Developing a network to investigate the development of a global dataset of digitised texts

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All around the world, libraries, archives, universities, and many other organisations are digitising collections in order to make them freely available for research and scholarship. Whilst this endeavour is making millions of texts available, much of the effort is uncoordinated, making it hard for researchers or digital scholars to make the best use of this growing corpus. In addition, organisations wishing to target their digitisation efforts efficiently are unable to easily check to see if a text has already been digitised.These problems could be overcome by the development of an international register that contains a dataset of digitised texts, which brings together links to all openly available sources. The existence of such a dataset would deliver three big benefits:Scholars seeking large corpora of texts could easy search and compile links to items across from many sources, creating novel collections from which they can undertake research with digital methods. Readers wishing to find a digitised text, would be able to search quickly and efficiently across all potential sources to easily find whether a text has been digitised, and to gain access to the online text;Libraries undertaking digitisation programmes would be able to discover already digitised texts, making their own digitisation programmes more efficient by avoiding duplication. It would also enable large-scale collection analysis for research and other purposes. This project proposes the development of a new collaboration between the HathiTrust who are an existing and trusted aggregator of digitised texts, a preservation agent, and an access platform in the US, and key UK research Libraries who are large-scale sources of digitised materials. A trial combined dataset will be created to fully test the idea, and sustainability options will be explored in order to provide the collaboration with an ongoing operational model.Previous projects have sought to provide registers of digitised texts, but this network will go beyond those efforts in two ways. First, it will undertake research to identify how our proposed dataset could support discovery of digitised texts. Second, it will create a dataset that goes beyond existing projects by providing a large-scale dataset of library collection metadata from several of the largest digitising organisations in the world: whereas existing efforts are focused on aggregation and discovery, this project will provide a more comprehensive dataset that is also suitable for researchers and libraries to undertake data analysis. This will support the development of local, national and global digitisation strategies. If successful, this model has the potential to transform access to digital texts for citizens and researchers worldwide, for the study of single texts, or for the collation of novel corpora for digital scholarship.