Can BHL include materials from other digital libraries?

No, BHL can only accept materials into its collection from contributors that are part of our consortium or from materials available within the Internet Archive corpus that conform to our metadata and subject matter standards.

We work directly with the Internet Archive to often digitize, as well as store and serve our materials through our website. Materials from the Internet Archive that contain the appropriate metadata and scope may be considered for inclusion in the BHL collection.

BHL is not able to include materials from other digital repositories, such as HathiTrust and Google Books, for a variety of reasons including:

  • legal restrictions that prevent the distribution of materials across various digital repositories
  • technical incongruities with file formats and/or metadata that prevent the materials from being compatible with our digital library file structure.

Tags: harvest, IA, selection, digitization, collection development