HathiTrust Awarded $5 Million Grant to Develop AI Infrastructure

From the press release:

Researchers, students, and the broader public will have new paths into the HathiTrust collection thanks to a Mellon Foundation award to develop responsible, equitable, and transparent services that leverage AI for the public good and scholarly discovery. Two respected collaborators will join HathiTrust in this effort: Northeastern University Library, which brings deep expertise in digital scholarship, and Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that supports authors who want their work to benefit the public. With a firm commitment to lawful, noncommercial, public-interest uses, this project will make HathiTrust’s 19 million digitized volumes more useful and accessible to the academic community and the public.

Making Research More Discoverable and Accessible to a Wider Audience

The funded project is entitled Transparent Books: AI Infrastructure for Discovery and the Public Interest and builds on previous work by the Authors Alliance and Northeastern on the Public Interest Corpus, a framework for making book collections data available for AI training and research. The goal is to make HathiTrust's collection of roughly 19 million items available to researchers using AI for (for example) text or data mining, and to use AI to make those items more discoverable. 

Visit the HathiTrust website for the full press release and for the Transparent Books FAQ, which provides additional details on how the grant funds will be used, how the project will operate within legal constraints, and sustainability.