The UConn Libraries, with the assistance of the UITS Information Security Office, has finalized the log-in component for the campus community to HathiTrust (HT) Digital Library, a massive digital library of published scholarship created by a partnership of major academic and research libraries. Using their NetID, campus researchers can go to: http://www.hathitrust.org/  and download PDFs of full-view items and create permanent public “collections” of HT items.

HathiTrust includes material from the Google Books Library Project, an effort by Google to scan and make searchable the collections of several major research libraries, as well as material from the Internet Archive, a non-profit that offers free online access to historical digital collections, in which UConn has been an active participant since 2008.

HathiTrust allows users to do full-text searches of all the books in the repository, and partner affiliates can download all material in the public domain. In addition, soon members of the community who are visually impaired will be able to download the full text of material that is in copyright for use with assistive technology.

HathiTrust was launched in 2008 by the then 12-university consortium, known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system. It has grown to more than 50 partners, including Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. UConn is the first public research university in New England to become a member.

In the past two years, HathiTrust’s partners have contributed more than 10.7 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections. More than 2 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and are freely available on the Web.

Workshops are being scheduled on how to use this new resource. Register at: http://lib.uconn.edu/instruction/workshop/

For more information, contact: David Lowe