Mike Furlough
Executive Director
HathiTrust
Stuart Lewis
Associate Director of Digital
National Library of Scotland
Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council under their UK-US digital scholarship collaboration scheme, the Global Digitization Dataset Network has been investigating the feasibility, benefits, and challenges of developing a service aggregating all digitized texts globally. The project members (HathiTrust, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the British Library, Glasgow University, and Research Libraries UK) have been seeking to investigate the development of a service, that if successful, would meet the three main use cases of i) allowing readers to find a digitized book irrespective of the library that digitized it; ii) providing scholars with the ability to cross-search worldwide collections to identify potential textual datasets for analysis and research; and iii) providing libraries and other organizations with data to help assist with collections management, augmenting discovery, and prioritizing selection for digitization. Having successfully aggregated over 17.5m records from the initial partners, we wish to report on our initial progress and discuss with the audience potential paths for continued pursuit of this challenge.
https://gddnetwork.arts.gla.ac.uk/