Those are the two big social science and humanities news items in this installment of Blog Buzz.
Milestones:HathiTrust Reaches 5 Million Open Volumes was posted this past Saturday by Gary Price over at InfoDocket. Price links several times to a gloriously chart-and-stat-packed post from Mike Furlough, Executive Director of the HathiTrust entitled Getting to Five Million:HathiTrusts Collection of open books, as well as an earlier post from the Scholarly Kitchen on the topic. Price also points out that the HathiTrust, whose 5 millionth open book (courtesy of Ohio State University) is a treatise by King George III’s dentist, may not be the only online resource with the potential to give us insight into the monarch’s teeth — not for long anyway, as plans were recently announced by the Royal Archive to digitize 350,000 pages of source material from the Georgian period (the bulk of which is from George III’s Reign.*)
Furlough’s post is well is worth the read for those interested in the long term preservation and accessibility of library collections. In addition to the graphs and data (with links to even more data) he provides important explanations (the difference between Public Domain and Open Works) and insights on how closed copyrighted works in HathiTrust will still be of use to researchers.
The second big announcement (via Kaitlin Thaney of Mozilla Open Science) is that in Harvard’s Dataverse (from the Institute of Quantitative Social Science), “a software application that enables institutions to host research data repositories” (more about the project here), has changed the default waiver for datasets added to the system to CCo or public domain, and will give researchers the option to change the waiver for given datasets if necessary. The announcement on their blog is here.
*Attempt to remain calm, historians of the American Revolution and Georgian Period, this could take a little while.
It is so exciting to think about all work people will be able to do with this information for both HathiTrust and Dataverse!