project. Thornton said a small portion of NYPL contributions would include IA-scanned volumes and works digitized through other partnerships such as NYPL's own digitization-on-demand program partnership with Kirtas.
Distinguishing digital copies
When contributing works to a massive collaborative effort, identity and provenance become an issue.
In the cloud, a scan from one institution differs little from a scan of an identical edition from another. However, those multiple preserved copies reflect a decades-long imperative to safeguard printed materials, an investment research institutions are hesitant to abandon.
In light of recent conversations in the academic community touching on the redundancy of massive research collections in the era of Google Books and collaborative repositories, the HathiTrust's efforts to brand and watermark with institutional labels therefore comes as no surprise.
Watermarks and more
Among the steps that have been taken to differentiate scanned materials, according to the organization:
- The pageturner [application] now prominently identifies the HathiTrust initiative;
- A watermark on every page identifies the digitizing agent; and
- A watermark on every page identifies the source library of the print material.
- The source of the print material is included in our feed of bibliographic identifiers so that institutions can import or update records with this information.
- The pageturner contains institution-specific branding, identifying to users at partners institutions that their institution is a member of HathiTrust.
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