The University of California libraries — which comprise the largest university research library in the world — are launching a landmark research project to investigate the potential for expanded lawful use of digitized books held by academic and research libraries.
The Mellon Foundation is providing $1.1 million support for Project LEND (Library Expansion of Networked Delivery), a two-year project that the UC Davis Library will lead on behalf of the 10-campus UC system.
When college campuses and libraries across the country closed during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many began offering greater access to digital books as an emergency measure. These programs met an immediate need — and raised a host of questions about copyright law, the role of libraries and the potential for technology-enabled research that were unforeseen even a few decades ago.
The project’s broad investigation aims to extend and strengthen the historical role of academic libraries in making information as broadly accessible as possible for use in research and education. Project teams will: use focus groups and other methods to understand the needs of UC faculty and students for a range of research, education and clinical care scenarios; evaluate the legal frameworks under which libraries could provide expanded access to digitized books, including those still in copyright; review and analyze existing technology platforms and systems for sharing and interacting with digital books, and explore the possibilities for creating new systems and services; and determine the optimal composition of a digital book collection to meet user needs; what digitized collections are currently available or where more digitization efforts may be required; and how best to manage both print and digitized collections.
During a 2022 planning phase, also supported by the Mellon Foundation, the UC libraries laid the foundation for this large-scale research and service design work.
The research will be informed by existing models including controlled digital lending, a set of practices and technologies by which some libraries lend digital surrogates of their print materials. It will also draw on UC’s experience with pandemic-era programs such as HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service, or ETAS, which offered temporary access to digitized versions of in-copyright print books held by the user’s library. Because of HathiTrust’s work and understanding of the current digital library experience, the team will coordinate closely with HathiTrust to lay the groundwork for a potential role in implementation.
Project LEND will be managed by Majors of UC Davis with a leadership team that includes UC faculty, postdoctoral fellows and librarians; senior personnel from HathiTrust; and an expert in ebook user experience from the Digital Public Library of America. To ensure service models are broadly applicable, the project team will also consult periodically with an advisory group of representatives from academic libraries outside UC.
The project’s funding counts toward UC Davis’ $2 billion fundraising campaign, Expect Greater: From UC Davis, For the World, the largest philanthropic endeavor in university history.
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