Yes, working with the HathiTrust data is interesting, to say the least.

I did a bit of investigation to determine the feasibility of linking our bibliographic records to HathiTrust records. These investigations manifested themselves in three blog postings:

  1. http://bit.ly/PVsKBg - Describes the overlap between the Hesburgh Libraries book collection at the University of Notre Dame and the HathiTrust. It also outlines possible services to be implemented the 'Trust.

  2. http://bit.ly/OgNhCU - Here I describe how I identified and downloaded a set of 25,000 MARC records describing public domain items in both the HathiTrust and the Hesburgh Libraries' collection.

  3. http://bit.ly/N0P4cl - In this posting I provide an interface for browsing a subset of the MARC records, as well as providing the means for downloading them to a local disc.

What did I learn? In short, linking our records to HathiTrust records will require the coordinated skills and expertise of collection managers, catalogers, pubic service types, and systems types. I sincerely believe we can provide enhanced services against our collection -- services beyond linking -- if we figure out ways to exploit the HathiTrust.

(P.S. It looks like I misspelled HathiTrust in my initial posting. Speln iz not mi 4ta.)

-- 
Earache Least Moron