On Aug 3, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

If I needed/wanted to know what materials held by my library were also in the HaitTrust, then programmatically how could I figure this out? In other words, do you know of a way to query the HaitTrust and limit the results to items my library owns?

Not an answer to your question, but if you want to share I'm curious what your use case is where you want to limit to items your library owns.


There are at least three reasons I would like to have us mirror/cache digitized items, listed here in no priority order:

  * "Lot's of copies keep stuff safe" - In other words, a part of a library's function is preservation. While the 'Trust (I can't ever remember how to spell "Hathi") is primarily about preservation, I am uncomfortable having access to materials via a network. It is too much like cloud computing where one does not really own nor have control over their own content.

  * printing - There are advantages and disadvantages to both electronic and digital mediums. In my opinion, the flexibility for annotation of printed items is a significant advantage. Yes, one can annotate digital materials, but those annotations are often limited to the applications' functionality. Comparatively, a pen or pencil applied against paper offers a huge number of opportunities. If libraries were to provide the ability to keep books gotten from their collections, then those items could be written, scribbled, footnoted in to the reader's content. Libraries could eliminate the stigma of "don't write in books."

 * textual analysis - Direct and immediate access to digitized versions of books is the gateway to the "distant reading" of texts. A library could provide simple and rudimentary text mining services against it collection -- for example, http://bit.ly/O1c7qb

In short, collecting digitized versions of locally held print materials enables a library to provide additional services against its content. Libraries need to be more than warehouses of books, and move towards making their content more useful.

--
Eric Morgan
University of Notre Dame



[cid:[log in to unmask]]