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The central thesis of this newsletter over the last few years has been, I hope, clear and straightforward: Artificial intelligence, like the World Wide Web before it, can be very helpful for some aspects of learning and research, such as finding library resources and pursuing forms of digital scholarship; at the same time, AI can be corrosive of other aspects of learning and research, such as the development of critical thinking, persuasive writing, and the conception of new ideas; scholars and libraries, rather than technology companies, should be leading the charge to maximize AI’s advantages and minimize its disadvantages; and if we pursue this research thoughtfully, we can find a sensible and effective middle way to implement AI for our purposes.

In prior pieces, I’ve described the work we have done in this vein at the Northeastern University Library, including designing interfaces and connections to the library catalog and collections, and outlined additional essential work that needs to be done, such as addressing environmental concerns and understanding changes to the research process. (My next issue will be on the growing complexity of preserving the scholarly record.)

Two years ago, Dave Hansen, the executive director of Authors Alliance, and I wrote a piece titled “Books Are Big AI’s Achilles’ Heel,” which led to a 2024 Mellon Foundation grant to explore, through a series of workshops and conversations with stakeholders from academia, publishing, and technology, how books could be brought into artificial intelligence systems in a robust, ethical, and effective way that serves the public interest. Earlier this year, along with our colleagues in that planning project, we laid out a framework for future efforts, and started to envision how to move to an implementation phase with potential partners.

I’m truly excited that this process has culminated in the announcement today of a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to HathiTrust, the Northeastern University Library, and Authors Alliance to carry out this important work over the next five years. In our earlier Mellon-funded planning phase, HathiTrust, the indispensable nonprofit repository of 19 million digitized volumes from research libraries, emerged as the best foundation for a library-led AI and books project. In addition to its massive corpus of scanned texts, HathiTrust has the technical infrastructure on which to build platforms and systems for improved discovery and research with AI, and, with its engaged membership of over 200 libraries, is well positioned to draw on the guidance and assistance of that network. Under the new grant, Authors Alliance will continue to exercise its ability to convene a wide range of stakeholders, and to apply its deep understanding of key issues in this area. At the Northeastern University Library, we will leverage our years of work in digital librarianship and digital scholarship to help design services that support the use of these books through AI-assisted interfaces, making HathiTrust’s forthcoming infrastructure for AI and books as helpful as possible for students, faculty, and the public.

I’ll have much more to say about this project in future issues, but for now, here’s the official press release.

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August 27, 2026

HathiTrust Receives Grant to Deliver AI-Enabled Access to Digital Books

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.

Transparent Books: AI Infrastructure for Discovery and the Public Interest responds to the growing need for shared, trusted, academy-led infrastructure enabling sophisticated discovery and research of digitized collections. The project aims to connect readers to relevant titles more efficiently, thereby enhancing their reach and impact, and will consider a range of interests, including publishers, authors, scholars, and members of the public.

Over the course of the $5 million, 5-year grant, HathiTrust and its two grant partners will:

• Enhance Book Discovery: Apply AI tools to the HathiTrust corpus to improve descriptive metadata (e.g., subjects, languages, summaries) and text quality, and to develop interactive search to facilitate deeper understanding of books, both as individual items and in aggregate.

• Provide Verified Resources: Offer lawful, legitimate, verified, and transparent sources of text and images from books at scale for academic and noncommercial use cases, for purposes such as text mining, computational analysis, and the creation of specialized language models.

• Advance Shared Principles: Develop principles for legal frameworks, research integrity, accountability, and environmental impact to serve as a shared foundation for decision-making that centers academic values and the public good.

• Create Sustainable Services: Develop financially sustainable services that support academic and noncommercial research.

Mike Furlough, HathiTrust’s Executive Director, said, "For decades, libraries have sustained their values in the face of rapid and powerful advances in technology. Libraries created HathiTrust to ensure that the results of mass digitization would address the unique needs of researchers and the academy. This project continues that longstanding effort to collaboratively make the scholarly record more accessible and usable for today and into the future.”

Transparent Books also builds on the 2024–2026 Public Interest Corpus project, led by Authors Alliance and Northeastern University, which examined how research libraries can make book data available for computational research in lawful ways that serve the public interest rather than reinforce commercial control of large-scale digital collections. Through Transparent Books, HathiTrust will use the framework identified in the Public Interest Corpus project to deliver its corpus for noncommercial AI research and development.

Authors Alliance Executive Director Dave Hansen shared, “Our role in Transparent Books is to help articulate principles for use of the corpus, convene the authors, researchers, and institutions the project depends on so their views can be meaningfully reflected in the project’s designs. Ultimately, we want to lower barriers for noncommercial, academic researchers so they can build models and tools that actually advance research and benefit the public. And we want to see this happen in a way that ensures authors' works and ideas are discovered, attributed, and built upon.”

The project will collaborate closely with academic libraries and researchers to address the complexities of applying artificial intelligence tools to scholarly collections. Creating a path to lawful, legitimate access to in-copyright books data without corporate mediation demands a deep understanding of libraries’ current use of AI tools and their aspirations to offer meaningful engagement with their collections for academic and public communities.

Dan Cohen, Dean of the Library and Professor of History at Northeastern University, highlighted, “Students, faculty, and members of the public who treasure books as rich sources for teaching and learning will value the new kinds of access and use this initiative will provide. At the Northeastern University Library, we have been thoughtfully integrating collections with AI tools to help readers find materials of interest and to enable advanced forms of research, and the lack of digitized books has been a major gap we aim to fill.”

For more information about this initiative, visit the FAQ. Information and opportunities to learn more and to participate in various project activities will be provided regularly.

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Media inquiries

Jessica Rohr

HathiTrust Communications and Marketing Strategist

jbelle@hathitrust.org