The Harvard Library has announced that it will deposit about 200,000 public domain volumes in HathiTrust, a shared digital repository for published materials. The move follows Harvard's first deposit of about 53,000 volumes in HathiTrust in 2011.
The Harvard Library, founded in 1638, claims to be the world’s largest university library and the oldest academic library in North America. With approximately 17 million books, more than eight million photographs and an estimated 400 million manuscript items, the Library’s holdings span a vast range of subjects, languages and dates.
HathiTrust was formed in 2008 with a mission to ‘contribute to the common good by collecting, organising, preserving, communicating and sharing the record of human knowledge.’ Currently, the shared repository has more than sixty institutional participants and contains more than 10 million digitised volumes, with more than 2.7 million public domain works are available online.
