This month, Associate University Librarian for the Digital Library Diane Bisom received notice that the UCR Library was the single largest contributor in 2017 to the online digital collection of governmental records that is part of the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The UCR Library provided more than 8,000 book-length digitized U.S. government publications to HathiTrust in 2017 as part of our efforts to digitize our holdings with the Google Books project.

University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble said, “This is a significant milestone for HathiTrust, and a testament to the important role that UCR has played in this initiative. We have been informed that HathiTrust plans to acknowledge this achievement in their forthcoming 2017 annual report.”

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions that offers a collection of millions of digitized titles from libraries around the world, which helps researchers meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text. More than 130 individual institutions and six consortia / state systems are also contributors to HathiTrust, including several universities that belong to the Ivy League, Pac-12, and Big Ten Academic Alliance.

In 2008, HathiTrust was created by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the University of California system to establish a collaborative, online infrastructure and website to provide access to their digitized book collections and journal content.

More institutions quickly began to join HathiTrust, and the shared infrastructure provided those partners with an easy way to archive their digital content. The goal to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world began to take shape, in tandem with the development of collaborative strategies to manage both digital and print holdings.

The primary community that HathiTrust serves is the faculty, students, and users of its partner libraries, but the materials in HathiTrust are available to all to the extent permitted by law and contracts, providing the published record as a public good to users around the world.