• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.443-464
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• 2016

A great number of institutions around the world have been building digital repositories to communicate scholarly information. Meanwhile, digital repositories have been struggling with how to preserve increased volume of digital contents for the long term and how to build a sustainable information environment. The HathiTrust partnership was established to meet the need of a sustainable collaborative model of digital repositories in research libraries, mainly in North America, and has been expanded globally by signing with other libraries around the world. This paper is dealt with the establishment, operation and policy, construction status, and user service of the HathiTrust. The results presented in this paper include the benefits and potential opportunities of the HathiTrust as a participating member. Partnership in HathiTrust would allow each member institution to provide more cost-effective operations, shared management and long-term preservation of digital content, ease of copyright management, and increased accessibility. In the future it is expected to provide a shared storage of printed materials and to facilitate a big data research center.