HathiTrust's Growth Strategy: Full-Text Search Coming to WorldCat and EBSCO Discovery Service

Today, in separate announcements, OCLC and EBSCO both unveiled plans to integrate full-text HathiTrust search capability into WorldCat and EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), respectively. Once implemented, the deals will make the full texts of all of the 9.5 million-plus works in the digital repository searchable by some of the most widely used discovery tools—and greatly expand the accessibility of the massive HathiTrust corpus.

No firm dates have been announced for when the full-text search functionality will become available for either. But, in the near term, the agreements are helping to solidify HathiTrust's place as the closest thing the United States has to a national digital library.

The agreements continue a strategy that HathiTrust began pursuing last March, when a plan was announced for full-text search integration with ProQuest business unit Serials Solutions' Summon, which has reached a beta-testing phase.

In OCLC's case, the announcement grows out of an ongoing partnership with HathiTrust; WorldCat already contains more than 4.7 million records representing the HathiTrust Digital Library. The nonprofit also unveiled a prototype WorldCat Local catalog interface for the HathiTrust Digital Library in January. Meanwhile, OCLC is reaching out to publishers in its own effort to make more full text works available via the WorldCat platform.

The details of how the search functionality will work are still being hammered out, but in all cases it will draw on the full text of the complete HathiTrust repository, including copyrighted materials, according to John Wilkin, executive director of the HathiTrust and associate university librarian at the University of Michigan.

Full text will be available for indexing, but the texts will not be displayed directly—even in the case of public domain works; instead, a search result may instead display a link to the version at the HathiTrust site. "Each of these companies will approach the problem differently," Wilkin told LJ. Search results may also be used to point to licensed versions of works that the companies can display, he said.

Agreements with other discovery companies are currently in the works, he said, but he declined to name them at this time. He also pointed out that HathiTrust is "not making any money from this"—for HathiTrust, it's all about expanding accessibility.

"A multi-pronged strategy"
As Wilkin wrote in June in an essay on the HathiTrust blog, HathiTrust's accessibility is tied firmly to discoverability. "[B]ecause discovery is integral to access, HathiTrust has worked hard on a multi-pronged strategy for discovery," he wrote. "Key to this strategy are our ongoing efforts to ensure that HathiTrust content is 'in the flow' of library discovery more generally..."

The agreements are just the latest moves in HathiTrust's efforts. While the Digital Public Library of America project is still in the planning stages (an upcoming plenary meeting is slated for October 21), and the Google settlement stalled, HathiTrust (which itself contains many books digitized by the Google Books project) has been moving forward to become a premier digital repository.

Since last year, HathiTrust has rolled out initiatives to find previously unknown public domain and orphan works among its collections—partnering with several academic institutions, including the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and others, to gradually expand the pool of accessible digitized materials for its users.