Washington University Libraries has joined HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries to preserve and provide access to the published record in a digital form. The announcement was made by Shirley K. Baker, Washington University’s vice chancellor for scholarly resources and dean of University Libraries.
WUSTL is now partnering with more than 60 other major academic and research libraries from across the United States and the world in an effort to preserve and share the record of human knowledge.
Currently, HathiTrust’s repository contains more than 10 million volumes, most of which were digitised from the collections of American and British research libraries as part of the Google Books Library Project, Google’s effort to scan and make searchable the collections of several major research libraries. WUSTL users may search the HathiTrust online catalogue at hathitrust.org or libguides.wustl.edu/hathitrust.
If a desired volume is under copyright, the full text will not be displayed, but the search will list nearby libraries that have a copy. Of the HathiTrust’s 10 million volumes, more than 2.7 million are in the public domain.
Current students, faculty or staff at Washington University or at any other HathiTrust partner institution may download any of the public domain volumes held in HathiTrust.
In addition to gaining new access for current students, faculty and staff, WUSTL Libraries will have the opportunity to digitise rare or unique public domain works from their own collections and deposit those digitised materials in the HathiTrust repository, where they may be accessed by persons affiliated with any of the HathiTrust members.
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