[INDOLOGY] Heath

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Dear Patrick,

The Hathi Trust puzzles me.  It's a major consortium of USA libraries that
has been busy digitizing books on a grand scale.  But almost everything
they have done is not available for consultation.  This is especially true
if you live outside the USA.   Personally, I have given up trying to use
the Hathi Trust's materials, because I repeatedly see desirable items in
their collection but I can't get at them.  Maybe it works better if you are
reaching them from a USA university network?

I've corresponded briefly with the folks at HT, and they said their hands
are tied by copyright issues.  However, many items I've tried to view were
long out of copyright, so that's not quite correct.  I think perhaps they
have a blanket bar on lots of materials because they don't have the staff
to pick through everything and decide what can be released.  But other
consortia manage this problem simply by using a date of publication and
making reasonable assumptions about the lifetime of the author.

I also don't understand the relationship between the digitizing that HT
does, and the work of Google Books, DLI, Microsoft and Archive.org.  Are HT
not duplicating work done already, elsewhere?

I have not had time to dig into these questions, so if somone here knows
more about HT's policies and goals, I'd be glad to learn more.  HT looks
like a valuable resource.  It would be good for our field if we could
actually use it.

Best wishes,
Dominik



--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk* <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
Department of History and Classics <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
University of Alberta, Canada

<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/goog_1525257691>
​sas.ualberta.ca​


On 29 September 2016 at 08:17, Olivelle, J P <jpo at austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

> Can someone tell me how to download a PDF from files in the Hathi Trust?
> There is no obvious button, even when I log in.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Patrick
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