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Type of site | Digital library |
|---|---|
| Owner | University consortium |
| Revenue | US$3,777,445 (2019 projections for proposal)[1] |
| Parent | University of Michigan |
| URL | hathitrust.org |
| Commercial | Partially[2] |
| Launched | October 2008; 17 years ago (October 2008) |
| Current status | Active |
Content license | Public domain (with restrictions onGoogle scans), various[3] |
| Written in | Perl,Java[2] |
HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborativerepository of digital content fromresearch libraries, administered by theUniversity of Michigan.[4] Its holdings include content digitized viaGoogle Books and theInternet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.
Hathi (/ˈhɑːti/), derived from theSanskrithastin, is theHindi word for 'elephant', an animal famed for itslong-term memory.[5]
HathiTrust was founded in October 2008 by the twelve universities of theCommittee on Institutional Cooperation and the eleven libraries of theUniversity of California.[6] As of 2024, members include more than 219 research libraries[7] across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is based on ashared governance structure. Costs are shared by the participating libraries and library consortia.[8] The repository is administered by theUniversity of Michigan.[4] The executive director of HathiTrust is Mike Furlough,[9] who succeeded founding directorJohn Wilkin after Wilkin stepped down in 2013.[10] The HathiTrust Shared Print Program is a distributedcollective collection whose participating libraries have committed to retaining almost 18 millionmonograph volumes for 25 years, representing three-quarters of HathiTrust digital book holdings.[11]
In September 2011, theAuthors Guild sued HathiTrust (Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust), alleging massive copyright violation.[12] Afederal court ruled against the Authors Guild in October 2012, finding that HathiTrust's use ofbooks scanned by Google wasfair use under US law.[13] The court's opinion relied on thetransformativeness doctrine of federal copyright law, holding that HathiTrust had transformed the copyrighted works without infringing on the copyright holders' rights. That decision was largely affirmed by theSecond Circuit on June 10, 2014, which found that providing search andaccessibility for thevisually impaired were grounds to consider the service transformative and fair use, and remanded to the lower court to reconsider whether the plaintiffs hadstanding to sue regarding HathiTrust's library preservation copies.[14]
In September 2024, HathiTrust comprised more than 18 million volumes, including 6.7 million in thepublic domain in the United States. HathiTrust provides a number of discovery and access services, notably,full-text search across the entire repository.
As of 2021, the copyright policy states that "many works in our collection are protected by copyright law, so we cannot ordinarily publicly display large portions of those protected works unless we have permission from the copyright holder", and thus "if we cannot determine the copyright or permission status of a work, we restrict access to that work until we can establish its status. Because of differences in international copyright laws, access is also restricted for users outside the United States to works published outside the United States after and including 1896."[15]
PageTurner is theweb application on the HathiTrust website for viewing publications.[16] From PageTurner readers can navigate through a publication, download aPDF version of it, and view pages in different ways, such as one page at a time,scrolling,flipping, orthumbnail views.[16][17]
The Emergency Temporary Access Service[18] (ETAS) is a service provided by HathiTrust that makes it possible in certain special situations, such as closure of a library for a public health emergency, for users of HathiTrust member libraries to obtain lawful access to copyright digital materials in place of the corresponding physical books held by the same library.
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