The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is joining with HathiTrust Digital Library to open electronic content for free online access. UMP plans to have 1000 or more titles available for full viewing by year’s end. The list of the free-view Press titles in HathiTrust is growing daily, and can be found at http://www.press.umich.edu/digital/hathi… .
Launched in 2008, HathiTrust ( www.hathitrust.org ) is a digital preservation repository and research management tool for the world’s great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search and large-scale, full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it.
“Presses have had online previews and PDFs of sample chapters, tables of contents, and sometimes entire books on their websites for years,” said Phil Pochoda, Press Director at UMP. “The HathiTrust partnership is something entirely new that takes into account the actual pursuit of broad dissemination of scholarly information. Security restrictions are in place to protect the integrity of the product, but with HathiTrust, a full-view of the material is there, it’s searchable, and it’s available to anyone with access to the Trust. If you want to either search for or happen to come across Michigan Press books, you can look through them onscreen anywhere, anytime.”
In keeping with the University of Michigan’s leadership role in the use of digitization and print-on-demand technology, UMP is seeking to push the boundaries of the rapidly-changing publishing world to position its resources where many different kinds of audiences can find them. And with multiple ways to find what they are looking for, even greater numbers of potential readers can find and “flip through” a book to see whether it meets their needs and interests without ever turning an actual page. If the reader wishes to buy the book, HathiTrust links to the Press site to allow for fast online purchasing.
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