The elephant in the room: Research in and about the HathiTrust Digital Library

The HathiTrust Digital Library is, by some measures, the world’s largest, holding nearly 17.5 million volumes digitized from research libraries around the country (and some from around the world).  But what’s actually in this mass of digital stuff, and what can you actually do with it?  Perhaps more importantly, what’s left out of it, and what can we do about that?

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), co-located here at UIUC and at Indiana University, is the research arm of this enormous, near-universal library.  This talk will briefly introduce HTRC’s approaches to the digital library; the innovative ways it makes even copyright-restricted materials available for research; and how some recent researchers have made computational use of the millions of volumes contained in it.  We’ll also make some attempts to characterize the nature and contents of the HathiTrust digital library itself, and discuss some recent efforts to fill its gaps.