HathiTrust, a digital repository for some of the US' research libraries, has announced that it is currently experimenting with large-scale full text searching. The move is part of an effort to create a mechanism to search across the entire repository. As an initial public beta of full text search functionality, HathiTrust is offering a simple mechanism to search across all of the fully viewable works (both those in the public domain and those for which it has permissions) and a sprinkling of search-only works.
The size of the content indexed is approximately 500,000 volumes, and the majority of the works are fully viewable. Although this is a fully functioning and reliable search mechanism for these works, it is being provided as a public beta in order to learn more about these large search indexes in a public setting.
HathiTrust, launched in October 2008, is the result of collaboration between a group of US research libraries to create a repository of their vast digital collections, including millions of books, to be archived and preserved in a single repository. The group included the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California (UC) system.
Creation of the HathiTrust is seen to support the digitisation efforts of the CIC and the UC, each of which has entered into collective agreements with Google. The alliance with Google is to digitise portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search project. Materials digitised through other means will also be made available through HathiTrust.
