LibGuides: HathiTrust Digital Library : What is HathiTrust?

What is HathiTrust?

Overview

The HathiTrust (pronounced 'hah-tee') houses a collection of over 15 million volumes of searchable books, journals, and government documents, including 5.8 million available as full text online.

HathiTrust is a partnership of over 100 libraries and research institutions that have come together to build and share a digital repository of print works. Begun in 2008, the goal of the partnership is to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world available in the public domain through a digital library. The HathiTrust has pursued this goal chiefly by digitizing materials like books and journals from major library collections and other partners, such as Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft. Central Washington University joined in 2020.

Currently Digitized

17,268,597 total volumes
8,346,422 book titles
464,109 serial titles
6,044,008,950 pages
774 terabytes
204 miles
14,031 tons
6,673,593 volumes(~39% of total) in the public domain

Relevant HathiTrust Pages

HathiTrust Digital Library
Preserves and provides lawful access to the 17 million digitized items.
HathiTrust Research Center
Offers services that support use of the HathiTrust corpus as a dataset for analysis via text and data mining research.
U.S. Federal Documents Program
Federal documents are a significant portion of the overall HathiTrust collection. Searchable collections include: U.S. Federal Documents, the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Bureau of Indian Affairs publications, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency publications, Foreign Relations of the United States, Statistical Abstract of the United States, and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Copyright Review Program
The Copyright Review team finds and opens public domain materials in the U.S. and around the world.
Shared Print Program
HathiTrust Shared Print Program attempts to ensure preservation of print and digital collections by linking the two, to reduce overall costs of collection management for HathiTrust members, and to catalyze national/continental collective management of collections.
HathiTrust Accessibility Policy
HathiTrust aims to provide a website that is accessible to everyone. In collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), HathiTrust will soon be offering access to its full repository to all eligible blind and visually impaired users in the United States. Those who have a print disability may be eligible to receive special lawful access to the entire HathiTrust collection, even those volumes restricted for general use.

HathiTrust Missions and Goals

Mission

The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. More specifically HathiTrust is organized to:

To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive co-owned and co-managed digital archive of library materials converted from the print collections of the member institutions.
To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions, with a particular emphasis on ensuring access for individuals with print disabilities.
To develop cost-effective and robust infrastructure for digital content of value to scholars and researchers, including a variety of formats and born-digital materials.
To develop partnerships and services that ensure preservation of the materials in HathiTrust and the entire print and digital scholarly record.
To reduce long-term capital and operating costs of storage and care of print collections through redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries.
To build infrastructure that facilitates cost-effective and productive collaborations among partnering institutions to reduce the cost of securing campus intellectual assets.
To define and make available a set of services that supports research using the HathiTrust corpus.
To create a technical framework that allows for both central and distributed creation of tools and services.
To sustain the HathiTrust enterprise as a “public good” while at the same time defining a set of services that benefits member institutions.

Adapted from HathiTrust Digital Libraries.