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Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Courant was certain that the University of Michigan could build a workable system for sharing its digitized collections. And that Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library—other early partners in Google digitization— could each do the same. But if the University of Michigan pooled its collections and resources with other libraries, he reasoned, couldn’t they create a single, huge repository that would reduce institutional costs and provide streamlined access for users all around the world?
Act 2 When the Institute of Public Policy Studies recruited Courant to teach forty years ago, the University of Michigan was a worldwide pioneer in computing. That means U-M had a few ginormous, and very expensive, computing towers that faculty could use for 15 minutes a pop. Today, nearly every University stakeholder has at least one personal computer, often more, and internet access is ubiquitous in the academic the world. When the world changes that dramatically, one can expect brand new problems, and brand new opportunities. “The invention of digital information technology totally transforms the way in which you might expect scholarship to be published and libraries to do their business,” explains Courant. “How do we design libraries so we can really take advantage of this treasuretrove of digitized information?” As dean of libraries, Courant would be in the perfect position to solve those problems, and to grasp those opportunities—and he knew it.
Courant, working with colleagues at Indiana University, put together a business plan to do that, shopped it to the other members of the Big Ten and to the University of California system, and in the course of a few months, launched a collective digital library, the HathiTrust.
one savvy user. And they read out-ofprint books, from one virtual cover to the next, on computers and mobile devices around the world. In just a few years, HathiTrust has become an indispensible part of the scholarly infrastructure.
Act 3 To be true, Act 3 hasn’t been written yet. Courant has returned to the faculty in the Ford School, where he’ll work to further a pretty hefty vision for digital libraries and scholarly publishing. Known as an outspoken critic of overpriced scholarly publications, Courant says now that HathiTrust has been created, it makes other things possible like, for example, “creating a platform to allow people to publish open-access journals that will be preserved indefinitely.”
Today, the HathiTrust—by far the largest digital library anywhere— includes 80 academic library members, contains 10.8 million volumes, and welcomes 50,000 users each weekday (25,000 on weekend days). Those users run advanced searches of the entire collection. They create their own sub-collections, like the collection of 912 Islamic manuscripts compiled by
HathiTrust’s robust preservation strategy allows the consortium to offer permanent storage of scholarly journals, but the trust will only do that for open-access titles that are shared freely. Courant isn’t against a little “shameless commerce,” he says (HathiTrust sells reprints of some out-of-copyright items, including its top-seller, an 1860s-era guide to beekeeping), but the University of Michigan alone spends more than $10 million a year on journal subscriptions, and for smaller academic institutions—whether in n 2011, the Authors Guild filed suit against Kenya, Kazakhstan, or HathiTrust for copyright violations because the Kansas—those fees put HathiTrust holds digitized materials still in important scholarly research copyright (as a matter of policy and practice, well out of reach. ■
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those materials are only made available to readers with print disabilities). Judge Harold Baer ruled decisively against the Guild, referring to the HathiTrust as an “invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts.” The Authors Guild has appealed, and the outcome is pending. If the Guild loses, it’s anyone’s guess whether it will take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. But if HathiTrust loses, Courant is confident that the HathiTrust and its members will. He writes, “Nonprofit organizations, emphatically including research libraries, are the natural stewards of information that will be of value to society for the indefinite future, precisely because we are driven by a mission of preservation and access, rather than by profit.”