Sara Benson: Welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today, I am very pleased to be speaking remotely with Michael Furlough who is the Executive Director of the HathiTrust Digital Library. Welcome to the show.

Mike Furlough: Hey! Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all today.

Sara: Thanks so much for coming and virtually, at least, for spending some time with me to chat about this. So, I’m pretty familiar with the HathiTrust Digital Library but I know a lot of listeners may not be. Could you explain to the listeners who are unfamiliar with the library, what the HathiTrust Digital Library collects?

Mike: Sure, and I will give you a little bit of a history, too. So, our primary goal and mission is to collect, preserve, and make accessible materials of scholarly and cultural record. Mostly, that takes the form of books that have been digitized from research libraries. Right now, the collection has about 17.4 million digitized volumes. That is like a book on a shelf that has been put on a scanner and that corresponds to just under 9 million titles. So, that includes books, single authored books, but also, serials, journals, things like that. We got started—really the start of HathiTrust emerged from the moment when Google, when it was still a pretty young company, began working with libraries to scan collections at a really large scale. I mean, their plan had been to or was to simply scan everything in these libraries and one of those early partners with Google was the University of Michigan and soon it was followed by other colleagues from the Big Ten, including Illinois, and those libraries started to plan for large scale cooperatively funded infrastructure that would support preservation and support access and really focus on a researcher or student mode of access to the collection. They recognize that they work together they can do much more with their joint collections effectively in a way that they couldn’t in a grant landscape. So, they also started working with other universities and in 2008 the University of California joined on with the Big Ten to form HathiTrust. We now have about 150 members worldwide and we’ve launched a lot of major programs that help us take advantage of the corpus, take advantage of the collection in ways that you just couldn’t for a print collection, as well.

Sara: Wonderful. So, it sounds like the collection is fairly robust at this point especially. What is your role within the library?

Mike: So, I’m the Executive Director. My job is to lead the organization as a whole. And it really is an organization, as I said. So, I do things like on a day-to-day basis I’m working with my team of about 12 people to help monitor our uses, monitor our finance. On a larger scale, I’m looking at our strategy, helping to set and define policy. I am accountable to a Board, a board of governors that includes representatives from the memberships, so, I work with them regularly, monthly, in a—to give updates and talk about what we’re working on and to understand what direction we might—what course corrections, rather, we might want to be making.

So, we have— one thing I would let your listeners know is that we have services that are operated at different institutions. So, I am based at the University of Michigan, but some of our services are operated here, but others are operated at Indiana University, some at the University of Illinois. California Digital Library also operates some services. All of these are like contracted services. So, even though my team is about 12, really were relying on the distributed expertise of the membership and there are dozens of people that work on HathiTrust.

Sara: Wonderful, yeah. I’m very familiar with some of the work that goes on at the University of Illinois in collaboration with the iSchool, as well. Is—can you talk a little bit—I’ve heard a lot of buzz lately around the Emergency Digital Library. Can