Archive for the ‘digitization’ Category


The launch of HathiTrust

Today, we officially launched HathiTrust, a multi-institutional effort to create the universal library–to bring together as comprehensive a body of works as possible and to do it in a way that ensures access, permanence, content preservation, and an advanced environment for research.  See the press release here:  http://www.hathitrust.org/press.  In short, HathiTrust is an effort born [...]


Discovering the Undiscovered Public Domain

At Michigan we’re engaged in an activity that I hope will one day seem ordinary and a routine part of library work. Resources from several departments are devoted to determining the copyright status of works typically presumed to be in copyright. For now, we’re focusing on US monographic imprints (books, that is) published between 1923 [...]


Did I say “theoretical”? Openness and Google Books digitization

I was recently quoted in an AP article (published here in Salon) as saying that Brewster Kahle’s position with regard to the openness of Google-digitized public domain content is “theoretical.” Well, I sure thought I said “polemical,” but them’s the breaks. Brewster argues that Google’s work in digitizing the public domain essentially locks it [...]