University of Michigan Library recently announced that fulltext search is now available across the entire HathiTrust Digital Library of more than 4.6 million volumes, including materials in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK). Jidong Yang, Head of Asia Library at the University of Michigan tested the fulltext search capability and found that the OCR accuracy for CJK materials is low. Also according to Jidong, “searching by Latin and even Cyrillic scripts seems to work pretty well. So it’s definitely a useful tool for searching western studies on East Asia. Compared with Google Book, Hathi has a more library-OPAC-like catalog (which is closely related to the new Mirlyn, Michigan’s VuFind-based OPAC) and thus provides a good alternative for those who often get lost in Google’s search interface.” (Jidong Yang, eastlib message, November 20, 2009)
For more info about Hathi see Large Scale Search Blog & Twitter.
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