The University of Cincinnati Libraries Have Joined HathiTrust
The University of Cincinnati Libraries have joined HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating and sharing the record of human knowledge. UC Libraries joins more than 130 international research libraries in HathiTrust, and is the third Ohio library to join along with The Ohio State University and Case Western Reserve University.
“Membership in HathiTrust will enable the University of Cincinnati Libraries to partner with national and international collaborators with similar missions to preserve, protect and make accessible the scholarly record,” said Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian. “Our membership will provide opportunities to enhance digital scholarship research like that done in our Digital Scholarship Center, as well as ensure the long-term digital preservation of our collections.”
HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the University of California system to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections. Today, the HathiTrust’s Digital Library catalog equals 16 million volumes digitized and deposited by member libraries.
As members of HathiTrust, the University of Cincinnati community will have full access to digital materials inputted by UC Libraries, as well as those items in the public domain and those for which there is permission. In addition, benefits of HathiTrust membership include digital content storage, cost-effective long-term preservation and access services for UC Libraries’ digitized content.
“Membership in HathiTrust provides a robust infrastructure of digital scholarly content and tools to further the academic pursuits of the next-minded UC community,” said Kristi A. Nelson, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “The academic collaborations and resources available through HathiTrust will be a tremendous asset to UC faculty, staff and students as we push to redefine learning and lead public universities into a new era of innovation and impact.”
“Membership with HathiTrust will open up a vast archive of texts for our faculty and students to enhance research and teaching in ways that will supplement our local collections,” said James Lee, assistant professor of digital humanities/early modern literature and co-director of the Digital Scholarship Center. “Their scanned facsimile images will permit our scholarly community to explore historical editions of texts, and the HathiTrust Research Center’s datasets enable a new dimension of scale by text mining over 15 million texts. The Digital Scholarship Center will immediately leverage this archive for both data mining and also for our book history projects.”
To login to HathiTrust as a University of Cincinnati member:
- Go to the https://www.hathitrust.org/.
- Click on the yellow “LOG IN” button.
- Select University of Cincinnati from the drop-down menu and click “CONTINUE.”
- Enter your UC ID and password and click on “Log In.”
“As a leading urban research university, the University of Cincinnati both adds benefits to and benefits from joining the HathiTrust,” said Pat Limbach, vice president for research and Ohio eminent scholar. “This investment gives our community access to a wider world of digital scholarship and also provides researchers around the globe with access to the important research happening across our campuses.”
“HathiTrust is thrilled to welcome the University of Cincinnati as a new member. We’re happy that we will have the opportunity to support their university community with access to our extensive collections, and to work with the university to address large scale challenges libraries collectively face,” said Mike Furlough, Executive Director of HathiTrust.
The initial focus of the HathiTrust collaboration has been on preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections. This includes both in copyright and public domain materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive and Microsoft, as well as through in-house initiatives. The members aim to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world and to develop shared strategies for managing and developing their digital and print holdings in a collaborative way. HathiTrust members ensure the reliability and efficiency of the digital library by relying on community standards and best practices, developing policies and procedures to manage content and services at scale and by maintaining a modular, open infrastructure. For more on HathiTrust, visit their website at https://www.hathitrust.org/.
