The Georgetown 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.
Membership in HathiTrust gives all Georgetown users advanced options when accessing HathiTrust's more than 4.5 million publically-available volumes. Users can now create reading lists, save items and download full-text pdfs of many items in HathiTrust's archive. In the future, digitized volumes from Georgetown's own collection will also be available to Georgetown users.
In addition, HathiTrust enables the Library to provide enhanced access to digitized materials, including items still in copyright, for users with print disabilities.
Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has more than one hundred partners who have contributed more than 12 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their collections. In collecting these volumes, HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds. Second, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading, searching and saving public domain volumes and those belonging to a user's institution.
