HathiTrust

What is HathiTrust?

Begun in 2008, HathiTrust Digital Library is first and foremost a digital preservation repository. It is also a highly functional access platform. HathiTrust provides long-term preservation and access to both public domain and in-copyright content, digitized books and other media such as journals scanned from the collections of major libraries and other sources. These include Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. Today eighty academic libraries and other major research institutions are members of HathiTrust. Texas Tech University Libraries joined in 2013.

What are the benefits to students and faculty of Texas Tech University's membership in HathiTrust?

Anyone with an internet connection can access most HathiTrust content in the public domain, currently about 3,000,000 titles published prior to 1924. By way of comparison, TTU Libraries owns in print approximately 250,000 of the public domain titles currently accessible in HathiTrust Digital Library. Benefits to Temple affiliates include the following:

• Patrons who identify themselves as Texas Tech affiliates will have access to a small number of additional public domain titles not otherwise accessible to the general public.
• Texas Tech affiliates can download for further analysis and manipulation HathiTrust titles in the public domain.
• Texas Tech affiliates can keyword search the entire corpus, both public domain and in-copyright titles, to facilitate information discovery. Metadata are far richer and more consistently applied than in Google Books, an important distinction and consideration for academic researchers. HathiTrust can therefore be used to facilitate textual analysis and other digital humanities projects.
• Texas Tech affiliates with a certified print disability can download over one million in-copyright titles, namely e-books owned by TTU Libraries in print.
• All Texas Tech affiliates, regardless of whether or not they are print disabled, are permitted access to in-copyright titles designated "Lost + Paid" or "Missing" in the catalog.