Oklahoma State University Library has become the newest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.
Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than 80 partners. The partners have contributed nearly 11 million volumes digitized from their library collections. More than 3.4 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available online.
HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds. It provides the expert curation and consistent access associated with research libraries. Second, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections as both a service for partners and a public good. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching to public domain volumes, and searching of copyright volumes. Specialised features are also available which facilitate access by people with disabilities and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into ‘collections’ that can be searched and browsed.
In a related announcement, the Georgia Tech Library also joined HathiTrust as one of its members. Through HathiTrust, the Georgia Tech campus community can now freely access more than 4.5 million digital books and journals in the public domain from a desktop or mobile device. Users can search HathiTrust’s catalogue, curate their own private libraries, and download digital material at no cost.
