The Dark History of HathiTrust

Abstract This research explores the ways values, power, and politics shape and are shaped by digital infrastructure development through an in-depth study of HathiTrust’s “dark history,” the period of years leading up to its public launch. This research identifies and traces the emerging and iterative ways that values were surfaced and negotiated, decision making approaches were strategically modified, and relationships were strengthened, reconfigured, and sometimes abandoning through the process of generating a viable, robust and sustainable collaborative digital infrastructure. Through this history, we gain deeper understandings and appreciations of the various and sometimes surprising ways that values, power, and politics are implicated in digital infrastructure development. Shedding light on this history enables us to better contextualize and understand the affordances, limitations, and challenges of the HathiTrust we know today, better envision its range of possible futures, and develop richer appreciations for digital infrastructure development more broadly

Piece by Piece Review of Digitize-and-Lend Projects Through the Lens of Copyright and Fair Use

Digitize-and-lend library projects can benefit societies in multiple ways, from providing information to people in remote areas, to reducing duplication of effort in digitization, to providing access to people with disabilities. Such projects contemplate not just digitizing library titles for regular patron use, but also allowing the digitized versions to be used for interlibrary loan (ILL), sharing within consortia, and replacing print copies at other libraries. Many of these functions are already supported within the analog world (e.g., ILL), and the digitize-and-lend concept is largely a logical outgrowth of technology, much like the transitioning from manual hand duplication of books to printing presses. The purpose of each function is to facilitate user access to information. Technology can amplify that access, but in doing so, libraries must also be careful not to upset the long established balance in copyright, where authors’ rights sit on the other side of the scale from public benefit. This article seeks to provide a primer on the various components in a digitize-and-lend project, explore the core copyright issues in each, and explain how these projects maintain the balance of copyright even as libraries take advantage of newer technologies

Shared Collection Development, Digitization, and Owned Digital Collections

While library models already exist for sharing physical materials and joint licensing, this paper envisions an aspect of future collections involving a national digital collection owned, not licensed, by libraries. Collaborative collection development, digitization, and digital object management of owned collections can benefit societies in multiple ways, from expanding access to users otherwise unable to reach these materials, to preserving content even when disaster strikes, to reducing duplication of effort and expense in collection or digitization. This article will explore both the benefits of and the challenges to this type of collaboration

Building a Collaborative Digital Collection: A Necessary Evolution in Libraries

Law libraries are losing ground in the effort to preserve information in the digital age. In part, this is due declining budgets, user needs, and a caution born from the great responsibility libraries feel to ensure future access instead of selecting a form that may not survive. That caution, though, has caused others, such as Google, to fill the silence with their vision. Libraries must stand and contribute actively to the creation of digital collections if we expect a voice in future discussion. This article presents a vision of the start of a collaborative, digital academic law library, one that will harness our collective strengths while still allowing individual collections to prosper. It seeks to identify and answer the thorniest issues - including copyright - surrounding digitization projects. It does not presume to solve all of these issues. It is, however, intended to be a call for collective action, to stop discussing the law library of the future and to start building it

Content, Purpose, or Both?

Most debates about the proper meaning of “transformativeness” in fair use are really about a larger shift towards more robust fair use. Part I of this short Article explores the copyright-restrictionist turn towards defending fair use, whereas in the past critics of copyright’s broad scope were more likely to argue that fair use was too fragile to protect free speech and creativity in the digital age. Part II looks at some of the major cases supporting that rhetorical and political shift. Although it hasn’t broken decisively with the past, current case law makes more salient the freedoms many types of uses and users have to proceed without copyright owners’ authorization. Part III discusses some of the strongest critics of liberal fair use interpretations, especially their arguments that transformative “purpose” is an illegitimate category. Part IV looks towards the future, suggesting that broad understandings of transformativeness are here to stay

Understanding Organizational Responses to Innovative Deviance: A Case Study of HathiTrust.

This thesis traces the emergence and evolution of HathiTrust as way of generating deeper insights into the processes of sociotechnical transformation. HathiTrust emerged from the groundbreaking and legally contentious Google mass digitization project as an organization operated by the University of Michigan. It grew into a partnership with over 100 research institutions that support a shared digital repository, oversee a digital library comprised of over thirteen million volumes, and run a research center for non-consumptive computational research. This dissertation combines traditional legal research and analysis with social scientific approaches. Primary data for this case study were generated from in-depth interviews and review of relevant documents such as contracts, judicial opinions, press releases, and organizational reports. It develops an analytic framework blending the sociological concept of innovative deviance with organizational sensemaking theories and copyright doctrine. It describes and explains how and why organizations make sense of and make decisions with respect to risk and opportunity under conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and disequilibrium. This explains how slow-moving institutions such as laws and academic research libraries change and adapt in accordance with changes in technology and social practices. It describes the dynamic, non-linear, and mutually constitutive relationships among technology, social practice, and law that shaped and were shaped by HathiTrust. In so doing, it offers insights into the processes of sociotechnical transformation.PhDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133351/1/acentiva_1.pd

Living coal : Robert Boyle, John Holland, and the bodily passages of chimney sweep literature, 1684-1824

This project attends to a body of literature that registers the extraordinary and tragic effects of chimneys infused with living coal upon young chimney sweeps. In so doing, I show how writers, especially John Holland, registered the dynamic interrelationship between chimney sweeps, chimneys and coal as bodily passages. To assist our imagining of these bodily passages, I adapt Edward Casey’s logic of place and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality” in order to make sense of the material exchange between the child-sweeps and the lively matter of and within the chimneys. Together, place-thinking and transcorporeality help us see the way in which dwelling within toxic places might involve processes of what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence,” a violence often culminating in the spectacular erasure of bodies. In turn, I hope to contribute to a fuller understanding of what it means to live firmly emplaced in the environment in which we dwell.Englis

The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’s Influence on Nineteenth-Century Fiction

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently undervalued by modern-day critics who read them through a Disney-tinted lens. Because such critics undervalue nineteenth-century fairy references, they overlook the voice the fairies give to marginalized groups in nineteenth-century societal discourses. This dissertation seeks to rectify this shortcoming by exploring the folklore published throughout the nineteenth century and applying it to nineteenth-century literature in a way that adds significance to those folkloric fairy references and highlights their place in nineteenth-century British social discourses. To more fully explore why nineteenth-century authors include references to the folkloric fairies in their works and to better understand how knowledge of this folklore helps the reader better interpret the work itself, each chapter of this dissertation explores the fairies in relationship to one of the century’s dominant social discourses: national identity, industrialism, science and religion, and childhood education. This dissertation also looks at atypical fairy works in relationship to each discourse. These are canonical works that are not typically discussed in relationship to the fairies, but which, I argue, either have characters within them that have yet to be properly identified as fairy or are fairy influenced

Here all seems security and peace! : How Brookeville, Maryland Became United States Capital for a Day

When the British burned Washington D.C. during the War of 1812, the city’s civilians and officials fled to the surrounding countryside to escape the carnage. Fearful that the attack on the Capital could eventually spell defeat and worried for their city, these refugees took shelter in the homes and fields of Brookeville, Maryland, a small, Quaker mill town on the outskirts of Washington. These pacifist residents of Brookeville hosted what could have been thousands of Washingtonians in the days following the attack, ensuring the safety of not only the people of Washington, but of President Madison himself. As hosts to the President, the home of a prominent couple stood in for the President’s House, and as the effective center of command for the government, the town was crowned Capital of the United States for a day. This paper hopes to expound upon the history of this event, focusing on the Quaker community that rose so charitably to the challenge. Through an examination of primary sources, digitized archival materials, and previous research, this is a history of Brookeville as it was in August 1814, a tribute to its people and an acknowledgement of its importance