School of Information Sciences

HathiTrust Research Center extends non-consumptive research tools to copyrighted materials

HathiTrust Research Center

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has extended non-consumptive research tools to copyrighted materials, expanding research through fair use. HTRC is a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to the HathiTrust Digital Library database.

Since 2011, HTRC has been developing services and tools to allow researchers to employ text and data mining methodologies using the HathiTrust collection. To date, this service has been available only on the portion of the collection that is out of copyright. With the development of a landmark HathiTrust policy and an updated release of HTRC Analytics, HTRC now provides access to the text of the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus for non-consumptive research, such as data mining and computational analysis, including items protected by copyright.

This extraordinary opportunity to use copyrighted materials for non-consumptive research purposes expands research access to the entire HathiTrust digital collection, which is sustained by HathiTrust's 140+ member libraries. Researchers may access HTRC's easy-to-use computational tools, which are ideal for beginners, as well as more complex tools designed to meet advanced data analysis needs.

A primary goal of HathiTrust is to enable the widest possible lawful research and educational uses of the HathiTrust collection. In recent years, U.S. courts have recognized the solid legal basis for non-consumptive research on copyrighted materials. In 2016, HathiTrust established a working group to develop the Non-Consumptive Use Research Policy to ensure the responsible research use of copyrighted items.

The policy is now enacted in an updated release of HTRC Analytics, which allows researchers to conduct computational text analysis on copyrighted items as permitted under U.S. copyright law. Non-consumptive research use does not change the legal status of items protected under copyright.

"My HTRC colleagues at both Illinois and Indiana should be very proud of their great accomplishment," said HTRC Codirector J. Stephen Downie, iSchool professor and associate dean for research. "Providing non-consumptive access to all of HathiTrust's nearly 17 million volumes will help scholars and students to uncover the secrets buried within to the benefit of us all."

Read the HTRC press release.

Research Areas:
Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Join the iSchool at the 2025 ALISE annual conference

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from October 6–8 in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme of the 2025 conference is "Decolonising Pedagogies: Agency, Identity, Practices."

Wang appointed to Autism Data Privacy Advisory Group

Professor Yang Wang has been appointed by Governor JB Pritzker to serve on the newly created Autism Data Privacy Advisory Group, established under Executive Order 2025-02 to strengthen protections for the civil and human rights of people with autism in Illinois. 

Yang Wang

New book provides roadmap for designing human-centered AI systems

Professor Dong Wang is the lead author of a book that offers a new perspective on human-centered AI design and human–AI collective intelligence. Social Intelligence: The New Frontier of Integrating Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Social Space, which was recently published by Springer Nature, is co-authored by Lanyu Shang (PhD '24) of Loyola Marymount University and Yang Zhang of Miami University.

Dong Wang

iSchool to present research at TPRC 2025

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC 2025), which will be held from September 18–20 in Washington, DC.

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top