The Triangle Research Libraries Network Joins the HathiTrust

The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), a longstanding consortium of Duke University, the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University, has just joined the HathiTrust, a large-scale, collaborative digital repository of some of the leading research libraries in the U.S.

The mission of the HathiTrust is "to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge." The repository has the following stated goals:

:: To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a number of academic institutions.
:: To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions.
:: To help preserve these important human records by creating reliable and accessible electronic representations.
:: To stimulate redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries, thus reducing long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of print collections.
:: To create and sustain this “public good” in a way that mitigates the problem of free-riders.
:: To create a technical framework that is simultaneously responsive to members through the centralized creation of functionality and sufficiently open to the creation of tools and services not created by the central organization.

More information on the HathiTrust is available on the site's FAQ. The digital repository can be explored via catalog, full-text, and collection-level searches.