HathiTrust and WorldCat: doing more together

HathiTrust is a leader in collecting, organizing, preserving and sharing the record of human knowledge through its digital archives. OCLC has been working with HathiTrust for some time now in a variety of ways. In April of last year, for example, MARC records representing the digital collections in HathiTrust were added to WorldCat, making those resources easier for users to find on the Web. These records are also available for OCLC members to add to their local catalogs, where they can surface in other applications such as interlibrary loan, collection analysis and local discovery systems.

Now, we're very excited to announce that HathiTrust will be implementing a WorldCat Local user interface that will further improve access to the digital materials archived there.

This is a great example of the kind of partnerships that are possible because of role OCLC and its members play in the "information space." HathiTrust provides access to a compelling and highly regarded set of materials from more than fifty major research institutions. OCLC members represent thousands of libraries worldwide. Putting those two sets of assets together greatly improves the value of each to the other.

But the partnership story doesn't end there. Because WorldCat data is made available to other partners, the HathiTrust materials can reach an even greater number of interested users. WorldCat has become much more than a repository of collected data in these equations. It has become, as some have said, the "switch" where many different information roads meet, overlap and extend.

It's also an example of how the feedback from the community of libraries that support WorldCat can help improve our partners' systems. OCLC is able to work with our members to do all kinds of usability testing to improve WorldCat Local. As is obvious from this example, that work will go on to benefit the users of HathiTrust materials.

I'm excited to be working on these kinds of partnerships for just that reason--every time we bring new materials, metadata, activities or opportunities back to the cooperative, we're seeing the positive effects "ripple out" to more and more participants. The cumulative effects just keep getting better, and I'm curious (and eager!) to see what kinds of new partnerships will be coming down the road in the future.