UW-Madison Libraries will soon become part of HathiTrust archive service, a new digital repository collaboration among research libraries, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation announced Monday.
The CIC, which consists of all Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago, will partner with 11 university libraries from the University of California system to share digital resources. According to Peter Gorman, dean of UW-Madison Libraries, HathiTrust will be implemented into the MadCat Library Catalog in the upcoming weeks.
It is going to be able to preserve print collections for future generations, for a long time books that have become acidic and brittle are now going to have a new life,"" said Kimberly Armstrong, assistant director for the CIC Center for Library Initiatives.
The CIC anticipates the new archive system will benefit students and others who need to access information quickly and efficiently.
""The collections of these libraries will be more widely available,"" Armstrong said. ""The world will be able to view these things without having to come to the library.""
CIC Director Barbara McFadden Allen said the search results will be more specific than general search engines.
""We think there are ways we can provide access to the data that are going to be more specific to research than Google would be offering on the open Internet,"" she said.
According to Irene Zimmerman, UW-Madison's project manager for the Google Book Search initiative, said the efficiency of the repository is made possible by the sharing of resources between libraries.
""Rather than each library having to create its own repository for their copies we thought that it would be safer if we did it as a combined effort to have all of our files stored at one site,"" Zimmerman said.
The main goal of HathiTrust is to ensure the security of books held in the library and on search engines like Google.
""We have a real interest of making sure that that content remains accessible to users for years to come if Google decides at some point in the future that its not in their interest to provide the service,"" Gorman said.
