[pd-discuss] Hathitrust locks public domain books; amasses scans from others, and gives full access only to partners members

[Peter B. Hirtle]

John Ockerbloom is right that the first thing you need to do is read the contracts with Google to see what the partner libraries are allowed to do with public domain scans.  Google at first asserted perpetual physical ownership (not copyright) over the scans they funded.  Recent amendments to the agreements with libraries stipulated that they would relinquish all ownership rights in the scans of public domain books after 15 years.  Unfortunately, those agreements were invalidated with the rejection by the court of the Amended Settlement Agreement.

But even if HathiTrust wanted to limit the ability of non-members to download public domain scans that have no restrictions on them, I would not object.  HathiTrust doesn't "amass scans from others."  Rather HathiTrust members pay a large sum of money to the HathiTrust to have their scans stored in the HathiTrust.  They do this in order to ensure that the scans, the overwhelming majority of which have been produced by Google, are in a secure environment that will endure over time.  In addition, the HathiTrust has developed a better interface to the scanned items, is actively investigating copyright status in order to be able to add more works to the public domain (so far, they have found 55,000 works that are public domain), and are working to provide access to visually-impaired students at member institutions.  

I suspect that if you were willing to fund the HathiTrust to do all these things, HathiTrust members would be willing to open the public domain resources to the world (if digitization contracts so allow).  But for now, in order to avoid the "free rider" problem, they are following a business model that gives more benefits to people who are supporting their programs rather than to the public at large.  That seems to me to be a fair trade-off.  

Furthermore, there is nothing that prevents you from identifying a title of interest in HathiTrust and then downloading the PDF from Google.  Or you can digitize the title yourself and make your digital copy freely available to the world.

As far as the sale of printed copies, Michigan is offering this as a service, just as my library does with our public domain books.  Some people want them in printed form, and we try to facilitate that.  The revenues we get probably do not cover the administrative costs associated with adding the books to Amazon - but again, we are trying to meet the needs of different users.

If you want to complain about something, complain about the British Library's partnership with commercial partners that offer no public access.  For example, the 19th century British newspapers digitized by the library are only available through Cengage, or the 18th and 19th century Parliamentary Papers series that are only available through Chadwyck-Healey.


Peter B. Hirtle
Senior Policy Advisor and Fellow, Society of American Archivists
Digital Scholarship Services 
Cornell University Library
2B53 Kroch Library                              
Ithaca, NY  14853
peter.hirtle at cornell.edu
t.  607.255-4033 
f.  607.255-9524
http://vivo.cornell.edu/individual/vivo/individual23436
Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums:
http://hdl.handle.net/1813/14142