There's an Elephant in the Library!
Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) means elephant in Hindi, symbolizing memory, wisdom, and strength.
These ideals, plus creating a lasting trust for the future, express what HathiTrust stands for and how its members benefit.
Texas State University joined HathiTrust in May, 2018
Currently Digitized
(October 4, 2018)
16,751,398 total volumes
8,129,135 book titles
449,206 serial titles
5,862,989,300 pages
751 terabytes
198 miles
13,611 tons
6,288,161 volumes (~38% of total)
in the public domain
Visualizations of collection by call numbers, languages, and dates
Special thanks to-
Billie Peterson-Lugo Director, Digital Library Services & Systems at Baylor University
For permission to adapt her Libguide for use at Texas State.
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:
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.
Texas State University joined the HathiTrust in 2018. As of fall 2018, there are currently over 150 partners in the HathiTrust. As a HathiTrust partner, enhanced access to HathiTrust is available for Texas State students, faculty, and staff through their Texas State NetID 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:
In September, 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."
The case was finally decided in 2013. In the end, courts found that Hathi Trust digitization practices fell within the "fair use" provisions of U.S. copyright law.
Hathi Trust has monthly newsletters and updates
Anyone can subscribe to these via e-mail.
Updated information is also available on Twitter.