HathiTrust: Home

Currently Digitized
(August 22, 2020)

17,429,974 total volumes
8,423,629 book titles
471,815 serial titles
6,100,490,900 pages
781 terabytes
206 miles
14,162 tons
6,756,004 volumes (~39% of total)
in the public domain

Visualizations of collection by call numbers, languages, and dates

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 digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a number of academic institutions.
• Improving, dramatically, access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions – i.e. research institutions.
• Helping preserve these physical materials by creating reliable and accessible electronic representations.
• Stimulating efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries, thus reducing long-term capital and operating costs associated with the storage and care of print collections.
• Creating and sustaining this “public good” in a way that mitigates the problem of "free-riders". 
• Creating a technical framework that is both responsive to members through the centralized creation of functionality and sufficiently open to the creation of tools and services not created by the central organization.

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 150 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".)

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 Orphan Works Project.  The Association of Research Libraries has 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."  You can read HathiTrust's statement and their Authors Guild Q&A and keep current with the issue by checking their law suit information page.  On October 28, 2011 EDUCAUSE Live presented the webinar, "What's at Statke in the HathiTrust Lawsuit?".

On December 2, 2011, the defendants filed a response to this lawsuit.  The court has set a deadline of May 20, 2012, for the discovery phase to conclude, with trial scheduled for November if the case was not dismissed or settled.

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.