The HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust's public domain and other openly available content.
DPLA provides an online portal to freely available digital material held by libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. By offering a unified discovery point for these disparate collections, DPLA aims to make readily available to the public the words, images, sounds, and objects of America's shared cultural heritage.
Of HathiTrust's nearly 11 million volumes, the metadata records associated with the almost 3.5 million that are freely available will be accessible on the web at dp.la, and through the DPLA application programming interface (API), making HathiTrust a DPLA 'content hub.' The digitised volumes themselves will continue to reside in HathiTrust.
The partnership makes HathiTrust the single largest DPLA content hub, in the company of institutions such as the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the New York Public Library, and many others.
The partnership officially began on June 18, 2013, and the data is in the process of being transferred from HathiTrust to the Digital Public Library of America. DPLA will be working to add a special interface for books to supplement its novel map and timeline browsing interfaces, but the HathiTrust content will be available through the current site as soon as the data is loaded.
