The California Digital Library (CDL) has helped manage The University of California Libraries’ membership and participation in both the Google Books Library Project and HathiTrust since the early 2000’s, before either project actually launched. CDL worked to negotiate the contracts for participation in each project and continues to play a key role in managing these partner relationships.
Metadata management: In 2010, CDL’s Discovery and Delivery team began working with HathiTrust to design and establish Zephir, HathiTrust’s dedicated metadata management system and the first element of core HathiTrust infrastructure developed outside the University of Michigan, which created the original HathiTrust system still in use today. Zephir was launched in fall 2013, and since then, the Discovery and Delivery team has supported the member submission and upload of metadata records into Zephir by all HathiTrust contributing members, including the UC campuses.
Workflow coordination: CDL’s Digitization team, part of the Publishing, Archives, and Digitization group, works with each of UC’s contributing campuses to share requirements and develop workflows for submitting catalog metadata to Google and coordinating book shipments for scanning. Since UC joined the Google Library Project in 2006, nine UC campuses and both Regional Library Facilities (RLFs) have sent volumes to be scanned by Google and included in Google Books (and, starting in 2008, deposited into HathiTrust). CDL’s Digitization team also supports campuses in depositing their digitized volumes in HathiTrust, including uploading their metadata records to Zephir and sharing their print holdings information with HathiTrust to inform services and membership fees.
Opening content: The Digitization team also collaborates with UC librarians and staff to lawfully open materials in HathiTrust and Google Books. During the Covid19 pandemic, when UC libraries were physically closed, the Digitization team worked with a group of liaisons from each UC campus to manage UC’s access to HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) and to assess ETAS use by UC users.
Collection stewardship: CDL’s Shared Print team works to help coordinate UC’s participation in HathiTrust’s Shared Print program. During the 2011 HathiTrust Constitutional Convention, the membership approved a ballot initiative to develop and fund a distributed print monograph retention program that complements the HathiTrust digital corpus. The HathiTrust Print Monograph Archiving Task Force, which included several UC leaders, was convened in 2014 and released its final report and recommendations in 2015. Since that time, HathiTrust has completed two phases of its Shared Print Program. As of 2020, 79 HathiTrust members have committed to retain over 18 million print monograph volumes, amounting to over 5 million unique titles. The HathiTrust Shared Print Program continues to evolve and is moving towards the launch of its third phase.
In 2020, CDL formed a collaboration with HathiTrust and the Center for Research Libraries to play a facilitative leadership role in advancing shared print’s transition to a new phase of integration and interoperability (read more here). The Collaboration has since released a freely available shared print comparison tool for serials and journals and hosted a summit bringing together the shared print community, library technologists, and service providers to map a path forward to embedding shared print in the collections lifecycle.
HathiTrust governance: Finally, CDL staff (along with colleagues from UC libraries) often have a presence in HathiTrust leadership and working groups.
If you have a question about UC’s participation in the Google Books Library Project, HathiTrust, Zephir, or Shared Print program, please submit a ticket.