HathiTrust: Home

Currently Digitized

18,000,000+ total volumes
Adds ~1 million volumes/year
~50% English Language
1,400,000+ federal government documents
~6,400,000 volumes (~40% of total) in the public domain

HathiTrust was established in 2008 with the mission to "contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating and sharing the record of human knowledge."  The original HathiTrust libraries were partners with Google and/or the Internet Archive for the digitization of books in their collections.  In part, HathiTrust was created so these libraries could work collaboratively to manage, provide access to, and preserve their digital assets in ways that Google could not.  The primary goals of HathiTrust include:

• Building a reliable and increasingly comprehensive co-owned and co-managed digital library of archived materials converted from the print collections of the member institutions.
• Dramatically improving 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.
• Developing  cost-effective and robust infrastructure for digitized books and digital content of value to scholars and researchers, including a variety of formats and born-digital materials.
• Developing partnerships and services that ensure preservation of the materials in the HathiTrust Digital Library and the entire print and digital scholarly record.
• Reducing long-term capital and operating costs of storage and care of print collections through redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries.
• Building infrastructure that facilitates cost-effective and productive collaborations among partnering institutions to reduce the cost of securing campus intellectual assets.
• defining and making available a set of services that supports research using the HathiTrust corpus.
• Creating a technical framework that allows for both central and distributed creation of tools and services.
• Sustaining the HathiTrust enterprise as a “public good” while at the same time defining a set of services that benefits member institutions.

New content is added to HathiTrust, daily.  At this time, there is no convenient way to see lists of the new content.  However, compressed files of the content that has been added are made available daily, displaying in reverse chronological order.

Additional resources and guides are available from HathiTrust. 

Baylor University joined the HathiTrust in fall 2010, bringing that membership to a total of 52 partners.  As of fall 2018, there are currently over 282 partners in the HathiTrust.  As a HathiTrust partner, enhanced access to HathiTrust is available for Baylor students, faculty, and staff through their Bear ID and password. Although this level of access isn’t required to search HathiTrust or view the full text of public domain materials, additional functionality is available to users from partner libraries:

• The complete PDF of items no longer protected by copyright can be downloaded (non-partners can only download a single page at a time); and
• Collections of items in HathiTrust can be created and saved (non-partners cannot save collections without enabling a "friend account".)

For this reason, we've set up access to HathiTrust in OneSearch for Baylor users to automatically login with their Bear ID/password.

On September 12, 2011, HathiTrust was sued by the Authors Guild and others.  The primary issue that brought about this suit at this time was the University of Michigan's Orphan Works Project.  The Association of Research Libraries produced a document, "Resource Packet on Orphan Works: Legal and Policy Issues for Research Libraries", which provides general "information concerning orphan works, the University of Michigan’s Orphan Works Project, an FAQ, and a legal memorandum by Jonathan Band (policybandwidth) describing the legal issues associated with making orphan works digitally available."  Wikipedia provides an overview on this lawsuit.  

On October 10, 2012, "the Honorable Harold Baer, Jr., . . .held that the HathiTrust’s mass digitization is fair use, in spite of the challenges raised in a lawsuit by the Author’s Guild and others."  Read more from LJ INFOdocket.

Updated information is also available on Twitter.