HathiTrust has announced the release of a new, state-of-the-art bibliographic management system for its 11-million volume digital repository. The new system, called Zephir, is developed and managed by the California Digital Library, and represents the first distributed development of a major repository component outside the University of Michigan.
HathiTrust is a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in a digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. HathiTrust's membership continues to grow, with 89 institutions currently participating from the United States, Canada, and Spain. 11 new institutions have joined in 2013.
California Digital Library (CDL) receives and manages bibliographic records in Zephir that are associated with digital items to be deposited in HathiTrust. Zephir stores all versions of submitted records and selects the 'best' record when records for a given title are submitted from multiple sources. The records are then exported for use in HathiTrust's catalogue, data feeds, and APIs.
Laine Farley, Executive Director of the California Digital Library, noted that decades of experience managing bibliographic data for distributed campuses made the University of California system, and the California Digital Library in particular, well suited to this work.
