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HathiTrust: Overview

We have Judi Briden of the University of Rochester to thank for some of the valuable information found in this guide

Welcome to HathiTrust

HathiTrust (listen to pronunciation) is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. 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. There are more than 120 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide.

What is Hathi Trust?

HathiTrust Digital Library is a collection of over 13 million volumes of searchable books, journals, and government documents, including 5 million available as full-text online.

In February 2016, Texas Christian University joined more than 100 academic and research libraries as a partner in HathiTrust. For more information about the HathiTrust community, see Partnership Community.

For more detail about the kinds of content in HathiTrust and to visualize by call numbers, languages, or dates, see Statistics and Visualizations.

Resources

What can I do with Hathi Trust?

What can I do in HathiTrust?

Anyone can search and view the full-text content in HathiTrust. With login, patrons at member institutions benefit from added features. Below is a brief summary of what you can do. Here is where you can log in.

  without login with UR login
Search full-text of all volumes
View full-text of non-copyright volumes
Download single page of non-copyright volumes (PDF image)
Download full volume of non-copyright volumes (PDF image) X
Search within collections
Create and save your own collections X
Chart courtesy of Syracuse University Libraries

HathiTrust Mission & Goals

Our 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.

Our Vision.

HathiTrust will be a vital catalyst for emerging forms of research, teaching, and learning that engage the scholarly and cultural record.

Our Goals.

  • To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive co-owned and co-managed digital library of archived 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 digitized books and 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 the HathiTrust Digital Library 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.