Charting HathiTrust's Strategic Directions

In 2018 HathiTrust will mark its tenth year.  In this past decade we’ve grown from just over two dozen members to nearly 130 and expanded our collection to include nearly 16 million volumes.  Along the way we’ve achieved a great deal: the launching of the HathiTrust Research Center; large-scale copyright reviews of works in the collection; building a Federal Documents Registry to identify US government documents for digitization; the development of a distributed shared print monographs collection to mirror HathiTrust’s digital library.  In 2011 we held a “constitutional convention” to develop the organizational and governance models necessary to ensure our long term sustainability. 

 

We have accomplished much of what we originally set out to do and we are now ready to set ambitious new strategic goals for the next 3-5 years.  Our collaboration has enabled unprecedented access to digitized collections, cost-effective shared infrastructure, digital preservation, development of distinctive collections, and availability  of new services to scholars. Many of these benefits have accrued beyond the HathiTrust membership and serve the public good. Building on this success, HathiTrust remains committed to its mission to “contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” 

 

By defining a vision for the future as well as areas for strategic focus, HathiTrust will be well positioned to provide leadership in the preservation and use of digitized collections and tools to support research, teaching, and learning.  We took preliminary steps in 2015 when we surveyed the members and, based on your comments, determined to keep our collections scope on books and book-like materials for the next several years.  Following that, the Board of Governors and the Program Steering Committee began to consider how to use that focus to further serve the membership and our user communities.  Earlier this summer, both groups met in retreat to identify areas of strategic focus for HathiTrust for the next 3-5 years.  

 

From that retreat came a draft version of HathiTrust’s Vision, Strategic Themes and Objectives.  This is not a finished plan, by any means. Through the remainder of 2017 HathiTrust’s staff and leadership intend to be be in conversation with our membership to review these ideas, and, more importantly, to hear your own.   We will devote  our 2017 Member Meeting to this topic as well.   Following this outreach period, we’ll review and revise our strategic directions for release in early 2018.   

 

 

 

A series of small discussion groups will be hosted in September and notes on these discussions will be posted as they become available.