Twenty three universities have agreed to share and combine their digitized content, including millions of scanned books and documents, in one gigantic, 78-terabyte library that launched Monday.

Called the HathiTrust, the depository contains digital content from 11 University of California libraries and a 12-university consortium that forms the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

Before the HathiTrust launched, digital content was isolated to each university library, according to John Wilkin, associate university librarian of the University of Michigan, who was named the executive director of HathiTrust.

“This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the nation’s foremost research libraries and holds even greater promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners,” Wilkin said in a press release.

HathiTrust is similar to Google's Book Search project, which has formed partnerships with several major universities and public libraries who have lent their materials to the search-engine giant for digitization. However, while Google Book Search's seemingly altruistic mission is to provide "a tool that can ... help remove the barriers between people and information and benefit the publishing community at the same time,"

the corporation profits from advertisements displayed near digitized pages.

HathiTrust, by contrast, exists purely for universities to share their information with one another, with the goal of fostering advancements in research.

Nonetheless, the HathiTrust project will likely encounter controversy regarding copyright infringement, as Google has in the past. Critics of Book Search have said the service commits "massive copyright infringement," even though Google argues its digital content sharing is considered Fair Use.

Press Release [HathiTrust]

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