Check Out HathiTrust!

Hathitrust (http://www.hathitrust.org/home), founded in October 2008 by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and now with over 50 of the largest libraries in the world as members, is the next big thing in online digital books for its members and for the public. Its fast-growing holdings (numbering over 9 million total volumes, about half of which are book titles) include content from the Google Books initiative, Microsoft’s projects to digitize library contents worldwide, and contents from all its member libraries. It indexes both public-domain works and works still in copyright, and – the best part – much of its content is downloadable in full directly from the HathiTrust website. Readers can create permanent labeled collections of titles, complete with a form of catalog records for each title, within the site. (Guests can register for free!)

Hathitrust also includes content from other well-known public digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (public domain works) and the Internet Archive project (Web content). In doing so, it is creating a massive online archive of all kinds of content while still maintaining a strong commitment to preservation of book and serial titles. Membership in Hathitrust is open to institutions worldwide – let’s hope it grows and prospers!