You are receiving this message as a HathiTrust Member Representative, Primary Contact, or member of a HathiTrust governance or advisory group. Please share this with others in your community who will be interested.
 
Dear colleagues,
 
Today we are writing with news that we have reached a tremendous new milestone in the history of HathiTrust and the Research Center’s services.  We want you to be the first to know and also the first to hear of an exclusive benefit for members.
 
Since 2011, the HathiTrust Research Center has been developing services and tools to allow you and your academic community to employ text and data mining methodologies using the HathiTrust collection. To date, this service has been available only on the portion of the collection that is out of copyright. With the development of a landmark HathiTrust policy and an updated release of HTRC Analytics, HTRC now provides access to the text of the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus for non-consumptive research, such as data mining and computational analysis, including items protected by copyright.
 
What This Means for Your Institution
This extraordinary opportunity to use copyrighted materials for non-consumptive research purposes expands research access to the entire HathiTrust digital collection, which is sustained by HathiTrust’s 140+ member libraries. Your community may access HTRC’s easy-to-use computational tools ideal for beginners, as well as more complex tools to meet advanced data analysis needs.

HTRC Algorithms: a set of tools for assembling collections of digitized text from the HathiTrust corpus and performing text analysis on them. Including copyrighted items for ALL USERS.

Extracted Features Dataset: dataset allowing non-consumptive analysis on specific features extracted from the full text of the HathiTrust corpus. Including copyrighted items for ALL USERS.

HathiTrust+Bookworm: a tool for visualizing and analyzing word usage trends in the HathiTrust corpus. Including copyrighted items for ALL USERS.

HTRC Data Capsule: a secure computing environment for researcher-driven text analysis on the HathiTrust corpus. All users may access public domain items. Access to copyrighted items is available ONLY to member-affiliated researchers.
 
Member benefit: full corpus access for the Data Capsule service. Existing Data Capsule users from member institutions or new Data Capsule requesters from member institutions have the exclusive option to select “Full Corpus Access,” which includes copyrighted items. We anticipate increasing demand for this service and recognize our finite resources to support it. Accordingly, we will limit access to ONLY member-affiliated researchers. HTRC will contact existing Data Capsule users from member-affiliated institutions with complete instructions on using the full corpus if they choose to do so.  If you have specific questions or need some help getting started, please contact [log in to unmask].
 
How is This Possible? Expanding Research through Fair Use
This work has been several years in the making. A primary goal of HathiTrust is to enable the widest possible lawful research and educational uses of the HathiTrust collection. In recent years, US courts have recognized the solid legal basis for non-consumptive research on copyrighted materials. In 2016, HathiTrust established a working group to develop the Non-Consumptive Use Research Policy to ensure the responsible research use of copyrighted items. The policy is now enacted in an updated release of the HTRC Analytics services, which allow researchers to conduct computational text analysis on copyrighted items as permitted under US copyright law. Non-consumptive research use DOES NOT change the legal status of items protected under copyright.
 
We invite you to explore resources provided on the HTRC website and pass them along to individuals and groups in your community who may most benefit. Resources include video tutorials, a chart on tool access, and a Getting Started with HTRC Guide for easy start-up activities.
 
Thanks to all who have helped HathiTrust reach this milestone in our 10th anniversary year. We look forward to supporting you and your community in using these resources.
 
Best regards,
 
Mike Furlough, Executive Director, HathiTrust
J. Stephen Downie, Co-director, HTRC; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
John Walsh, Co-director, HTRC; Indiana University