From a Chronicle of Higher Ed. Report by Marc Perry:
With the Google project in legal limbo, Indiana University and the University of Illinois are moving forward with plans to set up a similar research center [HathiTrust Research Center for Computational Access to Archives] built around the archive maintained by the HathiTrust Digital Library, which was created by a consortium of universities, in part, to establish a stable backup of the books that Google digitized from their libraries. The new research center will initially focus on works that are no longer protected by copyright—roughly 2.3 million books in HathiTrust’s 8-million-plus collection.
“Right now, the safe path is working with the public-domain materials,” said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust. “That’s a phenomenally large amount of material.”
Here’s a Link to an INFOdocket Post (4/18/2011) With Full Text of Official Announcement
Via INFOdocket
Glad to know they’re sticking with public domain materials for now. The market for scholarly books is small enough anyway. It can’t cope with university libraries sharing one copy among dozens of library systems.
I also wonder if this research center might be a scheme to provide them with legal cover. Some universities have endowments that would give them very deep pockets if they loose a major copyright dispute. This research center wouldn’t have that much money to take.