The Library on a Massive Scale
What do you get when you combine the collections from 60 major research institutions into a single, digitized library? A comprehensive collection, of course, but also a major headache for the people who have to collect, organize, preserve, and publish the information in a user-friendly manner for students, professors, and the general public.
That’s the headache that John Wilkin, associate university librarian for the University of Michigan’s Library Information Technology (LIT) department and executive director of HathiTrust at U-M. The latter is a comprehensive digital archive comprising materials from likes the U-M, Arizona State University, Baylor University, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College, to name just a handful.
At press time, HathiTrust’s digitized collection included 9.71 million total volumes, more than 5.15 million book titles, 256,000 serial titles, 3.4 billion pages, and 435 TB of information.
Wilkin gave Campus Technology a look at how the initiative started, challenges it’s faced when trying to manage huge volumes of data, and how HathiTrust has overcome those obstacles.
» via Campus Technology
