HathiTrust has received a $5 million, five‑year grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop AI‑enabled services that expand access to its collection of 19 million digitized volumes. The initiative, titled Transparent Books: AI Infrastructure for Discovery and the Public Interest, is designed to support responsible, equitable, and transparent use of artificial intelligence for scholarly discovery and public benefit.
The project will be carried out in collaboration with Northeastern University Library, which brings expertise in digital scholarship, and Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for authors seeking to make their work publicly accessible. The effort emphasizes lawful, noncommercial, public‑interest uses of digitized book data.
Over the course of the grant, HathiTrust and its partners plan to:
• Enhance book discovery by applying AI tools to improve metadata, text quality, and interactive search.
• Provide verified resources for text mining, computational analysis, and language model development.
• Advance shared principles for legal frameworks, accountability, and environmental impact.
• Create sustainable services that support academic and noncommercial research.
The Transparent Books initiative builds on the 2024–2026 Public Interest Corpus project, led by Authors Alliance and Northeastern University, which explored lawful ways for libraries to make book data available for computational research. Authors Alliance Executive Director Dave Hansen noted that their role is to help establish principles for corpus use and to convene stakeholders so their perspectives inform project design. He emphasized that the goal is to lower barriers for noncommercial academic researchers while ensuring authors’ works are properly attributed and accessible.
The project will work closely with academic libraries and researchers to navigate the complexities of applying AI to scholarly collections, aiming to provide lawful access to in‑copyright book data without reliance on corporate mediation.
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