HathiTrust 2014 Year in Review
Jeremy York
We’re proud to present our annual Year in Review to you. Since I joined HathiTrust in May, I’ve had a great time visiting some of you personally to discuss some of what is covered here, and to hear your thoughts and ideas for our partnership’s growth. As you can see here, we’ve passed some significant milestones, and expect the coming year to be exceptionally productive. Now in our seventh year, and ten years after the start of the Google-Library project that preceded us, we hold over 13 million volumes from the collections of our members. Thanks in part to the institutions taking part in the Copyright Review Management System project, we are close to having 5 million of these available either as public domain materials or licensed for access by the rightsholder. I want to especially greet and welcome our 14 new members listed below (including one in Lebanon), which brings us to 103 members overall. Having prevailed in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in our conflict with the Authors Guild, we enter 2015 with the remainder of the dispute resolved. We can now focus on core activities that advance the public good and help our member libraries better serve their users and manage their collections.
Many long planned efforts are beginning to bear fruit. You can expect to see more action in our efforts to expand and enhance access to US federal government documents collections, and we will make the first releases of the Registry of Federal Documents later this year. The Print Monographs Archive Planning Task Force will present their recommendations for implementing this program and those will be shared with you all. The HathiTrust Research Center is poised to expand their services in the coming year, offering advanced researcher support services as well as training and services available to member libraries. 2015 will also mark the first of what will now be an annual election of new members to the Board of Governors, and the first major turnover of membership on the Program Steering Committee. Details on the appointment process to PSC will be announced this spring, and nominations for election to the Board of Governors will open later in the year.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed time, ideas, and energies towards making HathiTrust a stronger organization. We’ll continue to rely on member participation to steer and carry out our necessary work. I hope your year has gotten off to as good a start as mine.
-- Mike Furlough