HathiTrust has announced the composition of its new 12-member Board of Governors, which will lead the library collaborative into its next phase. HathiTrust is a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.
The board, which replaces the Executive Committee established by the founding members in 2008, will oversee HathiTrust’s 10-million volume digital preservation repository, research center, and other initiatives. The decision to create the board was made during the HathiTrust Constitutional Convention held in October 2011, which was convened to chart HathiTrust's governance structure and priorities going forward.
The board officially begins work on April 16, 2012. Among its first priorities will be to implement the remaining proposals passed during the Constitutional Convention. These include the establishment of a distributed archive of print monographs corresponding to the digital copies held in HathiTrust; the creation of an approval process for proposed new initiatives; a fee-for-service model for content deposit; a mechanism for allowing non-partners to contribute content to the repository; and a coordinated effort to expand access to digitised US federal government documents.
