An examination of Massive Digital Libraries' coverage of Spanish language materials: Issues of multi-lingual accessibility in a decentralized, mass-digitized world

Google Books has been shown to have limitations in the coverage and access of Hawaiian and Pacific books. This paper investigates the results of an ensuing study that examines the coverage and accessibility of Spanish language books in four Massive Digital Libraries (MDLs): Google Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Open Library. A random sample of 1,200 books was taken from a Master's-degree awarding university library in the United States. In this study, 400 titles from the library's general collection were compared to 400 Spanish-language titles. Levels of accessibility for each title in the four MDLs were recorded, ranging from no record, record only, partial view, to full-view. Results showed little difference in accessibility between Spanish and English books in Google Books (7% Spanish fully accessible vs. 8% English). However, differences in accessibility were found in the Internet Archive (2% vs. 8%), HathiTrust (6% vs.11%), and Open Library (5% vs. 16%). Issues related to accessibility and non-English collections in MDLs are also addressed.